culture

Pulling on the root of bad business writing

March 23, 2009

In his fine weblog Startup Diaries, David Silverman takes a good stab at answering the eternal question: Why is most business writing so bad? He writes, for example, “I blame this on an educational system that rewards length over clarity. When you get tick marks for bulls’ eyes — and no demerits for the number [...]

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Don’t call me “non-technical”

March 10, 2009

When I’ve referred to “non-technical” users, I’ve always meant just about anyone working far away IT. Well, based on research by Lyzasoft’s CEO Scott Davis, I think I’d better be careful with that definition. My concern is not for IT people. It’s for the “quants” in finance, marketing, accounting and operations who may not write [...]

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Dings to talk about when offshoring data

October 9, 2008

Restless minds will want to know what Asian manufacture of furniture, clothes, electronics and other goods has to do with business intelligence. A globe-trotting industrial engineer who’d rather not be named has been telling me about different perceptions of quality among nationalities. He works on contract to American companies to ensure that product quality lives [...]

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BI culture: not a science, more like an art form

May 9, 2008

At 8 o’clock Monday morning, a few hundred attendees at TDWI conference in Chicago will hear the organization’s former education director Dave Wells give his keynote, “People First: Creating a Business Intelligence Culture.” He’ll say something startling: there’s much more to BI than data.

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Sierra Club’s global cooling

March 27, 2008

The Sierra Club, once a leader in bottom-up organization, is about to flip over and assume a top-down orientation–in fact, one much like the big corporations it usually opposes.

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The blessing

March 10, 2008

The story from Dave Wells, former TDWI education director, is that Seattle University’s big cheeses—all Jesuits—met to talk about the university’s new BI project. Dave said the provost had been listening throughout, and at the end endorsed the project. “I appreciate that we all pray,” said the provost. “But at times we might need help [...]

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“Huge culture class” over school metrics

January 31, 2008

A new source in the education-testing business tells me about a “huge cultural collision” between the “sensate, feeling types and the new racetrack bettor types.”

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Why IT guys write that way

January 28, 2008

“IT Guy” hits the spot with his response to Ann All’s post “Translate IT into English for Big Business Benefits.”

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Running with the infovis geeks

October 31, 2007

This afternoon the geeks and the grad students who drove the IEEE InfoVIS (information visualization) conference with their clever but mostly useless inventions swarmed into the hotel lobby for some reason that only their well-wired brains understand. They are a different crowd from the one I’ve seen lately. This year I’ve only been to business [...]

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