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Book Review: Blink
In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the kind of thinking that occurs in about the same amount of time it takes to blink: Rapid Cognition. The brain has an ability to make excellent or devastating decisions in a fraction of a second. In some cases, if we relied more on this part of our brain for decision-making we might all be better off. In other cases, not thoroughly thinking through a decision could lead to disaster.
I’m posting about this book here because I think that the basic ideas holds true for any type of development project, whether it is a vertical application or a data warehouse. I couldn’t help but relate the material to my work with business intelligence and data warehousing applications in particular.
Malcolm claims that “we have come to confuse information with understanding” (page 264). How many times have you heard the phrases “information overload” or “analysis paralysis”? In fact, that is one of the problems that data warehouses are trying to solve: Get the right data to the right people at the right time to help them make better decisions. A “better” decision might simply mean making a decision with less information, less noise, and less bias. Don’t throw the album at the CEO, give him a photo.
Thinking too long about complex matters often leads to paralysis — or if you’re lucky, some sort of compromise that weaves in and out of your 3-page long pro and con list. Conversely, making snap decisions on simple matters can lead to equally bad results. A good rule of thumb is that if the matter is simple, think about it. Spend time on it. Make a good decision. Do this when you buy a new dishwasher, if you’re deciding what to feed the kids for dinner, or if you need to hire a new employee. For more intricate and complex matters, like asking your girlfriend to marry you, rely on rapid cognition to deliver an appropriate amount of insight without all the noise (the “she doesn’t dig sci-fi, but she does like roller coasters” back and forth in your brain might take years to sort out). Your brain’s rapid cognition center will automatically filter out the noise, make a good decision for you, and in the end, you’ll be happy with yourself moving forward. Do you really need to think long and hard about getting out of the way of a speeding bus? Should you go on an impulse-shopping spree?
Malcolm doesn’t talk about this, but I think that regret comes out of making bad choices after thinking too long and too hard. You end up making some sort of compromise, when you knew exactly what you really wanted in the first two seconds. Think about some of your greatest regrets. Before you made the fatal compromise or decision, the one that you would come to regret, did you think long and hard about it? I have a silly monkey tattoo on my ankle that I thought long and hard about getting. My gut told me no, but here I am more than 10 years later not too happy with my decision.
Blink and Bloomberg Professional
Yesterday I attended a training session for using the Bloomberg Professional data service. Within their training, they talked about their Launchpad desktop application. This got me thinking about Blink and data warehousing.
Launchpad allows you save any number of functions that are specific to your business needs so that you can easily get to them again (sort of like your Internet Favorites or Bookmarks). With thousands of functions, I’m quite sure that Launchpad was well-received. But on a deeper level, Launchpad gives brokers and researchers the ability to make better decisions faster. You now have a filter. Not as fast as a blink of your eye, but close. You can get lost in Bloomberg Professional and spend hours upon hours achieving absolutely nothing. Is this the cost of research? Or is it that we need more filters? As Business Intelligence professionals, application developers, and solution providers, we must start thinking that “Less is More” and start giving our end-users access to new brain functions.
Scorecards, dashboards, and aggregations are great examples of initiatives that are in this arena. But it isn’t so much about the latest tool or interface, it’s about a mindset. It’s about providing decision-makers with just enough information to “thin-slice” a situation or condition and make an approriate decision to gain some business advantage. Malcom talks a great deal about thin-slicing and provides several great examples of how it works.
Recommendation
Tipping Point was a better read and seemed to have a better direction. In fact, I was wondering throughout Blink what Gladwell’s real point was: Should we or shouldn’t we rely on Rapid Cognition? He added an Afterward some time after the book was first published and this actually tied his thoughts together. Without the Afterward, I would have been thoroughly disappointed.
That said, this is a good book that got me thinking (not so rapidly, though!) If you liked Tipping Point, this is another book with a subtle social message (that involves screens, women, and large musical instruments — now doesn’t that make you want to go out and get it?).
More importantly for me, it has given me a bit of a push into a different way of thinking about business problems, data as an asset, and decision support.
You can get Blink here from Amazon.
Book Review: SOA Approach to Integration
I posted a review of the book “SOA Approach to Integration” by Matjaz, B. Juric, Ramesh Loganathan, Dr. P., and G Sarang (published by Packt Publishing) over at Amazon this past weekend. Please check it out if you get the chance. Unlike my last review, this one is more favorable!
I wanted to read more about SOA for two reasons: curiosity and to round-out my knowledge of various integration strategies. Those who know me, know me as a “data guy”. I like to design data models, create databases, normalize things, and sketch integration strategies in UML. Boring. I know.
I suppose this comes directly from my background as a VFP application developer. In the nineties, I developed a dozen or so customized, vertical applications that existed for the most part in departmental islands. Their purpose was to solve business problems, usually at the process level. I soon began writing code to integrate these applications, the fancy term is “Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)”, but I never really called it that. Using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and shared objects, I was able to build point-to-point bridges allowing these islands to communicate with one another.
When I had the chance to start developing data warehouses, I jumped. I no longer write applications, instead, I do a lot of data modeling and I write code and design workflows to integrate data from any number of disparate applications spread out across an enterprise. I find this work more than just “satisfying”.
SOA is a different approach to integrating an enterprise. It is like EAI in some ways, but overall, the SOA approach is more advanced and scalable. Up until I read this book, I could not easily draw the line between exposing a few functions in a peer-to-peer api/RPC scenario, to this “Enterprise Service Bus” that coordinates and orchestrates entire business processes off in some far off place using XML and web services.
As you know from my postings and articles, I talk a lot about “Business Processes” in regards to dimensional modeling. This book brought me greater insight into what a “process” is and what it could be. In Dimensional Modeling, we take a bottom-up approach to building an enterprise database. Using conformed dimensions, we start process-by-process to construct a complete data warehouse. Unlike what some detractors and skeptics conclude (are there really any of those still?), we’re not creating new silos or islands, but rather an integrated, highly valuable data warehouse organized by business process, facilitated by the use of conformed dimensions. SOA looks at the business process in much the same way, but while the data warehouse typically gets a hold of a transaction after it occurs, SOA is part of the transaction. They’re two pees in the same pod.
While I agree that SOA is necessary for real-time transactional and document-related (”doc-literal”) integration, I don’t feel that data warehouses are threatened by the emergence of this “technology”. SOA solves a “business logic” problem, where business logic is spread out across an organization. Data warehousing solves reporting, analytical, and data exploration problems. A fully integrated organization will rely on SOA and data warehousing.
To buy this book, click here.
Check out these other reviews as well:
Tech Initiatives
Ken Guest’s online diary
Enterprise Architecture SOA and More
More Reviews on the Way
Anyone have some good reading suggestions?
I read a lot, and now that I have a long train commute each day into and out of Brussels, I’ll be reading much more. Some books on my radar include “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell, “SOA Approach to Integration” by Ramesh Loganathan, et. al., and a re-read of the “Data Modeler’s Workbench: Tools and Techniques for Analysis and Design” by Steve Hoberman.
I really enjoyed Gladwell’s “Tipping Point”, and have had Blink on my shelf for several months. As soon as my US taxes are finished (*sigh*), I’ll start on it.
On the tech front, I’m pretty excited about reading “SOA Approach to Integration”. The book focuses on WS-BPEL (see WS-BPEL 2.0) as well as Enterprise Service Bus.
I read the Data Modeler’s Workbench a few years ago. Since I’ve matured as a data modeler and have entered a few new industries (clinical, financial), I think it is time for a re-read. But I’ve got to buy it (again) first! Steve gets my money twice :-s
Perpetuating the hoax of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
THis book is begining of the conspiracy theory literature. It was shown to be a hoax about a hundred years ago, yet it still is used as a propaganda tool to hurt Jews, Freemasons and liberal thinkers in general.
It was used to fuel the pogroms of Tsarist Russia, the rise of antiSemetism and anti Enlightment of Europe and then the Holocaust. Now it is used to keep any peace happening between Israelis and Palistinians. It must be the nature of man to make an opponent into something more than he is.
The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion (in Russian: “Протоколы Сионских мудрецов” or “Сионские Протоколы”) is a text purporting to describe a plan to achieve global domination by the Jewish people. Following its first public publication in 1903 in the Russian Empire, numerous independent investigations have repeatedly exposed the writing as a hoax; notably, a series of articles printed in The Times of London in 1921 revealed that much of the material was directly plagiarized from earlier works of political satire unrelated to Jews. Nevertheless, some people continue to view it as factual, especially in parts of the world where anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism, or anti-Zionism are widespread.[2] It is frequently quoted and reprinted by anti-Semites, and is sometimes used as evidence of Jewish conspiracy, especially in the Middle East. [3]
I know that those who love such conspiracy theories will dismiss as part of the conspiracy all attempts to show the hoax. And that is another injustice done to them as it fuels their hate against fellow man.
Turan