Pissing from the mountaintop at Oracle OpenWorld
Wouldn’t you know it. Follow BI around long enough and you come across family—if only the kind of family you see at funerals and weddings. Oracle finally brought us together again with its sustainability theme at last week’s OpenWorld. The Sierra Club and I used to be close. My mother led San Francisco Bay Chapter [...]
Heard at TDWI: “The soft stuff is the important stuff”
In the 32 days since the end of TDWI’s San Diego conference, one phrase has come to my mind repeatedly: “The soft stuff is always the important stuff,” uttered by Wayne Eckerson, director of TDWI Research. He was summing up a panel discussion, but the insight applies so broadly he could have used it for [...]
Is BI boring yet?
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations author Clay Shirky says that a technology’s social effects—substitute “business” effects if you want — usually occur just when a technology has become boring. For example, email. It used to be something we talked about: “Do you have email?” “You mean the Internets?” And so on. [...]
The trouble with IT marketing
Why does so much IT marketing put features out in front instead of benefits?
SAS finance architect is out to overhaul credit-scoring metrics
Some loan officers used to go by rules of thumb. There were “The Three B’s: never lend to beauticians, bartenders or barbers” and “The Three P’s: never lend to preachers, plumbers or prostitutes.” Now we have an automated system, but it can’t tell an upstanding banker from a down-on-his-luck bartender. Imagine a high-level banker who [...]
A word from the marketing-crimes division
This public service announcement opens on a CSI-like scene. Let’s call it “CSI: Marketing Crimes Division.” The lieutenant asks the lab guy, “What have you got?” “It’s a tough one,” says the lab guy. Lying before them under bright lights on a stainless steel examination table is the weapon: an email printed on plain white [...]
Agile BI for a chilled economy
It’s called “agile BI,” and it goes like this: forget the big meetings, forget the planning, forget the budgeting. Just get someone from IT and someone from business together and make a prototype in a week. Dave Wells, an independent consultant after five and a half years as TDWI education director, reports that clients are [...]
