culture

Top three ways BI buyers choose badly

July 11, 2011

A veteran sales person at a major vendor of business intelligence products lists the top three reasons for buying decisions. The reasons are contrary to most people’s view of themselves as sophisticated.

Read the full article →

Where data analysis is a nightmare

April 18, 2011

There are the dream organizations that deploy data analysts wisely. Then there are the nightmares, such as the I.R.S. as portrayed in David Foster Wallace’s last novel, The Pale King, reviewed yesterday in the New York Times. … In a universe of veiled and veiling numbers, the task of drawing the true [data] out into [...]

Read the full article →

Data managers should emulate good librarians

April 15, 2011

Haul away the hardware, peel off the software, rinse off the mystique and you see what the people who manage data really are: They’re librarians. That’s the role IT workers should model themselves on. I’m not talking about technology. I don’t care what tools anyone uses. Whether we’re talking about bound paper known as “books” [...]

Read the full article →

What’s that tool? It’s a macguffin, sir

March 24, 2011

When will someone write the first novel about business intelligence? Easier said than done!

Read the full article →

CIO Insight’s monument to redundancy

January 3, 2011

What drove 39 tweeters to endorse CIO Insight’s latest monument to redundancy? I wonder how many actually read it all. I could hardly reach the first period before fatigue set in. The blog post titled “Gartner: CIO as Business Transformation Leader,” dated November 1 and promoted on CIO Insight’s email blast last week, begins with [...]

Read the full article →

New hope for the “single version of the truth”

December 1, 2010

What will it be, a “single version of the truth” or unabated proliferation of ad hoc data? It’s a chronic dilemma, and its resolution is crucial to big-box business intelligence. Frank Buytendijk’s new book, Dealing with Dilemmas: Where Business Analytics Fall Short, offers a way out of this pickle.

Read the full article →

Beginner’s mind in IT

September 24, 2010

A young IT worker follows his common sense, for which his boss scolded him.

Read the full article →

Getting over the ‘P’ word to expand BI horizons

August 27, 2010

Many in the business intelligence industry talk about organizational problems getting in BI’s way, but few talk about them very much. Scratch the surface of most presentations and conversations — such as last week at the TDWI conference in San Diego — and you find people problems bobbing right up alongside data problems: indifferent executives [...]

Read the full article →

Minding data’s pedigree

July 22, 2010

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 [...]

Read the full article →

A reason for BI failure: knowledge requires a knower

June 15, 2010

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 [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries