January 2010

Marco looks to BI for help

January 29, 2010

My friend Marco’s spam-bait operation was down last year, and he’s been asking me what business intelligence can do for him. He had just read one of TDWI’s promo emails last night when he called me again. “I like Vegas. Should I go?” he asked from somewhere that sounded far away. I said it all [...]

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Bring in the shrinks for decision analysis

January 19, 2010

Now comes the hard part in business intelligence: figuring out how the humans can make better use of all our data and tools for decision making, writes Wayne Eckerson, director of TDWI Research. Let’s bring in the shrinks. When Wayne points to a trend, it’s news even if others might have already foreseen it. He’s [...]

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“Streetlights and Shadows”

January 15, 2010

Some of the books Stephen Few reviews may at first glance to have little to do with data analysis. On second glance, though, they have everything to do with it. He often goes into the essence of thinking, insight, and decision making — core knowledge for BI practitioners. See his latest, posted yesterday afternoon, on [...]

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Mapping the many faces of “retention”

January 15, 2010

Everybody knows what “retention” means until they have to design a metric. Ken Rudin, once of LucidEra and now general manager of analytics at the games site Zynga, thought that he and his team could “put something together” quickly — but it actually took “four solid weeks of discussion and debate.” About 50 million people [...]

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Rolling heads can’t think

January 12, 2010

Wolf Blitzer calls for heads to roll after the Christmas Day attack. But Jill Dychè is a data pro, and she’d rather let the heads think. “Who should get fired?” is the same conversation as after screwups in corporations, writes Dychè, principal at Baseline Consulting. Instead, the government should be addressing process issues. Indeed, the [...]

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Culture failure!

January 7, 2010

See Oscar Berg’s post “Did You Ever Hear anyone Shout ‘Culture Failure’?” on his weblog, The Content Economy. A culture failure is much more alarming and also much more uncomfortable than a simple process or technology failure. It signals that something is fundamentally wrong, something which is very complex and hard to change. It means [...]

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Hoping for Citizen 2.0

January 6, 2010

I like the sound of Government 2.0: Collaborate with citizens online and you can change government from a sewer-dwelling raccoon into a purring housecat. Social media lets us try for a kind of politics that was impossible until now. I hope for great results. For many, Government 2.0, or “collaborative government,” will mean just “friending” [...]

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“Efficiency” can cost too much

January 6, 2010

See Henrik Mårtensson’s “The Cost of Queues” on how an extreme focus on “cost effectiveness” can damage an organization. (Thanks to Jack Vinson for the referral on his blog “Knowledge Jolt with Jack.”) If you try to become more cost effective by reducing capacity, and thereby capacity cost, all will be well at first, from [...]

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