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Thursday, December 10, 2009
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Week 10

Wednesday, September 23, 2009
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The break is nigh! Woo! well now i have to do all the assignment work this weekend or else i'm up data structure creek without a dimension (that really bad, i know). But seriously, i finally will get a proper crack at doing the assignment this weekend. I could have made time to do it earlier, but that would have meant that i would need to have sacrificed AFL blogging, hygiene, going to the footy, friends, other uni work, girlfriends, etc. And i don't want to do that, as much as i might enjoy doing BI. I use a complicated algorithm of how much time and when i work on assignments and because of the due date of this assignment i haven't got to it yet. Luckily, at least i'm hoping, i'm a gun and can get it done in the 'break' along with a shed load of other work. I will have to resist playing tennis a lot, lol. The girlfriend is away, so that might cut me some time, but i expect that i will be on the phone to her a bit, so maybe not.

Lecture
I think i've heard most of that lecture before, not just the last story about the scanning POD. So if you thought that was boring me, you should have thought you were boring me the whole time. I think all the interface stuff you said in SDI and in that one lecture to IE has been ingrained in my psyche.

Tutorial
I'm in love with screenr. I have the biggest tech crush on it. I used it to do a demo for my group members for one of my assignments. I thought it was really useful, but it seems they still didn't understand. I think that's both my fault for bad demo without enough explanation and the fact that they didn't really understand the context of what i was doing, which i assumed they knew. I watched the screenrs and read the stuff. I didn't do anything though. Blogging is much more important :)

I have the feeling i am going to need those 3 marks from blogging come the end of semester considering i haven't started the assignment and Olga has asked more questions to Steve and POD then I ever have about anything. Hopefully the forum shall save me, luckily i can pester POD and Steve on twitter during the break. Hopefully i won't be too proud and seek their help when i need it.

Chao internets.

Week 9

Wednesday, September 16, 2009
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As i have stated a million times before week 9 is a hard time. Trillions of assignments due, haven't slept properly since week 2 and everyone is in desperate need of a break that is still a whole week away. I would, however, hazard that POD has the best attendance in week 9 than almost any other lecturer in the uni that doesn't schedule a test for week 9, lol.

Aroma some more, I finished it pretty quickly. I noticed that we needed another measure so I added the dollars to the product sales cube. That was pretty logical I thought, not much point having product sales, without the sales bit. I'm getting really used to excel and VSASBI now. Luckily i'm awesome so I have time to write my blog now that i'm finished with it.

I haven't started the assignment, i haven't even finished reading the joke spec that POD has made. I really have to start. I have no idea how long it is going to take. I really need to figure that out after I go to the football on Friday night for free (sort of).

Law of diminishing returns; oh how i missed you. I like how you tried not to use the words 'marginal' and 'unit' even though they were begging to be said. Not sure if you said unit, but i deffo don't remember marginal being said. I kinda lost concentration from about 9:30-9:40 i think, that's not a slight on POD, it's a slight on my brain which wasn't working today as evidenced by me leaving my keys at home and putting a USB through the wash.

Well it's time to get out of the lab, so i best end it here.

Week 8

Saturday, September 12, 2009
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oh yeah, week 8. Should probably blog then. I must say i am a little bit hung over so apologies for any increase in ridiculous comments.

More aroma. I'm getting used to Visual Studio BI stuff more now. I got the hierarchy the wrong way around in the tute. I'm not sure if i was dyslexia or me thinking the other way around. It did have me thinking about whether i was understand or just following directions though. I got that working after some help from Steve. I hadn't saved the database file along with my other aroma stuff so i just downloaded the aroma file from moodle to save me time, lol. You gotta love how you don't have to do the tut. before to do this tut. it's very convenient.

Lecture was about Business Performance Measurement and it was titled Business Performance Measurement (I) which means next week at least will be about this too. I noticed you broke the diagram (pictured), all the words are outside their shapes. You don't win the noble prize for BI with that quality of diagram. I put that in here to remind you to change it. Also remember to change the transition on slide 15 too. Unbelievably this week, all my lectures had probability and/or stats in them. I am so bored of normal distributions right now. If week 8 wasn't hard enough, without having the same thing told to you in varying degrees of confusing ways that you have understood since primary school or at least 11th grade. I mean (no pun intended) seriously, so many people don't know the difference between mean, median and mode; it's shocking. And standard deviation too, it's so easy to understand. What's worse than that is somebody teaching it badly, not you POD, but other lectures of the methods of research for IT (like what i did there?), go in to the deep dark depths of Bayesian theory to describe relatively simple things. end rant.

most thought provoking idea came at about 9:55 in the lecture "There is no conclusive experimental evidence to verify that the use of graphics improves a decision maker's understanding of data" which i can agree with. But understanding is different to speed or other characteristics which may be beneficial to the user. Especially because every user learns differently, i'm a bit ahead of myself, cos i know a bit about VAKT from when POD talked about it in IE. I can see arguments for graphs even if they don't aid understanding as much as others. Prettiness is probably underrated academically, but some people will reject a system if it doesn't look the way they expect it to look, not to mention all the ideas of HCI to do with signals that appear to be similar will likely be confused; tables look quite similar to each other, but by making different graphs we can differentiate the information domains. There are a thousand other ideas that I have like that we a conditioned to like graphs from school. But i think the biggest idea that is for graphs is the speed of use. If i am used to a graph i can tell what is happening in a split second. I don't think i could do it as quickly with a table. I think the amount of information that you can take in visually with a graph in an amount of time is much greater than in a table. I think a person would remember better too. I also want to ask questions about how the studies were done. If the question that needs understand is something simple like 'what were sales yesterday?' then a simple number is obviously the best graphic. but for questions such as 'how did sales vary over the three weeks?' i think graphs could be better than plain numbers.

I have been spending way too much time thinking about this clearly, i mean it's as good a thing to think about as anything, just i didn't need to. In conclusion i'm looking forward to the explanation of this in week 9, see you then.

Week 7

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So I really have got behind in blogging. It's actually the end of week 8 now and i'm doing my blog for week 7. Needless to say that i'm a bit behind in a lot of my subjects at the moment and things that are actually due in now are taking precedence.

This week heralded the beginning of the aroma stuff in the tutes. I like how stuff builds in the tutes, adding knowledge every week so that you can do more and more complicated things. This week wasn't as straight forward as others. I did manage to do all the required work in the tute. though. None of the extra credit stuff.

Thomsen, ADAPT and pivot diagrams in the lecture this week amongst other things. They seem pretty straight forward, but as POD said, that could be misleading. I would like the opportunity in the tutes to do some diagramming. I don't really know what's ahead of me, probably doing diagramming if i know POD, lol.

That's enough crapping on for this week. I have to do week 8 now anyways.

Week 6

Monday, August 31, 2009
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I'm a bad human being. I haven't started the assignment, eek. Been way too busy not doing it. It still doesn't make it okay. I can't decide if i want to do it at home or not. I might download some shiz from dreamspark if i have quota left in my internet usage cap at the end of the month. I really should start.

Le lecture was okay. I apparently am not as good at identifying dimensions as I thought. I made a rookie mistake in the model i was making in my head when POD made us think about the data (pictured). I can't remember what my mistake was but i was a little bit unhappy with myself. I thought i was going to get it right, but i messed it up. I was effected by the overconfidence bias i believe. Which is weird cos when i did the overconfience bias test i got 9 or 10 out of 10 when we were meant to do it with 90% certainty, so i was on the money.

Crappy labs slowed me down, i had to login to another computer once i had already got VS up and running, what a bummer. I am going to be sick of pivot tables by the end of semester aren't i? I see how they are quick and easy, i just don't like them. I found myself using them at work the other day, i wanted to shoot myself then i realised i was saving heaps of time using it rather than writing vlookup statements.

I didn't get up to MDX in the tut, which i was gutted about. That was the bit i wanted to do the most. I got stuck with my cube not loading properly in excel, it was really annoying and it really slowed my progress. I had to refresh the cubes in VS from memory. I tried just redeploying the whole project but that didn't work. Anyways that's over now.

I'm really over my Thursday schedule now though, cos pretty much every week I am busy from 9am-4pm with group meetings and classes and have no time for a break and considering it's week 6 that's not going to change in the next 7 weeks. I think i need to do what happens in Multiplicity.

Week 5

Tuesday, August 25, 2009
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Already it is week 5 and weird things are happening in the lecture theater. Sound mishaps and internet dropping out. The weird and wonderful things that happen at 9pm in K-block. POD was complaining that he wasn't coherent. What's new? just kidding.

The lecture was a little like what you said when you subbed in for David Arnott for IT for Management Decision Making with a little bit of stuff about what OLAP was. Seems like POD is on a quest to prove that nothing is new. Although I agree, it's pretty hard to prove with a lot of things and boundaries are blurry. Last night Alex and I were talking about Ford and how they brought cars to the masses. I said something like 'all he did was use Colt's idea for the production line and applied it to cars' and it got me thinking about what invention actually is. Which I shall not get in to now, but it's pretty interesting.

This is probably going to be a short post this week cos i wanna dash off to COSTCO to see what it's like. I went to COSTCO in London and that was an experience.

More handy pivot stuff this week in the tut. it seems like you want to make us experts in Pivot tables. Not sure how much i want to be good at Pivot tables though (see last week's rant). Steve is as excited by everything as always. He and Olga seem to get along very well. The others in the tute are pretty quiet, it's normally infoholic, Olga and I talking most of the time.

Till next week...

Week 4

Monday, August 17, 2009
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The pivot week.

It's not that i am an IT snob. Okay, maybe i am. But pivot tables aren't really that intuitive to me. Just cos you can drag and drop doesn't mean that that makes sense. That's leaving alone the facts that you are using a absolutely horrible data structure for decision support. Clearly excel isn't very scalable. You can do everything in the query if you want to (as is in excel) but it's not easier from a user perspective. If you want a usable data structure star schemas are much better. They require extra effort to create rather than just using an excel table but it's a much better solution. You can make a star scheme in access and make queries in that and it should be much easier (evidenced by the FI5095 DW tute in access).

Maybe I have too much trust in the POD but i think i will be following his suggestions on when to do work on the assignment and do it in small bits after we do stuff in the tutes. Which means I need to start doing my assignment, which is really disappointing for me as a lazy person.

Something tells me the diagram on the right is going to be on the exam. I have no idea how i would get that idea. Might have been the incredibly subtle hints, not sure though. I think it's just the vibe. The great thing about this model is that you kind of know it already. Like it's like a combination of everything i've learned in a way. It's a triangle (kinda) and has evolutionary development like Keen's model. It's kinda got SDLC-like boxes in; planning, deliver and use. What goes in those boxes is sort of obvious. The circles are just components (sub-processes) of the boxes. I could argue that strategy and resourcing is typically a little bit going to be controlled in the boardroom and could be outside the boundaries of evolutionary dev. You could add a big box around everything saying organisational culture or something similar, but then it would be ugly. I find that you can put such a big box around almost all diagrams.

You only have 15 readings for week 5. I look forward to skipping them.

Week 3

Wednesday, August 5, 2009
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I made this with Crystal Xcelcius:






Pretty pretty isn't it? It was pretty easy to use and to make, easier than with Visual Studio probably. Fairly intuitive for me, it's pretty windows-esc so it's got interfaces that look vaguely familiar and are fairly logically organised. I didn't really have a problem with the tool other than that it's flash, which I don't really like. Linking to flash is just a pain and is horrible for searching and indexing. Bu other than that it was okay. The spreadsheet was pretty damn simply really, and no real forecasting model would be that simplistic if it was any good. But it illustrated Xcelcius (i keep calling it the tool cos of its spelling) very well.

The lecture again seemed to be in the search of O'Donnell's law or should I say O\'Donnell's law as Moodle puts it [Every time i see that i think, shit if they can't clean SQL what hope to assignment submissions have and grade calculations, lol]. I felt like the whole way through the lecture i was being like one of those annoying ppl at magic shows who always asks the Magician how and then has to know how and goes home and is still thinking about it the next day. I was trying to figure out who the companies were in the case studies, the hints were unbearable, 2.5 hour flights, revenue figures, etc, all made me want to go home and look up the historical data for companies at said date. I did attempt to pay attention to what they did wrong or right in their BI system but it was always in the back of my mind that i was thinking about who they could be. It's okay, i think i have given up on trying to figure them all out now, Alex kinda helped a little bit and i resisted the urge to google and some of the hints i've forgotten or forgotten the details of and would have to go back to the lecture recordings to figure it out and that's just not worth the time and effort when I have amazing blogs to write.

The lecture made me think that maybe most BI is disposable, maybe we don't need really fancy systems to do these things, maybe we can just pull all the data together once and get the picture and then move on. Organisational memory is important though, you probably want to retain data, aggregated or otherwise about other times so that you can relate it to the present. Seeing the Development pattern of Case1: A mature system did remind me of Peter Keen's model before you pointed it out, i was feeling all clever after that.

To be honest I don't really rate these surveys you do. I'm not sure if people really tell the truth on surveys even if they are anonymous. They are all perceptions of reality heavily influenced by hindsight bias and groupthink (thanks George Orwell for bringing this term to my consciousness [i read 1984 recently]).

I really don't believe that outsourcing works well for BI, Arnott has me a bit brainwashed here, but it just seems like the kind of activity that you want to be better at your competitors at. If you understand your industry's customers better than your opposition you clearly stand to gain, i'm not sure that if you outsource BI you are going to have an advantage for very long because your competitor will get the outsourced BI system too and then it will be a level playing field. Sure there are different BI outsourcers, but you must be careful about contracts so that the outsourcers can't just sell your system to somebody else. [nb: this is not a well formed argument and i'm not sure i agree with everything i say; end disclaimer]

Week 2

Sunday, August 2, 2009
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It's not always interesting listing to somebody else explain the same thing to you that you have heard before. There are some prerequisites for it to stay interesting:
1. You were interested in the first place
2. It's not a carbon copy of what you heard before, ie: it must be of a different format and convey information in a different format, it would also help if there was extra information that you didn't hear before.
3. The delivery and information must be good. If the information and delivery is worse than the first time you are sure to think that it is a waste of time.

Critically for me the lecture this week ticked those three boxes. I had heard a lot of the stuff before but there was stuff spliced in to make it interesting and to keep me entertained. The material was a little bit different to what was the content in IT for Management Decision Making IT4MD).

I think it's funny how Arnott didn't go over POD's paper in IT4MD. Must be cos it's not published and properly peer reviewed, but fudge that. It's still evidence if it's not peer reviewed if the procedures were good.

The idea that I brought away from the lecture was that BI was hard but doable, just like a good woman... SNAP! Stupid immature jokes aside, i think there is a lot of evidence that BI systems can be fantastic when done correctly.

One thing that i would like to criticise is that BI ppl always seem to quote how important BI is in industry surveys of things that they might be considering in the next few years. I think that BI systems are something that most managers don't get around to implementing. I think quoting stats about how likely they are to implement things is a bit of a useless stat. I am planning on clearning my car, i should do it in the next two week and if a survey asked me if i was planning on it I would say yes but I haven't cleaned my car in a while and it's needed a clean for ages and I still haven't cleaned it. It's just not high on my priorities. It's much more important for me to write this blog, do other assignments and watch my football team lose after the siren and then write about it (it's a weird reflective experience; a kin to writing this post).

Secretly... psst... creating that app in visual studio was easy. I think it's cos it's so similar to the music player for mulo things that we created in SDI that it was easy for me. I'd done the ODBC thing before sometime too, I all seemed familiar. Great instructions too, maybe some more screenshots would have been good, there was one part where i was confused and there wasn't one, can't remember. I found that i didn't need to read the instructions, most of it was easy if i skimmed and then guessed.

Infoholic was late, which i communicated to the class brilliantly after he called me once he had acquired my number from the wonderful Alex. Small world. He then proceeded to go through the history of reporting apps in 35mins, which was quite interesting, i was aching to get started on the app a bit, but oh well. I did have time to complete the app though in class, but i don't think my fellow students were as fast as me. I am a bit of a bullet at these kinds of things when i have a bit of experience.

That's probably enough talk for the week, I better steer away from the TV right now. Australia are taking wickets and I have work tomorrow, don't wanna be up all night.

Week 1

Sunday, July 26, 2009
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As week ones go this was a good one. I am not the most outgoing person in the world, i know hard to believe, so having a lecture by somebody who has lectured me in the whole of two subject and partially in another (IE) and having a tutor that already know is a big bonus for me. I guess I just like what I know.

In the lecture POD was on his seemingly natural caffeine induced high and kept a very jet lagged Luke entertained enough to stay awake and I think pull away a fair amount of information. POD is one of the few ppl that I don't want to stab when they go over all the stuff you have to go through at the start of a unit, eg: plagiarism and cheating. So that was a good lecture. I noticed a huge amount of overlap between data warehousing and IT for decision making units as well, so i was pleased to see that they are all singing from the same hymn sheet as well as that i wouldn't have to learn that much if i didn't want to, to at least do alright in the unit. How hard are POD's units anyways?

Passing really isn't my objective, it's to get a grip of the subject matter so that i can do my minor thesis which is going to be tremendous. It is very dawnting to think of writing all those words. I'm scared enough of writing 20 pages for my research methods subject i'm taking this semester.

The assignment sounds practical and sensible. I like building things so i think i will enjoy it.

The tutorial was good, i especially liked the $5,000 gadget question that infoholic asked. I wanted a Samsung LED TV (pictured) which is just the coolest thing at the moment.

This is the 4th blog i've had (yes it is a semi-requirement) to do for a subject POD, so i am well versed. I hope i am getting better at it at least so that these aren't as boring to read as they had been. I might start video blogging again, I don't know, it's much more difficult to get organised in the head, but sometimes quicker.

Anyways, here's to another successful semester!