2009 at SSWUG.ORG
2009 will be a killer year here at SSWUG – we have a series of new, exciting things that are coming to the site that will continue to make sure you can find what you need (and make it much easier to do so), contribute and even find local SSWUG affiliated user groups. We’ll be rolling things out over a series of weekly releases starting in February – we’re testing and developing like mad right now and over the holidays to make sure it all goes well. Stay tuned!
Featured Article(s)
System Development and design, a Concern of Organization
A system is a group of interelated components working together towards a common goal by accepting inputs and producing outputs in an organised transformation process. This article explains about the importance of system anaysis, design and importance of selection of suitable system for the acheivement of organisational Goal.
Lessons Learned, Providing Reports to Users
David wrote in with his thoughts on working with users, finding the best approaches to giving users access to information and reporting – thought I’d pass it along here – some good lessons-learned here about working with users to get their information needs answered, without having to simply open the gates and provide unprotected access.
"Some managers at our State agency wanted to demonstrate the wonderful ways a data warehouse could provide information. So, they asked around for 5 to 10 questions that administration would like answered and where a simple prototype Data Warehouse or Business Intelligence application could amaze them with the answers.
We found that none of the questions could be answered with the data we now have, or with a little prototype system. We just could not link the data acquisition sources together in a reliable way. We couldn’t figure out it a person in one application is the same as a person in another application. We couldn’t figure out if people were in the same family. We just couldn’t come up with an answer to any of the proposed questions.
How does this relate to the question about Reports vs. Meaningful Views.
Standardized Reports will always be important. There are always reports that need to be provided. Many of these are required by outside groups, such as federal and state oversight divisions. Others are fairly complicated and used across the whole organization, so uniformity and trustworthiness is needed.
Once the data is acquired by all the applications and used in those ways, the added value of the data is the ability to answer “questions we never thought to ask before”.
The shortcoming of Meaningful Views is that they are designed to pull together information to answer a question that has already been asked.
My strong preference is to provide users with a data warehouse, business intelligence objects and tools. The data warehouse will eventually hold data from many of the business’s applications and present it in a way that the data of the entire organization can be seen in a combined way.
At that point, the meaningful views have become meaningful business intelligence objects. Users can create the same output they would get from Meaningful Views. But, in addition, they can play with the data, and ask questions they never dreamed of asking before. As many people in an organization are given the ability to do this, some new information will be discovered that can transform the business, or at least make it incrementally better.
Don’t just stop at Meaningful Views. Go for meaningful business intelligence objects and the ability to have users create their own queries."
Featured White Paper(s)
Collision Course of Prime Opportunity: Virtualization and SQL Server
Virtualization is an exciting technology because it offers enterprises a variety of ways to save costs, shrink the footprint … (read more)