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About 3.5 years ago I was introduced to Agile at the Agile 2006 Conference. After that, and implementing it in a software dev environment, I found that it just works. Sprints, Scrums, Stories, Backlog, Velocity, all the pieces fit and work.
Now that I am managing a Business Intelligence group, which when I started wasn’t doing [...]

Digging into the blog post from earlier this summer I wanted to see what was new and exciting in Excel 2010.
Recently I have been working on an cube and we want to be able to budget right from the cube. There are also many other cubes/scenarios where the ability to writeback to the cube would [...]

Most people, when using OLAP cubes, are hitting the live version that is located on SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS). They hit it with Excel, or some other reporting tool, etc. I have blogged previously about offline cubes and how you could possibly use them.
Now, the blog I did before, I talked about creating [...]

Today I received an email asking to some extent best practices on development with SQL Server Integration Studio (SSIS) and Business Intelligence Developer Studio (BIDS) in a team environment. Here is part of the email:
Me and another DBA belong to the same team, we have a SQL server with SSIS running. We use the SSIS [...]

We are again looking to fill out our Business Intelligence team at Trek Bicycle Corporation. What I am looking for with this position is someone who is both technical and has the business analyst skills needed to work with end users, gather requirements, etc. You can read more about the position here:
http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/company/careers/post/98/sr.+technical+business+analyst
Feel free to email [...]

A couple of months ago, a colleague lent me Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data by Stephen Few.
What a great book. I read it in one afternoon. It goes through a bunch of different software systems you can buy or implement in regards to Business Intelligence and Dashboards, KPI, Reporting, etc. It [...]

Last week I was in a heated discussion about Business Intelligence, and it came up that “Business Intelligence is just writing reports, what is the difference from just writing some reports?”
I tend to disagree. Writing reports is, well, writing reports. You can write reports off of tons of data, and yeah, probably get some good [...]

Recently I blogged about easing the transition to Excel 2007 from Excel 2003, by changing your PivotTable design and options.
This post is going to be about creating PivotTables that connect to OLAP cubes (and PivotTables in general) that will work in either client, or sometimes called “Compatibility Mode“
If you create a PivotTable in Excel 2007 [...]

Being that we are now in the year 2009, you would think that most people are currently using or have been using the Office 2007 suite for a couple of years now. The truth is that there are many businesses “in the wild” that are still standardizing on the Office 2003 suite.
Why? Well there are [...]

Recently, in May 2008, I took a position with Stratagem. Though the summer I worked for 2 places as a consultant, KHS in Waukesha, and The Dept. Of Regulation and Licensing (DRL) in Madison.
A little history. I was full time for W3i around 2 years, and then went independent for about a year, then as [...]