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I started getting phone calls from a certain BI bigshot’s public relations firm after I mentioned his firm in a story. The woman who called every few weeks seemed too sweet for the job, but some days any friendly voice gets in. I always talked to her but always held her off.

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If bureaucrats were to shut down their websites and simply fed data to whoever wanted to comb it out, as one group will soon propose, would we have failed at Government 2.0?

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A new day for data

Almost no one has mentioned Government 2.0 in the same breath as business intelligence—yet they’re destined for each other.

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I was thinking about Government 2.0 at about midnight last night—when the dark, quiet world gives way to ghosts. Then it’s easy to imagine BI tools and methods opening government to the masses.

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My friend Marco called me up scared of what Internet visionary Don Tapscott had said on Tuesday’s Talk of the Nation. Tapscott foresees a day when technology makes government—such as spending—directly accessible to the masses.

“Do you realize,” Marco said, “that all this Government 2.0 stuff, where just anyone could see where the money’s going and stuff like that, could make business really difficult for me?”

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BI haiku

“Eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables.” That’s Michael Pollan’s haiku-like dictum for eating. Let’s have some faux haiku, or senryū, to describe business intelligence, defined broadly. That could take lifetimes to ponder, or at least a couple of fiscal quarters.

First, we must bow to the ancestors. The eldest and most revered is Charlie Varon, who with unknown accomplices enriched the world with haiku error messages. A more recent ancestor is Juice Analytics. Compared with them, we are but pale shadows.

So far, here’s what I have:

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So many ezines, so many pitches, so much color, so much urgency, so much of so much. And then along comes—let me check the name—yes, Gordon Daly with a little ezine that’s nothing but a short letter (look it up: letter!) and I actually read it.

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Rules of Thumb is a fine website for those of use who enjoy proxy metrics, the things you use to judge when you can’t judge the real thing.

Picking a restaurant is an obsession on the site. One rule of its many rules is attributed to CBS’s Andy Rooney, who suggests you avoid cute names because owners aren’t serious about food. Other users believe that newspaper reviews in the window signal a restaurant that’s neither too bad nor too snooty. Still others believe a “high class” joint is good. The smartest one, though, says you should look first at the restroom.

There is a better way. My ex-wife managed restuarants for 22 years and knows the game. Put her anywhere in the world and the odds are 10 to 1 she’ll pick a good restaurant.

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At 8 o’clock Monday morning, a few hundred attendees at TDWI conference in Chicago will hear the organization’s former education director Dave Wells give his keynote, “People First: Creating a Business Intelligence Culture.” He’ll say something startling: there’s much more to BI than data.

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I’ve been asking known BI mavens what they make of thoughts by TDWI’s recently departed education director, Dave Wells. I summarized our Q&A a few days ago here

Among those who’ve responded, the consensus is that, as one person put it, “he’s got something there.” They’ll all be watching for it all to develop.

The BI This Week story is here.

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