Data Use Issues:
Data ‘Must Do's’

Seminar title: "Putting Information Together: Building Integrated Data Repositories"

Date and place: Wednesday, February 9, 2000, University at Albany

Speaker: Professor Lakshmi Mohan, School of Business, University at Albany

Transcript of video and audio clip

Focus on must do and know. We do not have time for nice to do and know. And that is a very critical issue when you go about in data warehousing projects, because the bad word here is comprehensive. 100%. Everything.

These are words that sort of reflect the fact that you are trying to do everything and as I say in my lectures to my MBA students—everything is nothing. So the key principle is 'what is it that we must do?'

Further, we are not just looking at retrieval of data. Well if you call American Express with your credit card and you punch in all the 14 digits, you can find out what is your balance as of date.

You can find out a few other things about your account. That's data retrieval. Here we're, not just looking at data retrieval, although that is a kind of a side benefit that comes out of a data warehouse.

But, what we are looking for is what I term actionable information. When you look at information you ask the question "so what?" And if the answer is "so nothing"—it is not actionable.

And when you are looking at actionable information, the starting point is, can we find the real problem? Not the surface problem, but what are the root causes for the problem that you're facing.