April 2008

99 and 44/100ths pure data

April 25, 2008

TDWI’s just-departed education director Dave Wells wants the BI industry to put better focus on seeing trends in data and not so much on cleaning the data.

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A story here, a story there about “franken-measures”

April 12, 2008

I’ve almost got too much good stuff for my story in BI This Week about offbeat metrics. Stacey Barr, “the performance measure specialist” in Australia and Zach Gemignani at Juice Analytics in North Carolina both came through with insight-provoking cases. Zach calls metrics for those hard-to-reach places where bookkeepers don’t go “franken-measures.” Stacey calls them [...]

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Breaking the snooze

April 10, 2008

A friend who’s deep in the financial applications world goes into a lot of sales presentations intending to buy something. But he complains to his wife later, “About 30 seconds into it, I just about couldn’t keep my eyes open.” Once in a while, though, some salesperson tells a story. Then it sticks. Then he [...]

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Good metric-making aims for the concrete and sensory

April 9, 2008

If you want to come up with effective metrics, forget brainstorming. Drop the creativity. Done well, it’s an analytical exercise, says Stacey Barr, aimed at deriving concrete, sensory effects to measure.

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BI for the lone wolf

April 7, 2008

Who says one-person operations can’t use business intelligence? I don’t want MicroStrategy to outfit my tiny office, now near San Francisco, with its latest and greatest. No, but I do want a company like Intuit, ever more interested in the one-person market, to understand that money isn’t the only data individuals should track.

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