The rumors of my death has been greatly exagerated. In fact, I don't even have writer's block. During the recent time, I have come to realize that what I had in mind to write about was not an option. In my efforts to adopt a different business practise for my company, it would mean that I revealed too much of our internal processes for it to be kosher.

Last week, I finally got started going to the gym again. I think it's been a year and a half since last and my good I needed that. My new gym membership came with an offer of recurring BIAs (Bioelectrical impedance analysis). In effect, a BIA tells you how your body mass is divided between water, fat and lean muscle mass. E.g. how fit you are.

While at Microsoft's V.I.P. launch (courtesy of Johan Lindfors with sessions by Jenny Nyberg) and in particular during the SQL Server 2008 session, I came to think of that there should be recurring measurements of an organisation's BIA as well. BIA in this case would be Business Intelligence Agility. I was a bit surprised that it was only the guys at Sybase that had caught up on this concept before me, apart from them viewing it as a base for enterprise modeling. to me, BIA would measure how easy it is to make an organization's data available for data mining and BI applications. Let's say that a company use a business system like Navision, and stora all data in native Navisaion storage, there will be plenty of data, but only available for transformations according to the Navision mining model. I am still not able to syndicate with other data and I can only use transformations available to Navision.

A system of high BIA will have acessible, well structured data that can be ported to a BI platform of choice. In other words, BIA would tell how fit your data is from a BI perspective. More specific parameters to follow...

Oh, and SQL Server 2008 compression is cool. Look into it - it will save storage, memory and increase speed.