27 Apr 2023
By Allen
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Digital Re-Branding Guide for Churches

Digital Re-Branding Guide for Churches

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With many churches across the country currently re-aligning denominations, this guide will help you in renaming and digitally rebranding your church. When you start this project, you will find the sprawl of digital content across not only your church website but also across the interwebs. I'll use the word church, but this guide will be useful to nonprofits as well. Let's get started. Table of Contents: Name and LogoNew Denomination BrandingChurch WebsiteFinding Social Media AccountsFacebookOther Social MediaGoogle Business EntryPhysical PropertySummary Name and Logo Before starting work across the interweb, be sure your church board had firmly decided on a name,…
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11 Oct 2019
By Allen
Rowing as Teamwork in Action

Rowing as Teamwork in Action

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I just completed 12 weeks of rowing with the OU Corporate team 'Row U' which culminated in a 2 minute, 500 meter race. While I did learn a lot about rowing my first crew season, I learned even more about teamwork. The twelve weeks were spent teaching the basics of rowing. For me as a landlubber, that meant starting with terminology like what is 'port' and 'starboard', 'bow' and 'stern', and seating order in the boat. Rowing is more than just arms rowing a boat.   Our coach, Carolyn, helped us each learn and work on our personal rowing technique.   She…
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24 Sep 2015
By Allen
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Psychographics for Small Business

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Every business has data. How are you going to use it? Today we talk about analyzing customer data based on location and psychographics. Location or geospatial data is becoming easier to analyze using free tools such as Google Fusion Tables. Psychographics sounds complicated, but it just means going beyond demographics like age and gender to more lifestyle and behavior based analysis. Psychographic data is available from vendors like ESRI. First, you have to have some data to analyze. Today's businesses realize that data is an asset just like a building, equipment or inventory. It requires some investment of time to…
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11 Jun 2015
By Allen
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Got Agile?

Got Agile?

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I recently had the privilege of working with a great team which had an Agile Coach and a Certified Scrum Master from SolutionsIQ. Doing Business Intelligence (BI) projects with Agile takes a complete change of attitude and habits for those of us like me who spent the last decade doing waterfall based data warehousing and BI. Here are a few things I learned from a recent project: 1. You can always learn more. The SolutionsIQ team provided great training to our developers, product owners and stakeholders. Some were receptive while others fought it all the way. Their team provided additional…
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19 Dec 2014
By Allen
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Appreciation Dinner at Vast

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We had a wonderful evening with clients and advisory board members at Vast this evening. Thank you to all who made this a great year. Thank you to Denise for putting together the dinner. High resolution copies of tonight can be picked up on the Facebook photo gallery. Post by Cognitive Information.
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26 Nov 2014
By Allen
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Book: Hadoop, The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly)

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This book gave me the tools I needed to get started with Hadoop.  The author uses easy to understand language to describe a very compicated set of tools.   The example code is easy to download and get started right away. I was working 3 IT projects, fixing stuff at home, starting a new job, trying to stay fit and thought I needed something to do in my spare time so I'll learn Hadoop. This book came to our OKC SQL User Group as part of O'Reilly's user group outreach, but it deserves a review so I read it. I read…
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21 Nov 2014
By Allen
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My Board Experience at The Alternative Board (TAB)

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About two years ago I was invited to visit a Business Owner Advisory board, hosted by Art Miller at The Alternative Board (TAB). These meetings are where owners who don't have a full board agree to meet monthly for half a day with each member bringing one business problem or goal to discuss with the group.  Everything shared in the group good or bad remains confidential, like Vegas in a good way. The members are not in competition with each other and the goal is not referrals like some other groups. The goal is to learn from the commonalities between…
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20 Oct 2014
By Allen
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My Intro to SQLFamily

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By trade, I'm a Cognos BI developer that jumped the fence to MS SQL BI a few years ago. My first encounter with SQLfamily was at SQL Saturday #63, April 2, 2011 in Dallas, Texas. First SQL Saturdays and SQL Rally I came to a SQL Saturay #63 pre-con to learn more about the BI stack.  There, I met Sri and learned about the North Texas User Group.  I didn't know anyone in town or in SQL, so after the pre-con Sri Sridharan and the NTSUG people welcomed me into their group, invited me to dinner, invited me to volunteer…
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14 Aug 2014
By Allen
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Review – Pragmatic Works Task Factory

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I've been using Pragmatic Works Task Factory to prototype a Business Solution (BI) for a new client and want take a minute to list my likes and dislikes. First, I'm no expert as I've only used it a month but their video tutorials have helped get started. Some of the individual components, such as Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) component, have older versions available as freeware through Codeplex. The benefit of using Pragmatic Works is having supported compenent versions to keep up with your SQL version. Time vs. Money So as a BI consultant, I have to look at tools from…
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