You’ve been appointed the project manager of your organization’s next business intelligence (BI) software or data warehousing initiative. Now what?

According to attendees and Lorna Rickard, Chief Workforce Architect with CONNECT: The Knowledge Network, a prominent speaker at The Data Warehousing Institute’s (TDWI) conference here, there are five pieces of advice that will help you set priorities, avoid conflict, empower BI project team members and generally make sure that things go smoothly. Click here to read all of the advice in the full article:
http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid91_gci1280

Jeff Wiss of MySQL said the following: “Thank you again for your amazing workshop at the MySQL offsite. Everyone is still talking about it. Those who couldn’t attend are quite envious of those who did. I’m so glad I was able to expose key decision makers and a portion of our Management Team to this incredibly valuable experience.”

The Power, Politics, & Partnership workshop is a two-day experiential learning opportunity that explores the roles that individuals play within the organizational “system” by illuminating new possibilities for creating partnership. This workshop is particularly helpful during turbulent times, when “business as usual” doesn’t work anymore. Participants experience first-hand what life is like in other parts of the organizational system so everyone can experience, appreciate, and understand one another’s worlds.

Just as change is a certainty in business, IQ managers operate in a climate of continuous change. The question is: will people successfully adjust to these changes or be overwhelmed by them and take performance and productivity with them? CONNECT’s Jed Summerton and Maureen Clarry shared a model for managing change that optimizes productivity in information quality initiatives, strategies for increasing productivity and reducing fear in information quality initiatives, and keys to maintaining productivity

Maureen Clarry and Lorna Rickard of CONNECT presented at Vectra Bank’s Business for Breakfast seminar series on September 18, 2007. Their presentation cut through the rhetoric that surrounds “corporate culture” by describing a research-based tool that is used to measure and manage organizational culture. It is based on decades of scientific study at the University of Michigan. The tool demonstrates the link between culture and bottom-line business performance, including such measures as return on investment (ROI); return on assets (ROA); sales growth; quality; and employee satisfaction.

Today many executives understand that creating a high-performance organizational culture is the only sustainable competitive advantage. Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM from 1993-2002, summarizes this important point: “I came to see in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it IS the game. In the end, an organization is no more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.”