Early in my career I was mentored by Jim Bydolek, a passionate graduate of the Public Management Science program at Case Western Reserve University.

“The right information at the right time can accomplish anything” was his professional mantra. Since then I've added one point, please see below.

Jim and I were building the nation's only statewide apartment house and hotel inspection system, in New Jersey, and we did accomplish what was said by insiders to be impossible. We got more cases into court. Living conditions in New Jersey's cities began to improve. When anyone asked what we were doing, Jim used to say we were "reorganizing the State of New Jersey".

Not long afterwards I was responsible for catching criminals in the Medicaid system through technical support of a massive federal system that processed millions of health care claims per quarter looking for patterns of fraud and abuse. The data center delivered 28 boxes of reports to our conference room at the first run. In the stunned silence Tom Leidy, my colleague said, “Access is a function of form”. The irony was heavy. So I put the output on microfiche and suddenly people started using it. To catch criminals. Soon we had it in an on line database and the users took off writing scripts and generating their own reports.

Printouts. Microfiche. Queries. Internet. Access is a function of form. I've never forgotten it. Thanks, Tom.

Later, in one of the fastest growing computer companies in New Jersey I discovered business modeling in spreadsheets. We were able to manipulate margins to lose money on selling a PC but make it up on peripherals with the aggregation still a competitive good deal for the customer.

But it also wasn't long until we were spreadsheet modeling sales person compensation plans that were so complicated we didn't understand them. Opaque spreadsheet models are still not uncommon in business today.

The problem with these poorly understood models was that they worked. Even though the designers didn't fully understand their ramifications, sales persons figured out enough to make lots of money by pursuing some unintended consequences in the plans. I discovered the destructive power of modeling. The models predicted the future incorrectly. It was an epiphany for me that Decision Systems lead to decisions; they are not abstract concatenations of data. I got respect for complexity.

The phone rang one day and a voice said there was a startup computer company in California with a new type of database. I was then on my own as the best R:Base programmer in New Jersey but who has ever heard of R:Base?, and I interviewed, thinking "great, another California database company nobody's ever heard of". The company turned out to be a 19 person startup called Arbor Software, and their then unknown database product was called "Essbase" (which stands by the way for “Extended Spreadsheet Server Data Base” - a little known factoid to impress your OLAP friends.)

Essbase was then a spreadsheet on steroids, we said. Arbor invented modern OLAP and made history, and I was in the thick of it as as the 3rd or 4th field tech hired into a firm that grew to about 500 people and had what was at that time the fifth highest IPO in the history of capitalism behind Netscape. It was a heady time.

The “right information at the right time in the right form” (then the spreadsheet driven by an OLAP database) was changing everything for analysis and planning in business world wide in the 90's. Essbase became like the Xerox machine or the Fax machine. Once your competitors had one, you had to have it too.

Three guiding principles of my early career therefore came together in Essbase.

1. The right information, meaning a single version of the truth in the centralized multidimensional database, and
2. the right form, then spreadsheets,
3. at the right time (instantaneously).

Accomplishes anything.

Oh, as long as it makes money and is legal -- most illegal things being, eventually, un-accomplished. Think Enron.

Multidimensional modeling became at Arbor a tool of almost limitless analytic power. Arbor merged with Hyperion Software to be come Hyperion Solutions, which has since been purchased by Oracle.

I spent a decade at Arbor-Hyperion doing POC's, building models, mentoring partners, working with developers, teaching classes, and like all the rest of us, getting a kick out of it. Along the way I was recruited to join IBM, who had decided to OEM Essbase and call it DB2 OLAP Server. For another 9 years there I was a member of IBM's world wide Business Intelligence sales team, training and mentoring technical specialists around the globe to sell and support Essbase, teaching multidimensional thinking to resolute relational IBM experts and, as always, to customers. We did very well.

Now I am on my own again with a new personal vision, expressed on this web site, and still based on the few principles I have learned. It's time for Unified Business Intelligence, now an enterprise wide instance of "the right information at the right time, in the right form". And it is possible.