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May 13, 2003

Stay Focused

Celebrating our most popular columnist

by David Stodder

For many readers, the best thing about Intelligent Enterprise is our regular column by contributing editor Ralph Kimball. In an industry full of carnival barkers and silver bullet salespeople, Ralph is one of the few who deserve to be called a guru. Both personally through seminars and classes, and in print via the pages of this magazine and one of its illustrious predecessors, DBMS, he has helped countless professionals succeed with dimensional modeling and data warehouse design.

And so, in this issue, we salute Ralph and his 100th column! He is truly a key, leading figure in what I see as a steady, ongoing revolution: that is, simply, to make this incredible and growing universe of data an effective resource for the user.

After a decade or more of data warehouses, data marts, and business intelligence software, it's easy to take for granted the power of this reorientation of IT priorities — much less the fact that it's not over. As Ralph points out in his 100th column, too many organizations, especially in these times of tight IT budgets, focus inwardly on the total cost of ownership battles involving infrastructure. We forget at our peril that the purpose of strategic IT is to "effectively facilitate decision-making," to quote Ralph's column.

Intelligent Enterprise covers a spectrum of intelligence, integration, and infrastructure methods, technologies, and solutions pointed at the unifying goal of making data resources highly effective for business decision makers. As we move into real-time enterprises, zero latency supply chains, business performance management, and other objectives that touch more and more users and bigger and more varied data stores and applications, we need to keep in mind where it all begins: with an idea and a plan of how to make it work for users.

Through his seminal work at Xerox PARC, Metaphor Decision Systems, Red Brick Systems, and through his books, seminars, and writings, Ralph has kept us focused on the right goal — and of course, on how to design properly to achieve that goal. Hats off to Ralph!

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Eyes on the Ball

Baseball season is here, which is always good news. I admit to the lifelong distraction of box scores, standings, and the joy of watching a seemingly simple game reveal its tension and complexity once you follow its muse. By October, I'll have had my fill of all the chewing, spitting, and equipment adjustments, but I'm fresh now. I'm also coaching my eight-year-old son's baseball team, which gives me the privilege of trying to impart some of the game's simple wisdom to a bunch of kids who, on the whole, would rather just play the game and frolic on its big grass playground.

Our world is full of heavy distractions. The turmoil in Iraq is rarely far from our minds. Yet, we must keep our eyes on the ball — and for readers, that means staying focused on what information technology can do to bring the greatest success to their organizations' objectives. Keep us posted on what you'd like Intelligent Enterprise to cover. What do you need to know?