Larissa Moss is president of Method Focus Inc., a company specializing in improving the quality of business information systems. She has 26 years of IT experience, with a focus on data warehousing for the past 18 years. She frequently speaks at conferences worldwide on the topics of data warehousing, business intelligence, project management, development methodologies, and other information asset management topics, such as enterprise architecture, data integration, and information quality.
In 1991 she self-published her first methodology RSDM 2000, Relational System Development Methodology, Volumes I & II. Since then, she co-authored the books Data Warehouse Project Management, Impossible Data Warehouse Situations, Business Intelligence Roadmap, and Data Strategy. Her articles are frequently published in DM Review, Teradata Magazine, TDWI Journal of Data Warehousing, TDWI Flash Point and the Cutter IT Journal. Her white papers include Organizational and Cultural Barriers to Business Intelligence, Developing BI Decision-Support Applications: Not Business As Usual, Data Quality is Not Optional, and The Importance of Data Modeling as a Foundation for Business Insight.
Her present and past associations include Friends of NCR-Teradata, the IBM Gold Group, the Cutter Consortium, and has been lecturing for TDWI, DCI, PESG, MIS Training Institute, and the Cutter Consortium. She can be reached at methodfocus@earthlink.net.
I’m talking about the occasional religious wars we wage in IT. Here are some examples: What type of requirements modeling is better – data flow diagrams or entity relationship diagrams (circa 1976)? What type…
This article is excerpted from the book Business Intelligence Roadmap: The Complete Lifecycle for Decision Support Applications (Addison-Wesley, 2003) by Larissa T. Moss and Shaku Atre. Data mining is often confused with "writing lots…
You may be wondering what in the world are “Scrum Fanatics?” And why should you beware of them? And what is Scrum anyway? Scrum is an agile software development method. What’s so bad about…
If you ask ten knowledgeable people for their definition of integration, you are likely to get ten different answers. Most of the answers will be an interpretation of Webster’s dictionary definition for integration, which…
This article is an excerpt from the book Data Strategy (Addison-Wesley, 2004) by Sid Adelman, Larissa T. Moss and Majid Abai. It is based on Chapter 11 “Strategies for Managing Unstructured Data” written by…
As I was cleaning out my file drawers the other day, I came across an old DM Review article on Data Warehousing Security written by Kenneth Allard and Ramon Barquin. Those of you in…
About forty years ago, in the early days of data processing, the entire focus of system development revolved around automating tedious manual business processes, such as order processing or accounts receivable. Thus, the main…
Enterprise data modeling (EDM) got a bad reputation in the late 1980s, and for good reason. It took too long to model the entire enterprise, and the model had little or no effect on…
I recently host edited an issue of the Cutter IT Journal (Vol. 21, No. 4, April 2008), a magazine that publishes debates on controversial issues. As I was thinking of a topic, I thought…
Remember post-mortems from the olden days? Way back when, we used to dread them because it meant that the system we just implemented was DOA (dead on arrival). Not that we had to wait…
In my last article, I described extreme scoping , an agile project management approach for building DW and BI applications. I mentioned that this new development approach requires a new dynamic project team structure…
In my last article “We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Methodology,” I illustrated the need for using a methodology to manage projects and develop applications. My story also pointed out that traditional waterfall methodologies don’t…
In my last article, I explained how I chose my column name: Back to Basics. As an example, I mentioned how amazed I was to discover that many companies don’t have a data strategy…
When I signed up for a bi-monthly column with EIMI, I was asked to provide a name for my column. Based on my background I thought of names like Method Madness, pointing to my…
Master data management (MDM) is currently being hyped as new technology, which will help organizations standardize their data about core business entities (e.g., customer, product, employee, and so on). Sounds good – but wait.…
This article is excerpted from a book tentatively titled, Data Warehouse Project Management (Addison-Wesley, Spring 2000). All material is copyright Addison Wesley Longman, Sid Adelman and Larissa Moss. It is the second in a…
This article is excerpted from a book tentatively titled, Data Warehouse Project Management (Addison-Wesley, Spring 2000). All material is copyright Addison Wesley Longman, Sid Adelman and Larissa Moss. It is the second in a…
This article is excerpted from a book tentatively titled, Data Warehouse Project Management (Addison-Wesley, Spring 2000). All material is copyright Addison Wesley Longman, Sid Adelman and Larissa Moss. It is the third in a…
This article is excerpted from Data Warehouse Project Management (Addison-Wesley, 2000). All material is copyright Addison Wesley Longman, Sid Adelman and Larissa Moss. This is the firs article in a two-part series on Data…
This article is excerpted from Data Warehouse Project Management (Addison-Wesley, Spring 2000). All material is copyright Addison Wesley Longman, Sid Adelman and Larissa Moss. It is the second article in a two-part series on…
The cornerstone of every commercial business is profitability. If market forces do not permit a great deal of leeway in the pricing of goods and services, other ways must be found to generate adequate…
There are several things to consider when planning the evolution of a data warehouse. Some of these are obvious, while others are often overlooked. The most obvious area given much attention to is scalability…