A sweet solution for cherry picking
Don’t say “cherry picking” to people at information-intensive businesses like banks, airlines, and telecommunications companies. You can spoil their lunch if a big customer has just run off to a competitor. Mark Albala says he has a tool that will warn of such a move. He’s president of InfoSight Partners, and he’s about to offer [...]
Sustainability and BI: gone from drizzle to “storm”
Last fall’s Oracle OpenWorld had such a strong sustainability theme that I thought for sure I’d find products down in the exhibit hall. Not one. When I asked around, one guy even said sustainability management with BI tech “couldn’t be done.” (Read my TDWI story from back then.) Now we see Terri Rylander’s post — [...]
Migrating mindsets is the real challenge in ETL
I was intrigued by Donald Farmer’s recent tweet about ETL: “Migrating technologies is just work. Migrating people and mindsets is the real challenge.” I asked him to elaborate. Donald is principal program manager of SQL Server Analysis Services at Microsoft. He sees “numerous” examples of migrating users who reject perfectly good methods in favor of [...]
Spam barely pays, says spamalytics
With all that email that piles in for vi*gra and unlucky Nigerian princes, we assume that someone, somewhere, makes tons of money on it all. But some stealthy University of California researchers at Berkeley and San Diego concluded that spammers may be easier to thwart than we thought.
Visual analysis is pragmatic, not just “pretty”
So many of us who feel drawn to visual analysis can’t understand why everyone can’t see the value. “Pretty pictures,” the skeptics mutter. On Eager Eyes, Robert Kosara makes important points that I haven’t seen before. Toward the end of his post he writes, “We need a new term.” He rejects the aged and indefinite [...]
BI buying decisions: the rule of thumb
A longtime salesperson of BI products says the average decision to buy relies on these factors: • About 50 percent of the decision — whether to buy any BI at all or which product to buy — is based on expected ROI. This part always comes first. • About 20 percent is about career. Someone [...]
Data analysts and journalists
“Heroic analysts” and journalists keep running into each other, at least in my mind. I realized that two scribbles from last Sunday about journalism can also be about data analysis: • “… the most precious gems gathered in any journalistic journey are frequently those found around the edges of a story.” • ” … the [...]
InfoWorld goes “moo!” over Jaspersoft
What’s “Bossie”? It’s InfoWorld’s acronym for “Best of Open Source Software” — a prize it granted Jaspersoft last week. But “Bossie” is also a cow’s name, and that’s a clue to what’s going on here. InfoWorld added letters — “ie” to make “Bossie” — so I retraced by eliminating them. On a hunch, I first [...]
