Some people ask themselves: “What’s this guy up to now? And what the heck does the term ‘Business Intelligence’ mean?”. Some even went that far that they asked: “Isn’t that an antagonism in itself?”.
It’s not. I’m learning a lot of new stuff, which is way fun, trust me. It’s simply the difference between a network administrator’s view (like thinking of MySQL as to “I have to open port 3306″ or so), and the view of people who actually do something with all the tools you give them.
So if you’re really interested in what I’m doing during daytime, go and consult sites like Wikipedia, about “Business Intelligence“, or “OLAP“, or the “Data Warehouse“, or “ETL“. You might even find the “Introduction to OLAP” in the Data Warehousing Review, which gives a bird’s view onto things like “Star Schemes”, “Cubes”, and the like. It explains those with as few words as possible.
For the uninitiated, or just the lazy types: think of it as of Excel on Steroids (or OO Calc on the same, which would fit better here). And think of it as a distributed, Client-Server based “SOA” (service-oriented) architecture, which means that products have to comply to open and well-documented standards (like SOAP), if they want to be able to “talk” to each other.
So you might ask: “You’re an analyst now?”. Yes, indeed - but I’m not (yet) into numbers and figures only. I’m a “Customer Support Analyst” with IBM Cognos, in the ICS (Installation, Configuration, and Security) wing of Cognos Support. That’s for starters, because I know my way around protocols, services, security, and the like. Let’s see what I’m doing in a year from now or so; it’s all very exciting. Linux? Sure. Mainframes even? The world is wide open, and we have to think about lots of things. And hopefully, the planet is becoming smarter, like my boss predicted.
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