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December 22, 2009
A Christmas Letter
Dear Blogger,
I have been working in Business Intelligence for 8 years. Some of my little colleagues say there is no One Version of the Truth. My manager says, if you read it on B-Eye-Network it is so. Please tell me; is there One Version of the Truth?
Virginia O'Hanlon
Virginia, your little colleagues are wrong. They have been dumbed down by a remarkably dumb age. They think, because their little minds can't handle the truth, that there cannot be any, not even one little version. All minds, Virginia, are little, and RAM upgrades are not available for BI practitioners, nor even for bloggers. In this great universe of ours, Business Intelligence is only capable of grasping that which can be extracted, loaded, transformed, aggregated, mined and visualized, and that is not the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, VIRGINIA, there is One Version of the Truth. It exists as certainly as the need to get out next quarter's numbers without arousing the suspicions of the SEC. Alas! How difficult corporate life would be if there were no One Version of the Truth. There would be no knowing if Marketing's "free camo underwear with every order" campaign had actually increased sales among the duck-hunting demographic, or just attracted some very lonely surfers exploring the outer reaches of online shopping. The amicable agreement on metrics which today lightens the business of every organization that has implemented a data warehouse would be extinguished.
Not believe in One Version of the Truth! You might as well not believe in a Balanced Scorecard! You might get your manager to hire analysts to audit your metrics, tracing each data element and its metadata back to its source, but even if they all found different answers what would that prove? Nobody knows what the One Version of the Truth is, but that is no sign that there is no One Version of the Truth. The most real things in our businesses aren't understood by anyone. Did you ever see a Mortgage-Backed Security, or a Collateralized Debt Obligation? Of course not, but that's no proof that they do not exist.
You may slice and dice the raw data to see what the numbers "really" are, but there is a veil covering the unseen world of business metrics that not even the brightest man could tear apart. Codd couldn't model it, nor Tufte visualize.
No One Version of the Truth? It lives, it lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten thousand years from now, it will continue to keep us all in work.
Posted by Donald Farmer at December 22, 2009 12:45 PM
