I haven’t had much time to write lately – too busy writing Vensim code, working on En-ROADS, and modeling the STEM workforce.
So, in the meantime, here’s a nice tutorial on the use of ODBC database links with Vensim DSS, from Mohammad Jalali:
This can be a powerful way to ingest a lot of data from diverse sources, and to share and archive simulations.
Big data is always a double-edged sword in consulting projects. Without it, you don’t know much. But with it, your time is consumed with discovering all the flaws of the data, which remain because most likely no one else ever looked at it seriously from a strategic/dynamic perspective before. It’s typically transactionally correct, because people verify that they get their orders and paychecks. But at an aggregate level it’s often rife with categorization mismatches across organizational boundaries and other pathologies.