Journalism from Hell

Don't get me wrong: I do like journalists and enjoy talking to them. In fact, sometimes I get fresh new ideas when getting interviewed by a member of the press. OK, every once in a while, I get quoted wrongly or out of context, and it ticks me off, but I can't complain. Most press folks I deal with are very professional and they know the drill.

However, I sometimes can't help it but wonder what I'm reading. As an analyst, it comes with the job to read a lot (daily newspapers, trade press, online articles, etc.) and some members of the press are writing things that are so unbelievably wrong or blatantly obvious or just silly. And because there are often references to an individual analyst or an analyst firm, I'm curious to understand whether the quote is actually coherent with the analyst's thinking, a simple misunderstanding, or the journalist's own product. A few examples here (some of them transcribed from German) that caught my attention and were kept on my desk...

• According to a study by XYZ Consulting, organizations that extend their SAP system with own developments that are only little used later on, are wasting money.
  
  Well, duh. If the analysts came up with that kind of logic, congratulations! If this is coming from the journalist, I would have expected a little more substance, too.
  
  
• Do not forget: The data warehouse has been and continues to be the place with the best data quality.
  
  Actually, that's not true. Ideally, we would hope that a data warehouse contains good (meaning consistent, accurate, complete, up-to-date, non-duplicate, etc) data, because that's where the decision support tools (reporting, query, analysis, scorecarding, data mining, etc) get their information from. Fact of the matter is, however, that most data warehouses contain tons of garbage, because they are not maintained well.
  
  
• To deploy a service-oriented architecture, organizations must have a data integration platform in any case.
  
  Whoa. There are certainly benefits of a data integration platform in a lot of contexts, but it's surely not a "must have" requirement for SOA.
  
  
• Java and Dotnet displace SQL
  
  Yeah, right. What is this guy smoking?
  
  
• Q: What do you recommend to organizations that plan to consolidate the data warehouse environment? A: They should look at tools for data migration.
  
  Oh boy. That's a little myopic, as companies typically don't simply move data from one warehouse to another. If anything, the modeling, transformation, loading are aspects that need to be changed. Plus, all the BI tools that sit on top of the data warehouse need to be considered.
  

Maybe these are all cases where the journalist didn't get a signoff from the analyst before publishing, because those questionable quotes may have been found. Or worse, this is what people believe and I hope that readers in those user organizations are a little sceptical sometimes.