definitions

Still a “tool” by any other name

April 20, 2012

A marketing manager I know stopped me in mid sentence. He didn’t want me to call his business intelligence product a “tool.” Why? “It sounds small,” he said. But it is small, I pointed out. It’s smaller than many others in its space. It’s downloaded in under a minute and unpacks itself on a desktop [...]

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Skinning “analytics,” the word

August 9, 2011

“Analytics,” the term, has been twisted so badly that Wayne Eckerson last month felt moved to rescue it with a definition. Rather, two definitions, possibly more. One definition is capitalized, the other is not. What “analytics” might mean in italics, all caps, or underlined he doesn’t say. Whatever the typography, Wayne just might have the [...]

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The Dow of BI

June 23, 2011

How do we take the pulse of the BI/analytics industry? What if those who promote the technology, advise the clients, and build the systems actually measured their collective progress with a number? It would be an ongoing, forever-updating, simple benchmark. It would be the industry’s Dow Jones Industrial Average.

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Speaking of the cloud’s mispronouncables

October 1, 2009

Boris Evelson tweeted a fine question yesterday morning, but it’s too easy: how to define Saas? If he’s going to all that trouble, why not also define Saas’s younger siblings: platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service. To be a real hero, though, he has to take on the real pain: how to pronounce “Iaas” and “Paas.”

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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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BI terms that mean something

May 28, 2009

What a radical idea: break business intelligence down by the types of work to be done — financial intelligence, human-resources intelligence, risk intelligence, etc. — instead of by the technology — data warehousing, data integration, dashboards, etc. “If I put my feet in the shoes of a business person listening to someone pitching ‘business intelligence,’ [...]

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Sleight of hand

May 18, 2009

“We’re confusing folks who can benefit from this. It’s sleight of hand.” – On drifting BI terminology by a keen observer who’d rather not be named

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That’s not BI

May 14, 2009

A pair of officials in double-breasted suits arrived at a New York school for a meeting with the principal. On their way to his office, a young student excitedly offered to demonstrate his skill at computer programming. In a story told in 1984 by Nicholas Negroponte, I heard echoes of today’s business intelligence industry. The [...]

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To hell with “guts,” Accenture’s survey gave a false choice

February 2, 2009

Forty percent of business executives trust their guts over data? I admit those survey results made me raise an eyebrow — but then I put it down again. False alarm. Forty percent may be significant, but compared with what? Is that worse than last year? For all we know — at least from the press [...]

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