October 2008

“Going through the roof” at Corda

October 31, 2008

Evidence came in yesterday afternoon that, so far, BI is doing well in the new economy. Greg Turman, director of sales for the Western Region at Corda, phoned to say, “I’m going through the roof,” by which he means sales are good. “I’m seeing tremendous startup activity. People are saying, ‘I can no longer guess. [...]

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Scary stories of information management today on DM Radio

October 30, 2008

DM Radio editor Eric Kavanagh puts on a scary mask for a special Halloween show this afternoon: “Scary Stories of Information Management.” Scaring you will be quite a trick after a year of cadaveric prose in BI articles and blogs. But there’s probably more where that came from. He wants your stories of fright and [...]

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Why they resist open source

October 30, 2008

In defense of the lively, Mark Madsen observes the nature of resistance to open source BI tools. An excerpt: Overcoming someone’s resistance to open source in your organization means that you probably need to educate them, given that they use open source every day without thinking about it. It’s in everything from cars to cell [...]

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Craving value: sparks for a new economic engine

October 30, 2008

It’s hard to see through the smoke as our financial house burns down, I know. But what I’ve noticed is more interesting: the first signs of rebuilding. This month, three experts I read—visual analytics expert Stephen Few, Competing on Analytics author Tom Davenport and digital-media economy specialist Umair Haque—all seem to have knit recent blog [...]

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Off the charts: “black swan” ahead?

October 27, 2008

“Black swans” are the anti-gravity of predictive analytics. These events are so far off the charts that we dismiss the possibility out of hand. But when one occurs, it’s a doozy. The Panic of ’08 may lead us straight into one of these, says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Fooled by [...]

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Recession’s benefits for BI

October 23, 2008

A recession would benefit business intelligence, say two industry experts I talked to last week.

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Did someone say “panic”? Not in BI

October 16, 2008

Last January, I surveyed BI consultants to see what the season’s recession was doing to BI. Things were going fine, most reported. This week I’m following up with them on the Panic of ’08.

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Dings to talk about when offshoring data

October 9, 2008

Restless minds will want to know what Asian manufacture of furniture, clothes, electronics and other goods has to do with business intelligence. A globe-trotting industrial engineer who’d rather not be named has been telling me about different perceptions of quality among nationalities. He works on contract to American companies to ensure that product quality lives [...]

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Stories that tell the bigger story

October 6, 2008

In a good example of “show, don’t tell,” Tableau Software’s weblog demonstrates the power of its product with a story: how rich, middle-income and poor voters compare in liberal, conservative and battleground states. The political story is awkward to tell in words, but it’s easy in pictures. Pictures that tell stories is what Tableau’s all [...]

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Companies look to BI to reduce energy cost

October 3, 2008

Companies are looking to BI tools for help with rising energy costs, says Dan Esty, co-author of Green into Gold and the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University.

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