To avoid the “foreign language” feeling for users of a BI/DW system you must start with the decision makers. They are the ones who are going to use business intelligence profitably. They are the ones that turn the information in your data warehouse into usable knowledge. So, just talk to the users.

Sometimes Decision Makers view the Business Intelligence system as if it were a foreign language. They took the training. They tried to get information out of the system. But they gave up because the terms used

In my last post I talked about how requirements are really the stuff that goes in and out of your system, the black box. The “stuff” are things like data, documents, objects, requests, events, and when “this stuff happens. But what else constitutes requirements (stuff)?

Once the boundaries for your system / software / business unit are defined as a black box, do not worry about what is inside the box. Focus on what goes in, what comes out, when this happens, and rules the box must follow. So just what can go into our come out of this box? [...] ...Tags:

By clearly understanding the boundary of your system you can easily distinguish between requirement and design statements. ...Tags: Tags: Software Development Black Box Requirements Systems Thinkin

After dealing with requirements in all sorts of shapes and sizes over the years I find the “black box” approach works well. For requirements, I think of any system as if it were a black box. I I can “see” or experience the outside of the box.

So how do you define requirement? I was working with a large hospitality corporation when I was asked this question. The problem is that the notion of requirement comes in many forms. The definition seems to depend on what role you play in relationship to requirements definition – Customer, Business Analyst, Systems Analyst, Designer, Architect, [...] ...Tags:

The View – Model – ViewModel design pattern, also known as MVVM, is getting more popular these days. I have found it extremely easy to use when developing very different applications and have used the design pattern recently in both ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight applications. However easy as it might be is seems to confuse people as I have seen some terrible examples where people make a complete

Using the declarative DomainDataSource that is part of the upcoming Silverlight 3 RIA services makes it quite easy to work with data. All you need to do is add a DomainDataSource control to the the XAML, point it to the generated DomainContext class (in this case NorthwindContext) and tell it which method to use to load the data from the web service(in this case LoadCustomers). Next add a DataGrid to display the data and you are good to go. < UserControl

Note: This blog post is written using the .NET NET framework 4.0 Beta 2 With Windows Workflow Foundation 3 it was possible to rehost the workflow designer in your own application. But possible is about all there was to say about it as it was pretty hard to do anything beyond the basics. With Windows Workflow Foundation 4 live has become much better on the rehosting front In fact it is possible to create the fully functional and useful workflow editor below in about 200

I can’t say I am a fan of the way the TryCatch activity is implemented in Windows Workflow Foundation 4. For starters there is a Finally block where you can add some activities you want to execute. Sounds nice and very much like the try/catch/finally code construct we have in C# or Visual Basic. Except that it behaves in a subtlety different way.

As you may have heard Windows Workflow Foundation 4 is not an upgrade from Windows Workflow Foundation 3 (or 3.5). The version numbers might suggest that the previous version was quite mature but in fact it refers to the version of the .NET NET framework.