Airlines providing Business Intelligence?

I'm sure it happens all the time that company brands are mixed up. I just found another case where SAS Institute has been mistakenly connected with SAS Scandinavian Airlines. In a recent Handelsblatt article, the author writes about companies struggling with BI software, because there aren't any standard tools, and no governance. When Yahoo Finance picked up the article, they added stock and trading data for the companies mentioned in the text. The list contained Business Objects, Gartner, Microsoft, SAP, and SAS. SAS a public company? Did Jim Goodnight sell? I didn't think so, and even if he did, the stock would certainly not get traded in Stockholm. I wonder whether this error was introduced automatically, by some text scanner looking for recognizable brand names, or whether the editor thought that the SAS (the software company!) airplanes are actually part of the SAS (the airline) fleet. Nah...

UK travel regulations

Flew to Edinburgh today and can confirm that travelling within the UK is not much fun at the moment. I fully understand and support security measures, after all, with my kinda airmiles accumulation, I want air travel to be safe. However, some of those rules imposed by the BAA, are bordering on ridiculous. I had three bags, a rollaboard, a computer bag, and a camera bag. Typically, I'd check the suitcase, and take the two (very small) carry-on bags on board. Today, the officials at Heathrow demanded that I take only one piece of hand luggage. My argument, that both of those bags combined were way smaller than the allowed size of hand luggage (they checked every piece whether it fit into the "size tester") didn't count. Only one piece was the rule. They suggested that I'd check in one of the bags. When I responded that I'll neither check my camera nor my computer, because they won't survive the typical baggage handler treatment, one guy suggested to put both into one bag and the airline would gladly provide a bag. I could have simply found some large plastic bag, stuff both luggage pieces in, and walk through. Instead, I pulled the camera from the bag, unmounted the lens, put both the body and the lens into the computer bag, stuffed the two remaining lenses into my pockets, folded the camera bag into the other, and voila, I had only one bag. Pockets full that my suit looked funny, yes, but only one bag. The guy couldn't say anything anymore, because there was no rule about not having exploding pockets. Went through the x-ray with my single bag, at the other end, put everything together, and there I was again with empty pockets, camera, computer, but two bags. And the reason for all of this? I don't know.

¡Ninguna calidad de los datos!

Just returned from two weeks of conferencing in Sao Paulo and Mexico City. It's been great to interact with folks that I typically don't see or talk to very much, bankers from Venezuela, local government CIOs from Monterrey, IT managers from Mexican car distributors, or Brazilian information architects from shipping companies.

Companies in Latin America and South America seem to suffer from pretty much the same issues as in the rest of the world, however there were a few interesing facts that surfaced in the 1on1 discussions:

• Very high interest in open-source
• Relatively small data volumes overall
  
• Next to no governance or stewardship concepts in information management
• High interest in data quality, but almost no deployments of tools
  
• High fragmentation of data marts, very few enterprise data warehouses

It's particularly interesting, that many technologies and the corresponsing vendors are pretty much unknown, e.g. data profiling, matching, federation, performance management seem to be an almost untapped market, indicating that the vendors have a huge opportunity here in a largely green-field continent. Maybe they should hire some folks able to talk spanish and portuguese...