TDWI St. Louis Chapter

For anyone who will be in the St. Louis area on November 12th, the St. Louis Chapter of The Data Warehouse Institute will be holding it's quarterly meeting.  I expect this meeting will contain some great content from renowned speakers Neil Raden and Krish Krishnan.

For more information and to register, see the TDWI STL page.

Meetings are free and open to the public.  You need not be a TDWI member to attend.

Hope to see you there!

Information Portfolio Components

My model for the Information Portfolio includes four components:

• People
• Applications
• Processes
• Data

People represent the individuals or teams that use data to execute business processes.

Applications are either traditional end-user applications or integration solutions that move data through a process, between processes, or to/from people.

Processes are the business activities that leverage data to fulfill the operational objectives of the business.

Data is the cornerstone of the Information Portfolio.  It is the stuff that moves through a process, between people and applications, to act as fuel in the execution of business services.

The Information Portfolio is a knowledge base or collection of metadata that links together these four concepts in meaningful ways that transform bare data, through context and meaning, into information that can be used in the delivery of business services. [Wisdom Hierarchy]

More on each of these components and how they relate to each other in the Information Portfolio as the month continues...

Day 1 - PragProWriMo / NaNoWriMo

It's November again, which means that it's time to spend some focus time writing. After a little bit of a slow start with day one of writing, I'm at 1,292 words. The pace that I try to set is 2,000 words per day, which leaves a chance to take one day off each week and still hit the NaNoWriMo target for 50,000 words. The official goal for PragProWriMo is 2 pages per day, which would be well under a 2,000 word/day goal.

I've been distracted and not really planning for November, unlike last year. Last year, I had an outline developed and some sketches down on paper before I started writing The Practical Data Warehouse. This year, I spend the evening watching TV, commented to my wife that I really didn't have any clue on what to write... then took her advice and just started writing. This years concoction:

The Enterprise Information Portfolio

A Model for the People, Applications, Processes, and Data of an Organization

As November rolls on, I'll be posting snippets from the text. Good luck to all the other NaNoWriMo and PragProWriMo authors out there!!