February 2009

Let’s call the whole thing DI

February 26, 2009

You say dayta and I say dahta. You say business intelligence—and now Colin White and Claudia Imhoff say “decision intelligence.” They may want you to say it, too, depending on what you mean. Now or later—yesterday afternoon it didn’t sound clear just when—they’d like you to say “decision framework.” Perhaps that’s in addition to “decision [...]

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Coffee with “Tiberius”

February 26, 2009

I ran into one of my first and best TDWI friends this morning. Even after all this time, he cannot yet be named publicly and, perhaps because of that, is free with musings on the industry and other things. We’ve tentatively code-named him Tiberius, after a meeting room at Caesar’s Palace. This morning he’s thinking [...]

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Data intimacy

February 25, 2009

Long before Scott Davis made the self-service ETL tool he calls Lyza, he tried to find out how analysts really work. He remembers in particular the woman in a focus group who said, “I want to stay close to the data.” He didn’t understand at first. The data was right in front of her, neatly [...]

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Fooled by proximity?

February 18, 2009

Almost the same moment I read that for the fourth year in a row executives rate BI the top tech priority in 2009, I hear Tableau Software’s news: last week saw the most downloads of trial software ever. “Not by a little, by a lot,” says marketing and PR VP Elissa Fink. The poll of [...]

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Time for traditional BI vendors to “pass the baton”

February 17, 2009

The shouts from the back of the BI room seem to be getting louder. In various ways, they’re saying let Big BI die. Former TDWI education director Dave Wells, visual analytics critic Stephen Few, and Tableau Software CEO Christian Chabot are back there. Others, too. Last spring, Wells proposed a new, people-centric definition of business [...]

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AT&T is committed to my satisfaction

February 12, 2009

I’m moving my office, and AT&T keeps assuring me of their determination to provide satisfaction. Every time another link fails on their website, and every few minutes as I wait on hold to place the move order, I’m told again. Telecom Italia was also concerned once. Back in 2004 in a little town near Palermo, [...]

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Blame it on PR

February 9, 2009

Apparently a true story I just heard from a former boss: Back when he managed Comdex, the giant tech show, he shared a PR manager with a rival VP. That VP often felt short-changed by the PR manager. At the 2000 Comdex, a reporter got food poisoning at an off-site event and died the next [...]

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To hell with “guts,” Accenture’s survey gave a false choice

February 2, 2009

Forty percent of business executives trust their guts over data? I admit those survey results made me raise an eyebrow — but then I put it down again. False alarm. Forty percent may be significant, but compared with what? Is that worse than last year? For all we know — at least from the press [...]

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