Metrics your mother warned you about
I could easily find a parking place in Berkeley on Saturday! What could it mean? On a normal afternoon in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto, I usually find just one space open, and often I have to drive around the block once…. Ah, it’s the end of Easter week and a bunch of the university people have [...]
A proto-dashboard that worked
Back in 1971 Chile’s newly elected socialists dreamed of what today we’d call a dashboard, and it was to run the country. They actually did build it, and just 15 months after conception it was good enough to thwart a nationwide strike.
Sierra Club’s global cooling
The Sierra Club, once a leader in bottom-up organization, is about to flip over and assume a top-down orientation–in fact, one much like the big corporations it usually opposes.
When economists say “slowdown”
If there’s one reliable sign that a recession is coming, it’s when the experts say they see none coming. I’ve survived four. “Oh, maybe a slowdown, yes…” they say. Now, in today’s New York Times, Charles Duhigg argues that what’s unlikely is a “full blown depression.” Quoth Duhigg:
Why? Because so many of them have spent [...]
The systems perspective on the Spitzer scandal
Why did New York governor Eliot Spitzer ever pay more than $100 for a call girl? That’s what scientists at a state-funded research lab freaked out about when the news broke yesterday. To them the scandal was that the rest of the money could have gone to science.
Risky projects need the “electricity” of heterarchies
The business people didn’t show up to the meeting. They’d been invited to come and talk with IT about the new BI project and in the same stroke help launch it.
This is one of the first stories I ever heard about BI. Though daddy of data modelers Steve Hoberman didn’t say what happened next, I can imagine: all the usual suspects in business were soon rounded up for a later attempt.
The usual suspects are almost always the ones with positional power, the ones with staffs and budgets. But an article in the current strategy+business magazine says that sometimes—such as when creating a politically risky new system—what matters most is trust. Yes, an old story, but for once there’s a prescription.
The blessing
The story from Dave Wells, former TDWI education director, is that Seattle University’s big cheeses—all Jesuits—met to talk about the university’s new BI project. Dave said the provost had been listening throughout, and at the end endorsed the project. “I appreciate that we all pray,” said the provost. “But at times we might need help [...]
It could be porn
What’s a spam filter to do? Netezza just wanted to tell the world about Helzberg Diamonds choosing the Netezza Performance Server appliance. Netezza’s writer must have put diamonds together with enterprise data warehouse. Voilà, “rock hard” EDW, and the email blast lifts off! Instant spam.
See the press release.
Pay no attention to that little product behind the jargon
A trade pub dear to my heart praised the healthy “buzz” at February’s TDWI conference. Yeah, but some of it sounded an ungrounded circuit.
So much jargon, so little meaning. Kevin Brown of Tableau Software and I were talking about it. He said, “Marketing should be simple.” For example, “if you don’t give the price out [...]
