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Showing posts from October, 2010

Challenging Stonebraker’s Assertions On Data Warehouses - Part 1

I have tremendous respect for Michael Stonebraker. He is an apt visionary. What I like the most about him is his drive and passion to commercialize the academic concepts. ACM recently published his article “ My Top 10 Assertions About Data Warehouses ." If you haven’t read it, I would encourage you to read it. I agree with some of his assertions and disagree with a few. I am grounded in reality, but I do have a progressive viewpoint on this topic. This is my attempt to bring an alternate perspective to the rapidly changing BI world that I am seeing. I hope the readers take it as constructive criticism. This post has been sitting in my draft folder for a while. I finally managed to publish it. This is Part 1 covering the assertions 1 to 5. The Part 2 with the rest of the assertions will follow in a few days. “Please note that I have a financial interest in several database companies, and may be biased in a number of different ways.” I appreciate Stonebraker’s disclaimer. I do belie

The Future Of BI In The Cloud



Actual numbers vary based on whom you ask, but the general consensus is that the Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics in the cloud is a fast growing market. IDC expects a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.4% through 2013. This growth is primarily driven by two kinds of SaaS applications. The first kind is a purpose-specific analytics-driven application for business processes such as financial planning, cost optimization, inventory analysis etc. The second kind is a self-service horizontal analytics application/tool that allows the customers and ISVs to analyze data and create, embed, and share analysis and visualizations. The category that is still nascent and would require significant work is the traditional general-purpose BI on large data warehouses (DW) in the cloud. For the most enterprises, not only all the DW are on-premise, but the majority of the business systems that feed data into these DW are on-premise as well. If these enterprises were to adopt BI in the clou

Can A Product Manager Be Effective Without Product Design Skills?

I am very passionate about the topic of design and design-thinking. When I saw this question on Quora, I decided to post my answer. Following is directly from my answer to this question on Quora : The answer is "Definitely not." It's not about the product design by itself, but it's about applying core and transferable product design skills to product management. Let's break it down: 1) Understanding users: Good product designers have great user research, observation, and listening skills to put themselves into the shoes of a user and understand the real, mostly unspoken and latent, needs of the end users. 2) Being self-critical: If you are a trained designer, you would stay away from self-referential design, which is a root cause for many failed products. Good product designers are self-critical about their approach and the deliverables and are always open to feedback to iterate on their design. 3) Working with designers: If you are a designer, you have great