Escaping the ghosts of BI marketing past
How sweet is is to escape, if only momentarily, from BI marketing that seems intended for techies. Just across San Francisco Bay from me, Birst made its point and made me laugh with a holiday-season three-panel comic strip.
Marketing director Barbara Lewis emails me that the artwork’s by illustrator Kevin Pope, and the idea came from [...]
Predicting BI trends and saying you’re sorry
We forget most failed predictions quickly. If you make a bad one, you just say “let’s move on,” and you’re as good as moved on. But sometimes you meet the kind of guy I say hello to near my office—the kind professional forecasters hope they never meet.
Mashed data visualization for holiday analysts
Among the visarazzi— data visualization’s foot soldiers, scientists and evangelists—”chart junk” is a no-no. If you make a bar chart about trees, for example, don’t for god sakes actually show drawings of trees. That would be silly.
However, the visarazzi probably don’t mean to prohibit chart junk food.
Not just one tool alone anymore
This time of year it’s tempting to sit under a tree and wait for the apple to drop. Aha, a trend! But it’s better to go asking smart people what they think, and Dave Wells—former TDWI education director and now a consultant—is one of the smartest I know.
He says the one-tool-fits-all scenario is going to [...]
How bad BI could dampen innovation
We all know BI’s ostensible price tag: the software, the hardware and the peopleware. But a new essay by Paul Graham, author of Hackers and Painters, programmer and venture capitalist, suggests that poorly managed BI might have yet another cost: the cost of thwarting creativity and zeal.
In business, we try to control what we must. [...]
