September 2008

Pissing from the mountaintop at Oracle OpenWorld

September 29, 2008

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Heard at TDWI: “The soft stuff is the important stuff”

September 25, 2008

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Is BI boring yet?

September 24, 2008

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. [...]

Read the full article →

The trouble with IT marketing

September 23, 2008

Why does so much IT marketing put features out in front instead of benefits?

Read the full article →

SAS finance architect is out to overhaul credit-scoring metrics

September 15, 2008

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 [...]

Read the full article →

A word from the marketing-crimes division

September 8, 2008

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Agile BI for a chilled economy

September 3, 2008

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 [...]

Read the full article →