creative analysis

Magic number

July 22, 2009

Establishing trust is the key for one analyst I talked today at the Tableau conference. Two years ago his career took him to a small, private university where he had to win over a few well-established administrators. They were to provide him data and be his clients. The key to trust for them was what [...]

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Two analysts’ paths

July 21, 2009

Yesterday I asked business analysts at the Tableau conference in Seattle about their work. Here are two quick sketches. • One of the two arrived at her present employer six years ago to do the company’s first analysis of its website sales. She used several years of accumulated data to show which content was making [...]

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Just give me the data

July 16, 2009

Recent email to me from a passionate practioner of creative analysis tells how traditional BI is bad for genuine data analysis. As I see it, traditional BI processes are still designed to start with the answers, not the questions: “Oh, we can’t give you access to the raw data. Your tools (old thinking) probably are [...]

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A long look at Stephen Few’s “Now You See It”

July 15, 2009

Stephen Few gave a snappy name to his new book, Now You See It, and a cover that signals a gem — all black with a slice of sunset that highlights the “see.” The question, though, is who the “you” is.

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Robert McNamara: good analytics, bad judgment

July 9, 2009

Tom Davenport on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and how he failed despite good analytics. McNamara was a hedgehog rather than a fox, an engineer rather than an ecologist. The hedgehog knows one big thing, and for McNamara that was rational systems analysis. If he’d been a fox, he’d have brought additional perspectives to [...]

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Veg-O-Matic analysis?

July 9, 2009

Does “slice and dice” connote canned, pre-defined reports? An industry leader I talked to the other day used the term to describe data analysis based on aggregated data. Come to think of it, I don’t recall ever hearing those who like to receive their data raw ever using the term.

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CIA’s insights on the psychology of analysis

July 7, 2009

Imagine someone writing a book about data analysis without even mentioning software. “To penetrate the heart and soul of the problem of improving analysis,” writes Richard J. Heuer Jr. in Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, “it is necessary to better understand, influence, and guide the mental processes of analysts themselves.” It’s the mind that does the [...]

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Lyza and Tableau according to Mako

June 30, 2009

Back in February when I heard about Lyza, I thought right away of Tableau. Despite each one’s different strengths in data discovery and analysis, each appeals to the same broad group. It’s an old group that’s getting new attention: creative analysts, or “cowboy analysts” to some. The like their data raw, not aggregated. They ask [...]

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