July 2007

Facing up to the dashboard metaphor

July 27, 2007

After about three quarters of an oatmeal stout, my old friend Sam the BI developer wondered aloud, “What is the ideal dashboard?” There was no need to call Steve Few or Edward Tufte. I had the answer right away. (I had been sipping an oatmeal stout myself.)

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“Poets are the original systems thinkers”

July 26, 2007

Here’s a morsel with possibly no practical value at all. It’s from last Sunday’s New York Times on what CEOs read: “I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers,” says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports … [...]

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More BI writers need “Made to Stick”

July 24, 2007

I comb through a lot of business intelligence-related press releases and articles, so I was surprised to hear that the new book Made to Stick is popular among PR people. In fact, the fact that the book is more popular among PR people than any other profession is co-author Chip Heath’s main disappointment. Last Wednesday [...]

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That old clunky thing

July 12, 2007

A friend of Datadoodle recalls this story: He stood before a room full of IT people who worked on mainframes and asked them, “‘How many of you feel responsibility for the quality of the data?’” Not one raised a hand. He said to them, “OK, now you’re the CIO and I’m a salesman. And I [...]

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BI consolidation first hand

July 1, 2007

Al Cherdak, an independent developer of enterprise software, has been seeing BI consolidation first hand. It’s killing innovation, and the Big Guys will save themselves by fixing it, he says.

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