Data management strategies

On 14th October 2009, I will be presenting at CPA Congress in Melbourne to the topic ‘Data Management Strategies’.  Apparently CPA Australia didn’t like my originally suggested title ‘The devil is in the detail – which is why the Lord of the Nine Hells should never be your DBA’, which I blogged about earlier.  I think the new title is rather bland, don’t you.

The session overview is below:

Micheal Axelsen FCPA Director
Applied Insights Pty Ltd

As accountants, we prepare the information that a business uses to make its important decisions. Sometimes though, the data we use seems to be impossible to track down – and when we do find it, who knows whether it’s actually useful or not?

In this entertaining presentation, Micheal looks at some of the practical pitfalls and case studies of working with data – from rampant spreadsheets to the DBA nightmare – that Micheal has seen, with practical advice you can use to help your business escape its database nightmare.

Anyway, it promises to be fun, although it would have been much more fun if I could have brought theology into the debate of DBAs vs rational people.

Image from Flickr User Lessio. Some Rights Reserved.

The devil is in the detail – which is why the Lord of the Nine Hells should never be your DBA

Maybe he knows where the bodies are buried...CPA Australia have asked me to present at their conference in Melbourne in October. They didn’t want to do Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme – that’s already been well-covered apparently. I did suggest that I could relate some case studies from the field about data governance – you know, how to get databases right and so on. I decided that I would try for the entertainment factor – after all, I have seen quite a few fun things in my time, and embellishment never hurt 🙂 – and so I have written an outline for ‘The devil is in the detail – which is why the Lord of the Nine Hells should never be your database administrator’.

Seminar overview:

A successful business knows about its business environment to deliver consistently good services or products to its customers at a reasonable price. Accountants prepare the information that provides the feedback to the business on how it is travelling.

Unfortunately, getting that information right is quite a trick! Some of the information is locked away in limbo; we know it exists but how do we get to it? And no, ‘it’s in the database’ is not really all that helpful. Is the information we rely on actually all that accurate?

In this entertaining presentation, Micheal Axelsen explores the steps and some of the pitfalls you can take to achieve good governance of your data so that the information you prepare for the business is as right as you can get it (and meets compliance requirements!).

On this journey we take a look at some of the practical pitfalls and case studies of working with data that Micheal has seen in fifteen years of working and consulting to industry and commerce, with practical advice you can use to help your business escape its database hell.

Short overview:

As accountants, we prepare the information that a business uses to make its important decisions. Sometimes, though, the data we use seems to be impossible to track down – and when we do find it, who knows whether it’s actually useful or not?

In this entertaining presentation, Micheal looks at some of the practical pitfalls and case studies of working with data – from rampant spreadsheets to the DBA from Hell – that Micheal has seen, with practical advice you can use to help your business escape its database hell.

Does anyone care to leave feedback for me? Would you go to such a session? Or is it trying too hard to try and make databases entertaining… Still, this stuff is what I live for – which is a sad indictment of the times, I suppose, or at least of my sense of humour.

Image from Flickr User Lessio. Some Rights Reserved.

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Season’s greetings from Micheal Axelsen & applied insight pty ltd

Click here for a full screen version of the eCard.

Just for you, I’ve created my very own Australian-themed Christmas card this year, complete with the Kingswood I had in 1992.  We’d gone on a trip to Northern New South Wales, mis-read a Refidex, and what can I say – apparently Kingswoods aren’t four-wheel drives, but I do like the photo.

applied insight pty ltd specialises in working with clients to deliver significant improvements in the governance, management and development of their business information and data.

applied insight pty ltd’s consulting services are all about using business information better –building good and useful databases, using social networking and online sharing tools for business results, and helping users create and retrieve documents and information more powerfully.

applied insight pty ltd increases the maturity of the client’s enterprise governance of information.

Business impact of online social networking

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of presenting a three-hour workshop at CPA Congress in Melbourne on the ‘Business Impact of Online Social Networking’.  Partly my presentation was regarding the business risk of online social networking, but also considering the positives and how online social networking can be used to make growing your enterprise.

@micktleyden was there, as was @alex_d13 from time to time.  I think it went fairly well – I have to say that three hours is a long time for any workshop.

Overall I was happy with it – as usual my opinion though doesn’t count so if you attended please feel free to email me or leave a comment either here on my blog or at the CPA Congress community.  Incidentally, I have to say that having the OSN to support the conference has been a different and good idea – it allows you to get expectations sorted out a little earlier and provides a framework for an ongoing discussion outside of the three-hour workshop.  Depending on your perspective that may or may not be a good thing.

Anyway, as usual you can download the ‘Business Impact of Online Social Networking’ workshop notes here.

Incidentally, the PR machine at CPA Australia has been working overtime – there’s been an interview with a journalist at Melbourne MX and apparently I am to appear on ABC radio in Melbourne with Richard Stubbs, about 2.30pm Melbourne time.

As it’s radio I probably won’t have to shave…

All good fun.  Hey, if I run out of things to say about online social networking perhaps I can talk about budgeting (did a thesis in it), database querying (did a thesis in it), technology dominance (doing a phd in it) or IT governance (lecture in it)

I am a dilettente.

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Applied Insight Website

Finally, after much hacking and gnashing of teeth, I have pulled together my company’s website – www.appliedinsight.com.au.  There are still a few niggling issues but it is basically done.

Considering the great expense gone to with design (I did it myself, although the logo is compliments of the lovely Vanessa from Raspberry Creative), I am pretty happy with the results, and there are cloud provider services allow you to connect multiple clouds in your site as well.

The site is hosted at Yahoo, and I set up WordPress on a MySQL Database to host it, and hacked apart a free three-column theme for WordPress.  I exported most of the entries from this blog over to there as well.  I’ve integrated the site with Twitter so people know what I’m currently doing, and I’ve integrated photos using Flickr.  Grand total cost:  about $A14 a month.  Everything else is open source and tweaking on my part.  I haven’t gone pro with Flickr yet – we’ll see how that goes.

For posterity – here’s a screenshot:

Probably loses something from the widescreen but there you go.