wow, this is project management 101. Have we really gotten so bad in our industry that we need things like this to be published? People need to be TOLD these things?
I mean, I saw my first issue register and problem log in 1982 as an 18 year old programming trainee. Even then it was presented to me as "normal". I am still using variations of them today.
Hi Peter, yes in my experience we focus to much on tools and execution, and forget about the foundations. I would say that most of the data issues can be solved with a pen and a whiteboard. Everything doesn’t need to be AI, AI something something to create value
I have not had a lot of direct on site customer experience over the last 15 years because I have been "woke cancelled" since 2010. I was actually marched off site from Vodafone Ghana in Accra by two armed guards in 2011. Kind of fun (and unusual) for a data warehouse architect! LOL!
In talking with guys working onsite and looking at social media like linked in. It seems that everyone has forgotten that "data warehousing" and "business intelligence" used to be mostly about sustainably increasing the corporations profit.
In some cases it was about compliance and other things. Basel created a lot of data warehouses for example. Financial control was about 25% of the jobs I did. But even things like fraud detection are eventually about profitability. I also did many government sector projects.
All the discussion I see today is about "data pipelines" and "bronze, silver gold architecture", "data vault", "dashboards", "cloud databases". And, of course, everything AI.
I mean, you are out in the public. You see what men are talking about in this area.
Even Bill has put his oar in the water lately in a linkedin post about how data warehousing has been given a bad name by those who failed to do it properly.
I think it's kind of sad because when I attended the Metaphor Computer Systems users conference in San Francisco in 1993 I thought that in 20 years time Business Intelligence would be pervasive and extremely valuable.
I thought that inside 20 years every large company would be able to do what we were doing then. As strange as it seems most large companies can't do now what Metaphor customers were doing then. We have all this new tech, and we have regressed. It's pretty weird.
I was talking to the CEO of a relatively small company recently. Because of my age and experience she asked me what was going on in IT. Their company was implementing Microsofts Business Central and they couldn't even get a sensible cash flow forecast out of it.
She was literally asking me: "How can we be in the 2020s and one of the worlds most used ERPs can't give me cash flow forecast? Or warn me that we might be running out of cash?"
She also asked me: "How can IT people be so arrogant when they know nothing about business? My consultants don't know the difference between a debit and a credit but they are trying to tell me how smart they are?"
Great points Peter, frankly the industry got so obsessed with architecting data that it forgot the whole point was helping someone make a better decision about money
Yes, this is very much so. I am a technical person. I was the most successful hire in my class of 1986 into IBM Australia's IT shop. By 1986, when I was 25, I was the System Architect for a release 4.0 of the IBM Internal Pricing System for AP, Canada and South America ex Japan. It was a 400 work month, USD4M project. So it was quite the promotion I got to that position. I still write C++ with the best of them. So I am still quite technical. Especially on the relational database side. So I understand the "technical person mind set". It's not like I have not been there and done that.
As a tech person still, I can say our industry segment has completely forgotten that the reason companies invest in tech in the first place is to improve the profitability of the company over the long term.
Now, it is fair to say that companies themselves have also lost sight of the profit motive. Most companies are more concerned about increasing their DEI hires and virtue signalling than making money today. This has led to the phrase "go woke go broke". Budweiser being the worlds most famous case with Dylan Mulvaney.
Maybe, one day, the men in our industry segment will support the idea that our job is to improve the profitability of the companies that we work for, hopefully ethically, not unethically like so many men have done in tech in the last 20 years.
Hi John,
wow, this is project management 101. Have we really gotten so bad in our industry that we need things like this to be published? People need to be TOLD these things?
I mean, I saw my first issue register and problem log in 1982 as an 18 year old programming trainee. Even then it was presented to me as "normal". I am still using variations of them today.
Hi Peter, yes in my experience we focus to much on tools and execution, and forget about the foundations. I would say that most of the data issues can be solved with a pen and a whiteboard. Everything doesn’t need to be AI, AI something something to create value
Hi John,
I have not had a lot of direct on site customer experience over the last 15 years because I have been "woke cancelled" since 2010. I was actually marched off site from Vodafone Ghana in Accra by two armed guards in 2011. Kind of fun (and unusual) for a data warehouse architect! LOL!
In talking with guys working onsite and looking at social media like linked in. It seems that everyone has forgotten that "data warehousing" and "business intelligence" used to be mostly about sustainably increasing the corporations profit.
In some cases it was about compliance and other things. Basel created a lot of data warehouses for example. Financial control was about 25% of the jobs I did. But even things like fraud detection are eventually about profitability. I also did many government sector projects.
All the discussion I see today is about "data pipelines" and "bronze, silver gold architecture", "data vault", "dashboards", "cloud databases". And, of course, everything AI.
I mean, you are out in the public. You see what men are talking about in this area.
Even Bill has put his oar in the water lately in a linkedin post about how data warehousing has been given a bad name by those who failed to do it properly.
I think it's kind of sad because when I attended the Metaphor Computer Systems users conference in San Francisco in 1993 I thought that in 20 years time Business Intelligence would be pervasive and extremely valuable.
I thought that inside 20 years every large company would be able to do what we were doing then. As strange as it seems most large companies can't do now what Metaphor customers were doing then. We have all this new tech, and we have regressed. It's pretty weird.
I was talking to the CEO of a relatively small company recently. Because of my age and experience she asked me what was going on in IT. Their company was implementing Microsofts Business Central and they couldn't even get a sensible cash flow forecast out of it.
She was literally asking me: "How can we be in the 2020s and one of the worlds most used ERPs can't give me cash flow forecast? Or warn me that we might be running out of cash?"
She also asked me: "How can IT people be so arrogant when they know nothing about business? My consultants don't know the difference between a debit and a credit but they are trying to tell me how smart they are?"
We are not winning in my humble opinion.
Great points Peter, frankly the industry got so obsessed with architecting data that it forgot the whole point was helping someone make a better decision about money
Hello John,
Yes, this is very much so. I am a technical person. I was the most successful hire in my class of 1986 into IBM Australia's IT shop. By 1986, when I was 25, I was the System Architect for a release 4.0 of the IBM Internal Pricing System for AP, Canada and South America ex Japan. It was a 400 work month, USD4M project. So it was quite the promotion I got to that position. I still write C++ with the best of them. So I am still quite technical. Especially on the relational database side. So I understand the "technical person mind set". It's not like I have not been there and done that.
As a tech person still, I can say our industry segment has completely forgotten that the reason companies invest in tech in the first place is to improve the profitability of the company over the long term.
Now, it is fair to say that companies themselves have also lost sight of the profit motive. Most companies are more concerned about increasing their DEI hires and virtue signalling than making money today. This has led to the phrase "go woke go broke". Budweiser being the worlds most famous case with Dylan Mulvaney.
Maybe, one day, the men in our industry segment will support the idea that our job is to improve the profitability of the companies that we work for, hopefully ethically, not unethically like so many men have done in tech in the last 20 years.