Core Philosophy

Every professional has a core philosophy that they believe in and one they like to see practiced.  These are mine:

Data is not Business Intelligence

Abundance of data has made turning data into business intelligence a big challenge.  This is not counter-intuitive: the abundance also means a lot of data is unreliable (uncalibrated or faulty sensors), irrelevant, or disconnected from each other (example: truck health monitoring data not talking to personnel databases). The expertize needed to wade through the terrabytes of data is typically absent at a mine site.

Recognize Good Data

Identifying "good" data is half-way to business intelligence.  Sometimes, this requires advanced computational tools, while sometimes it is plain grunt work, requiring someone to conduct data checks.  Whatever it is, this is an essential step.

Transform Good Data to Business Intelligence

This need not be as complicated as it sounds.  It can be as simple as basic statistics to something as complicated as artificial intelligence to determine the relative importance of different data streams in a process.  Along these lines, see my interview in the July 2008 Issue (page 16) of Mining.Com magazine.