A Revolution That Was Hunted Down, Maybe

Between the people who are literate in information technology, there has been considerable discussion on the Iranian election and the government's effort to prevent uprisings from leading to a revolution. There are plenty of political reasons why revolutions succeed or fail. Charles Krauthammer has written a good analysis on the Iranian situation, and I don't have anything to add to it. The actual thing that jumped on my face was that a modern intelligence infrastructure for monitoring civilian communications was set up as late as in 2008.

Presumably it is a high quality system. But the real question is whether it or any of its competitors are good enough for preventing a revolution from happening anywhere in the connected world, ever.

Database technology and especially data warehousing are the essential instruments of storing data for intelligence purposes. Analytical tools are built on top of data warehouses, and the results they provide can be very helpful in tracking people's activities, at least if you have an otherwise competent intelligence organization. Add real-time data warehousing to the mix and you get near instant, yet integrated analysis. To hunt down and punish, or to help in catastrophes, whatever.

So, you might expect that many well-known database industry experts would be closely commenting the Iranian election aftermath. But so far it has been only Curt Monash who has made a stand. Kudos for him.

But anyway you put it, this is only the beginning. Analytical databases and information retrieval tools are commodities now, it is planning and implementation that takes most of the resources. And once you get the first version in place, new demands surface almost immediately. The "father of data warehousing", Bill Inmon, has explained this process nicely:

DSS (Decision Support System) analyst operates in a mode of discovery. Only on seeing a report or seeing a screen can the DSS analyst begin to explore the possibilities for DSS. The DSS analyst often says, “Ah! Now that I see what the possibilities are, I can tell you what I really want to see. But until I know what the

possibilities are I cannot describe to you what I want.”

(Building The Data Warehouse, p.19)

-mika-