culture

A “Bart” just wants protection from the “Marges” and “Homers”

April 12, 2010

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 [...]

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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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Be a strategist, not a “geek”

December 22, 2009

Data analysts who simply explain the data and ignore managers’ real needs risk losing “strategist” status &mdash: and become just a “geek.”

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Why tools take root, or not

November 30, 2009

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. [...]

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Migrating mindsets is the real challenge in ETL

September 23, 2009

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 [...]

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Analyst: creative or canned?

July 31, 2009

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 [...]

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Analysts run on “maker’s schedule”

July 29, 2009

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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Mark Madsen’s three indications of uselessness

June 9, 2009

If you dropped into an organization, how could you tell who did real work? Mark Madsen has developed clues. Most people probably know him as the insightful and entertaining creator of “Clues to the Future of Business Intelligence” and more recently of “Using Open Source BI in the Real World.” But when he’s not on [...]

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Data lurking in the elevator

May 27, 2009

The TDWI San Diego conference opens in just 10 weeks, and some people are already thinking about who they hope to avoid. “We’re sure not going to hide out in a stairway,” one promises but has no other strategy so far. Speculation about who’d win should it come down to a good old bar fight, [...]

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