Minding data’s pedigree
Does it seem to you like data analysis is busting out all over the place? It might become another fun game like chess or Chutes and Ladders — so this might be good time to recall an old admonition: Don’t just consume data, mind its pedigree. Repeating the warning, though, makes you look like a [...]
A reason for BI failure: knowledge requires a knower
What can explain business intelligence’s poor adoption rate? Are tools not easy to use? Or is there a deeper reason? A book from 2000, The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, suggests that BI designers have neglected basic human needs. Jack Vinson, of Knowledge Jolt with Jack fame, has just [...]
A “Bart” just wants protection from the “Marges” and “Homers”
One of the pleas in Mark Madsen’s fascinating keynote at the TDWI conference in Las Vegas was to let the “Barts” work. The Barts are, of course, the Bart Simpsons among us, the sometimes nerdy rebels who actually come up with interesting analyses and other useful things. When the lights went up, a “Bart” was [...]
Culture failure!
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 [...]
Hoping for Citizen 2.0
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” [...]
Be a strategist, not a “geek”
Data analysts who simply explain the data and ignore managers’ real needs risk losing “strategist” status &mdash: and become just a “geek.”
Why tools take root, or not
The people in an audience who ask what seems like a rude question are often the ones worth listening to. Take, for example, one guy I heard recently. He talked about his old movie camera — which was relevant to the subject, cinema — but his question had parallels with a perennial issue in BI. [...]
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 [...]
Analyst: creative or canned?
I picked up the term “creative analyst” in late June on the phone with Lyzasoft CEO Scott Davis. But what does he mean? He described one analyst he’s known of. This guy arrived at a new job with strong recommendations for his ability to tear apart a dataset. He could slice, dice, build related charts [...]
Analysts run on “maker’s schedule”
Most of those versatile researchers of the data-driven world — the business analysts, creative analysts, or even cowboy analysts — probably run on a different schedule from their managers. Paul Graham’s latest essay compares “manager’s schedule” and “maker’s schedule.” I’m no analyst, just a writer. But the more analysts I meet, the more I find [...]
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