Preview to Tuesday, 7 February Webinar on Tailoring Data Models

Here’s a preview data model for my webinar on 7 February (yes, today!) at 1PM EST.  My topic is Help your Business Love its Data (Models): Tailoring Data Models for your Audience and it’s Part 2 of a three part serious on Getting Down to Business, sponsored by CA.

It’s free to register at https://www.ca.com/us/events/webcasts/na/Lets-Get-Down-to-Business-Help-your-Business-Love-its-Data-Models/02-07-2012.aspx

This is what I’ll be covering:

7 Feb 2012
1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. EST

Duration 60 min.

There’s no one data model hiding in your modeling tool. There are actually thousands of them – not just multiple data model files, but different views and presentations of the same data model, each one ready to be used by different purposes and outcomes. In this session, Karen Lopez will discuss the steps in of preparing and presenting the “right” data model for the right audience, as well as making them accessible via the web. We will also cover the 10 tips for ensuring that your audience is happy they attended the data model presentation and looks forward to attending the next one.

As usual for my presentations, this will have a bit of snark and talk about good things to do in business data models an show some anti-patterns for modeling, too.  That’s probably where the snark will come it.  Can’t guarantee it, but it sounds about right.

Bring your ideas about tailoring the presentations  of data models or any type of design.  Oh, and if you have any action figures, bring those, too.

Get Hands On with SQL Server 2012 – Virtual Labs

Want to get your hands on SQL Server 2012 right now?  You can be up and running without needing a server or to install SQL Server locally.  Just visit SQL Server Virtual Labs (use IE)  and choose a lab to get started.  The labs run in a virtual machine, so these aren’t just slides and a demo.  This is real, hands-on working with the tools.  Here’s your chance to get up to speed on SQL Server before the other 99%. .

You can get real experience with new SQL Server 2012 features such as:

• AlwaysOn, SQL Server’s new High Availability feature.  I have to say this is fun to play with.  Pull the plug and watch SQL Server gracefully fail over.  Like nothing happened at all.  Monitor the status of all the AlwaysOn components.  Very cool stuff here.
• Master Data Services, SQL Server’s new feature for managing reference and master data.
• Data Quality Services, a new feature for helping you Love Your Data even more.
• Sparklines and Data bars, new data visualization features.
• Columnstore Indexes, SQL Server’s new feature to make queries just fly.
• Spatial and Location Services for mashing your data up with location based services.

While you are running the VM set up, register for the SQL Server 2012 Launch events coming in March in the US.  I hope to make it to one or two of those.

Another Zombie Job Posting…Data Architect Designer Implementer Operational Support

I blogged over on Dataversity about Hiring Data Professionals: Mason Dixon Lines and Zombies in Your Job Postings .  In that rant, I talk about organizations that want to hire people who can do everything in the data column of the Zachman Framework.

I call these people "wonder candidates" and write about how they don’t exist in sufficient numbers to supply all the organizations in the world:

It would seem to make sense that if you were hiring a data professional you’d design a position that fills in the Data column, right?  No?  It turns out, though, that most people don’t think and work along a column.  In my experience, people aren’t passionate about tasks that span columns from top to bottom.  They normally aren’t skilled along the whole column, either.  Referring to the Zachman Framework, what sorts of skills and passions would this candidate need: planning, architecting, designing, building systems, building parts, keeping the systems up and running.

I thought about my rant in this area while reading a job posting on Dataversity for a Data Architect.  I’m sure the people at Miami Children’s Hospital do amazing things, probably with very limited budgets.  That’s why these hiring organizations tell me they have to fill their positions with Architect Designer Developer Implementer Operational Support Wonder Candidates.  I’m going to pick on this posting, so apologies to the hospital for using them as an anti-pattern for finding good data architects.  I’m sure they are nice people there and really want to get to successful database and data warehouse solutions.  You might even want to apply for that job.

“Designs and constructs very large relational databases for data warehousing. Develops data models and is responsible for data acquisition, access analysis and design, and archive/recovery/load design and implementation. Integrates new data with existing data data warehouses in design and planning.”

Right there we have the keywords design, constructs, develops, implementation.  These activities are done in different rows in the data column of the Zachman Framework.  There’s also this:

performance tuning, data retention policies, data classification, data security, and data acquisition….Data modeling experience. Database and application object management, including DDL, table constraints and triggers, clusters, object storage allocation and tuning, indexing options and tradeoffs, partitioning, etc., experience.”

Those activities are clearly down in the lower half of the Framework.  Yet data modeling, which exists along the entire data column, is not typically a strong skill set for people who work so far down in the Framework.   So my guess is that professional data architects and modelers will not be qualified to do the clustering/partitioning/indexing/performance tuning part of the job and that implementers who can won’t be qualified to prepare and maintain the data models they also want out of this role.

If I were interviewing for this type of position, I’d focus on why this organization wants data models but doesn’t seem to want to fund a data architect.  It’s sounds crazy, but I recommend that organizations not incur the costs of preparing and maintaining data models when they don’t want to work with professional data modelers.  They won’t see many of the benefits of having an active data model but will incur all the costs and the risks associated with preparing incorrect ones.

I realize that there are many successful IT professionals who can work along many rows and columns.  I’ve worked with these amazing people.  But staffing a team of these amazing people is costly: they are difficult to find, expensive to hire, and tough to keep around because:

There may be people who can do a lot of those things, but in my experience they aren’t passionate about all of them. New hires won’t be happy and the organization will not realize the economies that they think they will. 

I recommend that if organizations want to combine responsibilities that they do so across the columns in the same range of rows.  Combining positions where thought processes are similar (business and data analysts, DBAs and developers, etc.).  Analysts in general make for good analysts in other columns.  Operational people tend to think operationally, builders tend to think mostly of building, not planning well.  Let’s not drag people up or down the rows.

Go now and check your job postings.  Do they reflect the true nature of the job?  Or are they actually full of zombies ready to drag someone to an assignment that they don’t really want?

Do you work with any of these Zombies?  People who have been hired to fill several jobs, but don’t have the passion or skills to do all of them?  How is that working?

I’m Hiring This Girl One Day…#WIT

I’m so blown away by how well this girl rants against the onslaught of PINK on girls and females.  For us grown-up girls, the concept of "shrink it and pink" as a marketing approach makes me want to run screaming out of the store.  I had an exhibitor take a nice 16GB USB drive I was picking up out out of my hand and replace it with a blinged out pink 2GB one, saying "Oh, you want this one instead".  No, I didn’t.  And the fact that this vendor thought I did spoke volumes for how they felt about their female customers.

Sure, I cart around Barbies and have my fair share of girlie toys, but my Barbies are working girls – Technical Barbies that have job.  Astronauts, School teachers, FBI agents, Computer Engineers.  Action figures, I call them, because they do something other than look pretty. Most Barbies look like some type of working girl that involves being pretty, but I’ll keep that discussion for later.

Anyway, this video of Riley on Marketing gives me new hope that someday we’ll raise girls to have good analytical thinking.

In fairness to retailers, they stock and display merchandise in a manner that sells best.  Parents (and Aunties and Uncles), they do this because you like it.  Stop liking it.  Don’t just buy for your little girl from an aisle with big sign that says "Girls" over it.  Think about where you want your darling girl to be at age 18 – still trying to find a Prince to make her a Princess…or readying to enter post-secondary education so that she never has to rely on anyone but herself.  Sure, buy her a Laundry Barbie and a all that princess stuff.  Tell her that she is your princess.  Let her have her truly silly girlie moments. But please don’t let that be her only professional development plan from age 5-25. 

All I know is that when I hire people, I want a hell of lot more Rileys than I do princesses.

1 Second Guide to Not Being a Jerk on GoToMeeting

If you aren’t presenting, MUTE THYSELF.  This isn’t rocket surgery, folks.  Your office background noise doesn’t make you more important.  The fact that you are taking this call from an airport doesn’t impress me.  The fact that you must take a call while you are on the meeting isn’t a positive thing.  The fact that you are multitasking doesn’t make me like you more.  The fact you work from home and have a dog is not cute.  Okay, it is, but we don’t need to know.

If you are a fan of Wil Wheaton, you can also share this in his meme, Don’t be a Dick

Please share this with all your frenemies.

Why? #meme15

Jason Strate ( @stratesql | blog ) asked the following question in his #meme15 post  (a call for bloggers to write in the middle of the month) for December:

1. Why did you start blogging?
2. Why do you currently blog?

Then

I started blogging over on infoadvisors.com, my main website, in March 2006 in order to help data architects and other data professionals find information to make their days go smoother.  This was a natural outcome of the more than a decade long community management role I held on our discussion groups, since they were primarily about users of data management tools helping each other.  It was like building my first Lego set, something I did just this past year. Yes, my first one, ever.  Yes, that’s in the picture.  It was fun for me, but not so much for everyone else.  Just like when I first started blogging.

I think from our stats I did a fairly good job of sharing information about events, tools, techniques and maybe a few rants.  Just a few.  I didn’t like the platform I was using, Dot Net Nuke, so I started a WordPress-based blog (this one)  earlier in the year.  This allows me to blog more often.  I’m liking the new platform, but still trying to carve out enough time to get something of quality written.

I also blog at Dataversity.net.  That has provided me a slightly different audience, but still heavily data related.    There is an in-progress series about Normalization Myths and a few rants over there. Just a few.  You should go check them out.

Now

In thinking about Jason’s questions, I realized that I really blog in hopes of influencing people to think more about loving their data — ensuring that data has the best quality that we have time and resources to support.  I think that’s a good fit for my social media use, as well. There aren’t many people in the data architecture niche blogging – I know of only a handful and I have a blog post coming up soon that lists who I’ve found.  Compared to other topics, I think we data architects are going to find it tougher and tougher to influence the IT profession since for the most part we as a group avoid social media, blogs, and other newer forms of information sharing.   So while I’ll still blog because I like doing it, I want to start writing about more actionable topics – do this, then change that.  Make a difference.  Love your data. that sort of thing.

And I hope to that more often I’ll actually be able to influence people to make their data be better.