User Group Leadership: A Path to Success in Life?

I met with Steve Lemme of the IOUG for a story on user groups in Oracle Magazine, but the written story died during the editorial process. However I taped the interview for my Up Close series and the video lives on! My Up Close series focuses on the Oracle user group community. Steve is a true believer in user groups. He believes that joining one can make you better at using the technology. He believes that being a leader in the community leads to personal growth and professional satisfaction. But enough of me talking. Watch Steve tell you himself.

"World Changing" Database?

“We’re living in the shadow of architectural decisions that were made decades ago... but all these architectural restraints have gone away...”
-- Terry Jones of Fluid Info.

When Scoble and O’Rielly call a new take on database technology “world changing,” I figure someone at Oracle should look into it. I would guess there are teams at Oracle thinking along these same lines, but I’m not sure exactly whom, so I shotgun this out to all. Here’s Scoble’s post with videos. Here’s the inventor’s blog. I’ll post something over at Oracle Mix to get the conversation started there.

How to Talk to Your Boss about REAL Analytics

Jeanne Harris, co-author of Competing on Analytics knocked me out with her keynote address at the Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, and Analytics (BIWA) Summit this week at the Oracle Conference Center.

I came away with an understanding of how analytics are being used by those who do it best. Her examples: Amazon, Harrah's casinos, and the Boston Red Sox have all “dominated their fields by deploying industrial-strength analytics across a wide variety of activities.”

The talk was not heavy on technical details (the rest of the summit would provide those). Instead it focused on giving IT people the language they need to discuss the power of analytics with upper management. I caught up with her after the keynote to ask her to repeat some of what she had said. (Her publisher won’t allow me to run video, so the window below will only play audio.)