This morning I was listening to my favorite dutch radio station BNR (Business News Radio). They were talking about the statement of president Obama on the terrorist act on christmas day 2009 (see CNN / Daily News NY).

He stated that the “this was not a failure to collect intelligence. It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we allready had” (see USATODAY). “The bottom line is this: The U.S. government had sufficient information to uncover this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack. But our intelligence community (red. CIA) failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list.” (See Politico). “The US government had sufficient information,” he said, “but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots…. That is unacceptable, and I will not tolerate it.” (See CSMONITOR).

In these times of realtime data warehousing and data mining I must conclude that again the childs mind is the best way to explain things to people in the (Oval) office and Pentagon. Visualise Data Mining and turning Intelligence / Information into Knowledge (and eventually Wisdom) can be done by using a simple drawing…

Turning the collected data into information, and using this information to gain knowledge about certain passengers, to eventually get this wisdom to forecast possible terroristic people, is as simple as connecting the dots / data. It’s the relation / connection / glue that ties them together and gives the bigger picture. In the future this way of working might lead to recognition of patterns (data mining …) and predictive analysis about the data – information – knowledge (see DIKW).

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One of my colleagues in the Business, Ronald Damhof, posted on his BLOG a reaction to this POST (see his article). His view is that the business metadata is data, just like the ‘normal’ data regarding e.g. Marketing or Finance. It could even be handled like the ‘normal’ data, and can be stored in a Data Vault-like model (TEMPORAL, EXTENSIBLE, NORMALIZED). I agree with him on that, but one of the question that remains is how these information streams should be linked ?

We are able to built Data Vault models for the Business Intelligence needs, and visualise the CSF’s and dashboards for the end users. We can even built Data Vault models for storing the Business Metadata, which in fact brings up a memory to an other project of mine, where the customer wanted to store this Business Metadata in a central spot. I have done an toolinvestigation (very small), and we found out that the Microsoft Sharepoint Solution was the cheapest and best-fitting solution, since the other reports where also built towards a Microsoft Sharepoint Portal (Using Cognos Cubes / Reports). Unfortunately this business metadata was not modelled in the data vault way, so … the solution was not used (until recently they started to ask for this again). Writing this experience I come up with an other thought / insight / question; how do we handle unstructured data in the data vault model?

So there are multiple questions in my opinion to answer;

1. Do we need to link the Business Metadata to the ‘normal’ data?
2. If the first questions is answered positively, how would we relate the Business Metadata to the ‘normal’ datamodel?
3. How does the Data Vault model cope with unstructured data, e.g. WORD, PDF, Pictures, Sound, etc.?

To answer the first question from my own perspective; I think it would be wise to do so (I think Ronald agrees with me on that). It gives context to the ‘normal’ data and provides valuable information about ownership, maintenance, definition changes, etc. => Data Lineage: How did the element I am looking at originate from the source after all.

The second question is very tricky in my opinion. If we use for instance the RECORD SOURCE as an example, we are not allowed to LINK to the SATs, where the RECORD SOURCE is used, also linking to the LINK would result in a recursive LINK (the RECORD SOURCE of the RECORD SOURCE of the LINK…). So, if we follow the discussion about RECORD SOURCES on this BLOG and the BLOG by Ronald Damhof, we conclude to use the natural key for RECORD SOURCES instead of LINKING to a RECORD SOURCE HUB. Thinking about this, I conclude that the DATA VAULT model for the ‘normal’ data, is a source in itself for the Business Metadata for this item. If we want to know more about the RECORD SOURCE, we just create a stand alone HUB in an other DATA VAULT model and LOAD it with all unique natural keys in the DATA VAULT model for the ‘normal’ data.

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But today I had a PERSONAL BRANDING training by Tom Scholte at our new office in Nieuwegein. A very nice training for people like me. People who are not that good in selling themselves on the internet, phone or by email.

What can one do to enhance your own PERSONAL BRAND? Simple ; Be visible. Work on visibility and let, any one who cares, know what you’re good at or which achievement you have reached. This BLOG post should be in line with that goal(s). I just want to share a phrase from a DUTCH magazine (KEK Mama*) with you, that I though was interesting in these times of recession;

Recession rhymes with depression,

but it also rhymes with progression !!!

Today I made some progression on my PERSONAL BRAND. Thanks to Tom Scholte and his training about PERSONAL BRANDING, I realised I had to just do it all myself and listen even better to what people have to say about me as a private person or in business.

* As of May 14th, 2009 my family contains one extra boy. Pjotr was born that day and young elders read stuff like KEK Mama

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