Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

This week, I thought I'd comment on some of the important recent developments that have taken place in the data warehousing extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tools market.

Oracle finally released the latest version of its Oracle Warehouse Builder ETL toolset (version 10G, release 2). This is the eighth release of the product since Oracle started marketing it in 2000.

As the classic "dog days" of summer approach in the Northern Hemisphere, there is a temptation to take a break -- to draw a deep breath and forget about one's individual and organizational worries for a little while. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the price of organizational freedom is eternal vigilance.

In his call for papers, Guest Editor Ken Collier wrote:

"Business intelligence" (BI) has become the de facto umbrella term for describing all activities related to using business data to run the business. For decades business leaders have relied on cross-tab style reports for analysis and decision making, and they have always sought easier and more powerful tools for better analysis.

Today's fast-paced project environments coupled with organizations that lack good formal project management are creating project lifecycles short on the necessary up-front planning. These accelerated lifecycles can be the beginning of runaway (off schedule and budget) and distressed projects.

Whenever the performance of a project falls outside nominal values, it will be judged to be a project in distress and likely to fail unless some intervention strategy brings it back under control. How it got to that state is a question that needs answering. But more important is how it can be returned to a state of normalcy -- if at all.

A plethora of resources exists that attempts to assist organizations in drafting their outsourcing arrangements. Well-meaning individuals frequently publish, on the Internet, contracts they have developed in their organizations. These, while undoubtedly useful to the writer at the time, are often less useful to others (who are not from the same organization, are not using the same vendor, are not in the same country, do not have the same scope, do not have the same issues but have other issues not addressed, and so on).

Outsourcing contracts are difficult to prepare. Perhaps that explains why a recent Google search on "IT outsourcing contract" yielded 22.4 million results! Many books and articles on the subject are written by lawyers for lawyers, which makes the language inaccessible to the" legalese challenged," thus presenting a high risk of unintentional noncompliance by both parties. There are also many contracts you can buy sight unseen, which means their particular usefulness for your situation is unknown.

Much has been reported lately about companies and government entities mistakenly releasing consumer records or allowing them to be compromised by malicious third parties.