geordee

Beat The System

As any social organisation evolves the tendency is to build systems that will further aid development and progress. The social organisation may be anything ranging from a country, a religion, a city, a company, a small project or even the internet. The systems, traditional processes, machines and automation works on repeatable activities making them more reliable, acceptable and predictable. In some cases the systems are enforced using policies, rules and restrictions and in other cases it is just recommended using values, guidelines or rituals.

On the other hand, building systems also creates a counter-tendency to “beat the system”. This is...

Rethinking Business Intelligence

The only constant is change is ever so true with Information Technology. IT systems and solutions are created in the context of the evolutionary period in IT resources. From a number of implementations we derive technical know-how, patterns, best practices, and wisdom. Sometimes the evolutionary cycles take us to newer possibilities that invalidate the current common wisdom. So is with business intelligence.

It has been almost two years since I wrote the demise and restoration of data warehousing. The brave new world is now established.

Business Intelligence aided by data warehousing...

Crossing the Golden Gate

I have been playing around with GoldenGate for a few months now. The more challenges I face, the more I like the features and capabilities of this tool. Except for a few bugs introduced in the recent versions (typical in the Oracle products I have worked on), GoldenGate proved a solid replication and changed data capture tool. Now, “solid” should not be understood as rigid; GoldenGate is quite flexible in the way it can be configured.

One of the challenges we had is to extract data with minimal burden to the source databases (in Oracle). The source database was configured...

Wabi Sabi

The Japanese world view of wabi-sabi is quite powerful. It allows us to accept imperfections, even better, to be open about imperfections. Whether it be sin, mortality or suffering imperfection is part of this world. Hardly anything man-made is perfect. Interestingly enough, I was browsing through the internet for some good chef’s knives for my wife. I found Japanese knives to be highly rated, but not as attractive as the German ones. May be my naivety, but what struck me immediately is the form and aesthetics that follows function.

I look at my creations, the stuff that I build at my...

Two Birds in the Hand...

Rarely I record thoughts or feelings that may change over time. I hardly write about a product or company. But this time, I feel compelled to write about Google and the way the Google way of getting things wrong. I just finished reading an article on The Atlantic confirmed my thoughts.

I use most of Google’s services pretty well, and my all-time favorite is Google Reader. I still wonder why there is no serious competition to Google Reader. Especially the way Google Reader clients are built on many platforms. But with Google+,...

The Coldest Hour

I have got a new weather app. It is so well-designed that I do not mind checking it daily. One of the features I like is the hourly track of temperature for 36 hours. After getting used to it for a while, I started noticing the daily patterns in temperature.

One of the interesting observations is that the coldest hour comes around 4:00 and 5:00 in the morning. Just before the sun rises. When the night has lost all it’s hope about the day. And then the sun slowly rises, and the cold disappears. The dew slowly melts away and...

Walk Through

I always fancied the world of architecture. No, not the software architecture, the real one. While I admire the work of architects, my training as a civil engineer prompts me to look critically into the possibilities and feasibilities of architectural creations.

At the end of my engineering course, I took up an assignment to architect a house, under the guidance of a professor. I derived many valuable lessons from that experience, and one of those lessons is walking through the plans. My guide taught me to mentally walk-through the house after the plan is drafted. I was asked to take...

The Project Fuel

At times, I think of managing a project as driving a car. The size of the project is the distance to cover, time is time, and effort is the fuel in the tank. The faster we do the work - the faster the fuel burns - the faster we reach the destination. Of course, provided we are traveling in the right direction.

The interesting aspect is that there is usually an optimum speed for driving. If we deviate from that we end up burning more fuel than required.

Sometimes we are forced to drive faster to reach the destination quickly....

Mathematical Models

We live with mathematical models all around us, whether we realize it or not. We apply them at work as if those are deterministic formulae. One such approach is the application of normal distribution which is a common choice for modeling large number of independent or random variables.

Models based on normal distribution is almost considered like a universal truth and we apply it even when the variables are not really random; or even the sample size is clearly small. It may be complexities of work products, productivity figures, appraisal ratings - taken at micro level.

Luckily, I see another...

Oracle Spend Classification

As information technology progresses, computers become more capable to perform activities which requires not just basic binary logic, but approximation, correlation and prediction. Such implementations help us teach computers to perform large and complex tasks which otherwise require an intelligent supervision. In common technological parlance, this is known as machine learning or knowledge discovery. In relation with data warehousing, we know this as data mining, which is a prominent technique for knowledge discovery.

In large organizations controlling expenses is as important as making profits. Procurement and Spend Analytics is therefore an important area for analysis and business intelligence in large...