May 5th, Denver-area nonprofit staff and technical consultants met to discuss web-based mapping and view a few interesting projects.

General Notes

Some of the most difficult work is not the mapping, but getting the data together and convincing people to cooperate.

Sometimes you just need a good one-off way to map 1 or 10 or 100 addresses, not a full data integration setup.

Always keep the end user and their needs in mind. Know your audience. Keep the interface simple. Don't design autocad for the web; most people will be confused by maps and sites with a million features.

Here are some links I drudged up tonight just for anyone who has a few moments of spare time. Which...comes rarely these days for me. I'd love to chat about any of them if the mood swings that way.

1. NetSquared Interview from last year with a major BI vendor.

http://www.netsquared.org/blog/britt-bravo/business-intelligence-nonprof...

2. Blackbaud white paper on "Business intelligence for nonprofits." Perhaps defunct now. I couldn't find a straight link like I could last year. But the marketing material is still useful I think.

(This was originally posted to the NTEN Data Warehousing group list, by Nate Wilbert. Nate has kindly allowed us to publish his work here.)

I received an email today about an NTEN webinar with the headline "Bust Those Silos: Reporting Across Multiple Systems." This was interesting to me because I thought, great! Someone is going to talk about data warehousing! Well, not quite I think.

(This was originally posted to the NTEN Data Warehousing group list, by Nate Wilbert. Nate has kindly allowed us to publish his work here.)

I've actually been working with a particular set of tools in the Business Intelligence / Data Warehousing space the past 7 or 8 months. I've worked in the past with many different BI reporting tools like MicroStrategy (a ROLAP tool), Oracle's Hyperion Interactive Reporting and Oracle's BI Enterprise Edition (the old Siebel Analytics ROLAP tool). I've also briefly worked with others like Business Objects and Oracle Discoverer.

(This was originally posted to the NTEN Data Warehousing group list, by Nate Wilbert. Nate has kindly allowed us to publish his work here.)

In the first two posts I've discussed how data warehousing is similar to a large puzzle with many pieces, and how that puzzle is different from typical database "puzzles" created within an organization.

I think that perhaps I should back up and provide some reasons for even thinking about a data warehouse.

1. One version of the truth

(This was originally posted to the NTEN Data Warehousing group list, by Nate Wilbert. Nate has kindly allowed us to publish his work here.)

(This was originally posted to the NTEN Data Warehousing group list, by Nate Wilbert. Nate has kindly allowed us to publish his work here.)

I'm not really sure how many in this group have worked with data warehouses so I'm going to start this first post off with an analogy. In the group description you heard me liken data warehousing to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. Let's work that out just a bit.

The following is a summary of survey responses from the initial CNTC interest group (June 2008)...

Interested Folks
~25% independent consultants
~25% technology company employees
~25% employees of nonprofits providing services to other nonprofits
~25% employees of nonprofits

Technical Savvy
~75% high
~20% average
~5% low

Preferred Meeting Frequency
~60% monthly
~30% bi-monthly
~10% quarterly

Preferred Meeting Location
~75% Denver
~20% Between Denver and Boulder, or alternating
~5% Boulder

Hoping to Get from the Group (Common)
- Best practices and tools