a hundred degrees

Making Work For Myself

  I recently wrote in my job review that I wanted writing and training to be part of my job. Since I am unlikely to be assigned tasks like this, I am just going to stick my neck out and do them. Yesterday I wrote up an email to position myself as the trainer (and by implication resident expert) for our Data Warehouse power users.

  I ran it by Bob and he liked it, but wanted me to cut the extended metaphor about the group's value that I had at the beginning. His opinion was that it would work fine in a presentation scenario, but the shorter an email, the more likely it is to be read. He's right, the message is better for the reduction. But hey, by now, you know that if I spend time writing something, it's going to end up here. So here's the unused intro:

"We need to leverage our investment in the data warehouse."

Permit me to extend the metaphor.

The warehouse is the lever. If we have the cost of the warehouse on one end of the lever, then our efforts as stewards and authors are on the other end. It's up to us to really bear down and put the warehouse to use so we can get the value in the black.

The Data Warehouse Steering Committee will provide vision for the data and tools to be added to the warehouse. This will lengthen the lever (and increase the investment). You've heard that with a long enough lever you can move the world.

Our knowledge and skills in the warehouse determine the position of the fulcrum. The more we know, the closer the fulcrum is to the other end. The more developed our skills become, the greater return on the investment our efforts yield.

Okay, honestly it needed a little more polishing and some graphics.
Below is the text of the email that went out. So far I've gotten three responses, with "Scheduling" and "Where's/What's" in the lead.

INFORMENT USER GROUP

FiServ InformEnt has encouraged us to form an internal user group. Our bank community's growing awareness of the kind of information in the warehouse is increasing the demands on us as authors and information stewards. Let's get the group going!

We're all at different levels of experience with the KnowledgeShare and PowerShare tools. We use these applications to achieve different objectives and have thus become more skilled with some aspects than others. We need a forum for sharing with each other what we've discovered about exploiting these tools.

I know that some of the attendees to the recent SQL class came away feeling they were in a better position to get value from the warehouse. Let's keep moving in that direction.

In addition, we've sometimes discovered that more than one of us is working on the same problem. Increasing our communication should help to eliminate duplicate work.

How You Can Contribute

To begin with, use this email distribution group (INFORMENT_AUTHORS).
When you figure out how to do something nifty, drop the rest of us a line. When you can't figure out a problem, let us know. Someone else may have solved it already or be able to point you in the right direction.
When you create a .bqy, send us a copy with a brief explanation of what it does. You may help someone who was independently reinventing the wheel.

Second, I'm planning to hold several 60-90 minute workshops on a variety of topics. I imagine I could plan and prepare one a month.
Below are some of the topics I have in mind. Please let me know which of these you are interested in and rank which you'd like to see soonest. In addition please mention any topics you would like me to address that I haven't listed.

Where's what I need? / What's all this stuff?
In order to expand the role of the authors, you'll soon find that you have access to a great many more views from which to build your queries. When you find that deposit data is spread across nine views, you'll want to know where to find your data and how to properly link the views together in your query. We'll look at the InformEnt Financial Services Model, some specifics of the bank's implementation, shortcuts, evaluating the data source, and what to do when it just isn't there.

Joins
Just what are "inner joins" and "outer joins"? We'll talk about the concept and then look at some real examples of where we would use each. We'll also look at the effect these joins have on our results sets. It's possible we would also discuss Union queries.

Group By
Concepts and real examples of aggregate functions (SUM, COUNT, MAX, etc.) and their results sets.

Scheduling
The processes on the broadcast/delivery server let us do a lot more than simply publish to the viewers and analyzers through the web client. Learn about email, printing, and export options for sending your data and reports to folks who aren't even licensed users.

Report Tricks and Tips
Learn how to make that board report look more professional. We'll review the report tool and see some less apparent ways of getting specific layouts. Bring your own .bqy's and share your cleverness.

Subqueries
Sometimes the limits on your query themselves need to be derived from a query. Sometimes that subquery needs to change for each record in the main query. Learn to make sense of those two sentences. We'll learn about using subqueries and correlated subqueries. We'll rely heavily on real examples to show how you might really ask these sorts of questions.