Those who know what I do, probably also know that I am looking at data quality, its technology, its market, its usage, etc. And so I can’t help it but notice those situations when data quality has gone wrong. Particularly when it involves me personally. The latest screw-up is from my telecoms provider…

We have a regular ISDN (that is, a now called “Universal”) connection in the house. It contains three numbers, home, fax, and office. My daughter, who’s at the age of “telephonitis syndrome”, has her own phone in her room and so we don’t have to pick up all her calls, I wanted a fourth number that I assign to her room in the PBX, and have her friends call the new number. So far so good.

I call the telecoms operator and order a new number. No big deal, as an ISDN line can carry 10 numbers. The lady asks for my customer number, full name, and birth date, to verify it’s me. I’m told they will assign a new number, probably quite different from the ones I have and send me a confirmation with the date by which it becomes active. Or so they thought….

A week later. Nothing. Three weeks later. Nothing. Over a month later I get a letter from the telecoms company stating that their original confirmation letter has been returned to them because it was undeliverable. Huh? First I thought, they sent a simple confirmation by registered mail and I wasn’t at home? That wasn’t the case. The problem was, that the telecom company sent the letter to my old address. My old address that I had left more than 5 years ago! And I definitely don’t have a telephone number in someone else’s house. The operator knows where I’m living, as my current address is where their own fixed line ends, which they should know. And that’s the same address, to which they send the bill every month. Hellooooo!

Looks like poor telecoms company have a bit of a data issue, because their records between order management, billing, CRM, and probably another dozen applications simply don’t match up. Oh well, another story for the next data quality presentation.

I think I understand now why kids get hooked on MySpace. As soon as they build up a decent network of friends (and I hope these are “real” friends, not some 55-year-old freaks pretending to be 12) there is a sense of addiction to find out what’s happening within the circle of friends: who met who, who did what, who wrote on which wall, what music they hear or book they read (if in fact kids still read books).

I just got on Facebook, which looks like the half-adult version of MySpace. Although it also contains silly applications such as Skiers vs Snowboarders, the iLike Challenge or Punk-O-Matic, it seems the average age is slightly higher. Lots of high school students, but surprisingly many people that actually have once used floppy disks. Do you remember when you used your last 3.5″ plastic shell? Somewhere in the attic I still have a box with 8″ diskettes. 128K each. My toaster has more memory today. Gosh, time flies.

Anyway, Facebook is actually not half-bad. With a little searching, I found folks that I know and worked with all over the world. It’s a little challenging if the person has an everyday name like Peter Jones. There are hundreds with that name and if there is no picture attached, and the network doesn’t leave any clues, finding the right person is next to impossible. But working through the network of who-knows-who is pretty powerful, particularly because the so-called Facebook Newsfeed alerts you about everything going on among the people within the network. Great way of bridging the six degrees of separation. BTW, Kevin Bacon is on, but the profile says he is a Virgina Tech Alum ‘05. Must be that 55-year old freak mentioned above, who would like to be Kevin and attract young university students. Creep.

If you got a profile on Facebook and actually know me personally, ping me. Contact collectors don’t even have to try. They should stay at LinkedIn and boast of their network containing thousands of contacts. That dont impress me much…

I’m going to speak at our conference in Sao Paulo next week, so will spend a few hours in the air during the next couple of days. But I didn’t think that it would be that quick from Brazil to Germany, and at the same time take forever for the short hop to Hamburg. According to my Lufthansa itinerary, on the return flight, they will transport me from Guarulhos to Frankfurt in no time (literally), then apparently use a tricycle for the segment to Hamburg, or why would it take more than 14 hours?

Looks like a bit of a data quality problem. Or the apps developer screwed up (more likely).

Just talked to someone who was looking for advice on their mission statement. Not for the company, mind you, but for their department, which was the data warehousing department! Wow, I thought, never heard of individual missions that would go that deep into an organization. Since I find mission statements (and particularly the huge amount of work that goes into finding one) utterly useless, I couldn’t help it, but I had to find out what the current state of affairs is in the mission world.

So here are some current statements, picked up from the web, through a quick search, and I didn’t concentrate on any industry. Be the judge, whether those make any sense to you, are in alignment with the company’s behavior, and are a differentiator for the company.

• Siemens:We will supply our Customers with products and services on time with the highest quality and value. We will accomplish this by our commitment to continuous improvement and by exemplifying fairness and integrity with our customers, our employees, and our suppliers.
• At Microsoft, our mission and values are to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.
• As enterprises around the world move to adopt performance management, Cognos will continue to direct our products, support, and services toward helping our customers deliver on its promise.
• BMC: Passion for IT Innovation that benefits our clients’ investment in technologies.
• Coca-Cola: To Refresh the World… in body, mind, and spirit. To Inspire Moments of Optimism… through our brands and our actions. To Create Value and Make a Difference… everywhere we engage.
• At Nestlé, we believe that research can help us make better food so that people live a better life.
• BMW Group: To be the most successful premium manufacturer in the industry.
• Smith & Wesson: Safety, Security, Protection and Sport.
• The mission of Merck is to provide society with superior products and services by developing innovations and solutions that improve the quality of life and satisfy customer needs, and to provide employees with meaningful work and advancement opportunities, and investors with a superior rate of return.

Aha! Yawn. Mission accomplished.

OK, I know I haven’t been very active on this blog in the recent past. Quite a few have complained that the last post is months old, and I really don’t have many excuses, other than that things were really busy over here lately. I wish I could say that I’ve been watching television most of the time. Not quite, but I wanted to say that this Joost idea is really how TV should be. It’s like TVoIP, only that it doesn’t include all the basic channels (yet). My daughter would argue, though, that MTV is the only relevant channel anyway. My friend Marc sent me an invite to the Joost community, a quick install (on a decent machine, better have lots of graphics memory!) and you can view channels that you have never heard of. How about an Italian soccer channel that shows a program with (what they call) the 200 best goals ever. Includes old footage of Gerd Müller at the 1974 World Cup. Funny stuff. If you are more into boxing or indycar racing (I’m not), they’ve got you covered.

If you would like an invite, drop me a line. In the meantime, I’m working on some musical tracks, that I’ll post here soon. Stay tuned, through video, audio, or otherwise.

What’s Joost, Quicktime (9.79 MB)

Just returned from our Business Intelligence Summit in London, the biggest and the best ever, according to the attendees. And while I felt exhausted and brain-drained every evening, I believe I still can largely remember what I said during the countless meetings with clients, vendors, and members of the press. That’s why I was kinda surprised when I received the press clippings with quotes that I would have never, ever said, not in this context or any other. For example, ZDnet UK titles its article:

Gartner: It’s business intelligence 2.0 time

Uh. Not quite, in fact, the opposite is probably closer to what we said. I remember a few cases of vendors getting criticized for trying to add the popular 2.0 moniker to their marketing, although they wouldn’t even provide 1.0 functionality. The article starts with

Forget talk of Web 2.0, it’s time for BI 2.0, according to Gartner.

Nope. Not sure where that quote would come from.

Speaking at the Gartner BI Summit [...], Andreas Bitterer, said the next generation of business intelligence (BI) would be defined by what it was not.

I don’t even know what that means, and I would never say any such thing unless I’m completely drunk, which I clearly wasn’t back there on stage.

To begin with, BI 2.0 is not about more suppliers, said Bitterer. “There are too many BI vendors,” he explained.

Oh, my. I said nothing about BI 2.0 (in fact, I think it’s nonsense), and I also didn’t say that there were too many BI vendors. What I said is that organizations run BI software from too many different vendors. Slight difference.

“You cannot get one vendor’s software to work with another’s,” he said. “They do not make it easy.

Wrong again. What I explained is the difficulty to migrate reports from one vendor to another, and the vendors do not make it easy by not providing any export functionality and prohibiting reverse engineering.

Oh well, it wasn’t the first time that I’m misquoted nor was it the last time. It’s just strange to see, how direct quotes get spun around, causing quite a bit of confusion and potential inconsistency.

I just booked my first flight with Ryanair. In January, I’ll be going to London for a day, so I was looking for an inexpensive trip there and back, preferably from Hamburg. Easyjet doesn’t fly from here to London, DBA and HLX both depart from here but don’t go to London, so I ended up with Ryanair. They claim to fly from Hamburg, but it’s really Lübeck, an hour away. They must have missed that geography lesson.

So there I am, selecting days, flights, and I keep wondering about those ticket prices. The outbound flight costs 4,99€, the return is even less: 1 cent! Of course, I’m aware of the taxes, which brings the return flight to 50€, still only about 10% of a similar Lufthansa or BA flight. During the booking, however, I get increasingly mad about all those hidden fees or attempts to extract more money on top of the ticket.

First the system asks how many bags I’m planning to check. Checking between 1 and 5 bags costs an additional 9€ per flight. Ouch! However, I answer (truthfully): zero bags. Still I’m supposed to pay 6€ per flight. What the §&”#%@%!?? The zero option says something about Online checkin/priority boarding. First I thought: That makes sense: no bags, priority boarding. Wrong! I have to read a whole paragraph that explains how to opt out of this thing and simply travel with no bags. Another click per flight, and the additional fee is gone. Sneaky bastards.

Next stop: Travel insurance. They want me to pay 10,50€ per flight for insurance, and a number of pop-ups warn me that the airline recommends taking it. Again, I have to unselect the insurance option, otherwise I’ll pay for an insurance that I have anyway through paying with the credit card. Which brings us to the last fee trap.

As this is an online booking service, paying by credit card is the most common option. Ryanair offers payment by Visa, MasterCard, AirPlus, and some stuff like Delta, ELV, Connect, Electron, whatever that is. Turns out, using my Visa card costs me another 10€, just to pay the bill. So that’s how Ryanair makes its money: it’s actually not an airline, but an Irish fee machine. Amazing business model, but it seems to work for O’Leary.

I was just invited to join a Virtual Cocktail Party, as Jeff Pulver puts it. Through a number of referrals, I eventually got my invitation from my former META Group colleague Dave Yockelson. (Thanks, Dave, glad to have you back in the analyst rounds.) The idea of blog-tagging is, to ask 5 bloggers to tell 5 things that most people wouldn’t know. Kinda like the (sometimes rather embarrassing) opening line at this cocktail party where everybody stands around with a Martini and nobody knows each other.

So here are some not so well known facts about me:

1. I can probably be considered Germany’s first hacker when I broke the IBM 5100 security (1978).
2. Playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, KV 488, marks the height of my piano career.
3. On an American Airlines flight to Chicago, I once sat next to Dustin Hoffman (in coach).
4. I turned down a job at Netscape, because I thought browsers were silly stuff.
5. On average, I fly more miles in a week than I drive my car in a year.

So there you go. I’m sure those facts will eventually be used against me. And now for the tagging of others… TAG! You’re it now…

• Frank Buytendijk
• Andy Hayler
• Michael Arrington
• Thomas Hawk
• Scott Adams

What’s with all the 2.0-ishness that everybody jumps on as if their life depends on it? Maybe it’s all Tim O’Reilly’s fault, since he created this Web 2.0 buzz, although a 2.0 moniker has been around for years, such as in Business 2.0. More recently, companies on my radar also start to use the term and position themselves in the Business Intelligence 2.0 space. Oh, please.

I had to find out what the hype is all about.

According to DMReview,

…business intelligence (BI) today has not changed in concept since the invention of the relational database and the SQL query – until the advent of BI 2.0.

What? Under which rock have they been hiding? First of all, BI wasn’t there yet when RDBMS and SQL were invented, and I know that because I participated in projects around System R in the early 80s. And if I think about BI’s evolution with reporting, OLAP, data mining, dashboards, scorecards, predictive models, etc…. this DMReview quote is pure nonsense. If anything, we should be talking about at least BI 8.0, considering the conceptual changes in the world of BI since we began. The article continues

If the goal of BI 2.0 is to reduce latency – to cut the time between when an event occurs and when an action is taken – in order to improve business performance, existing BI architectures will struggle.

With BI 2.0, data isn’t stored in a database or extracted for analysis; BI 2.0 uses event-stream processing. As the name implies, this approach processes streams of events in memory, either in parallel with actual business processes or as a process step itself.

While I agree that there is an ongoing trend to reduce latency, this is nothing new. Changed Data Capture (CDC) mechanisms have been picking up events and transactions in near-realtime for years. So the “realtime”-aspect does not describe a completely new paradigm. And what’s this thing about data not being stored or extracted? OK, an event does not need to be stored first in a database or any other content store to be analyzed, but event data all by itself is rather useless. Only in combination with existing BI infrastructure such as a data warehouse, any analytical component (in a process stream or not) can generate insight.

For example, let’s assume there is a fraudulent event happening. Of course, nobody knows that fraud is about to be committed. The data associated with the event sits in this process stream and is not stored in a database (yet). So, everything is according to the definition above. Then what? How does that transaction event trigger any action elsewhere? How can any application or user figure out anything? Certainly not by simply looking at the transaction. The event data could be sent to some data mining model that generates a fraud score and then it triggers an alert. Is that what is meant by “event stream processing”? If so, we’ve been seeing this kinda thing for years. In fact, the whole discussion about analytical applications describes the same scenario: Operational applications (executed in “real-time”) call analytical components that figure out something, send an alert, call another program or otherwise influence what is happening next. Sounds the same as BI 2.0 to me. Yawn.