in media

“Don’t call it BI” begins my new column on Information Management

September 30, 2011

“Don’t bother me with petty distinctions between BI, analytics and decision support. I want meaning, not tools for their own sake – and here I see glimmers.” Read it here. Twenty tweets the first day!

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The analyst did it

July 7, 2011

Few analysts in business identify with intelligence analysts, but the two do have similarities worth observing. An Associated Press story about the CIA analyst who found Osama bin Laden this week illustrates a few obvious ones.

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Don’t weep for IT

March 29, 2011

Like some about-to-be-deposed Middle East dictators, some IT people fear the barbarians at the door that Dave Wells hints at. In a recent interview with Information Management editorial director Jim Ericson, Dave talked about the “storm” about to overwhelm IT departments. Then there are the reactions to that.

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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 [...]

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“Streetlights and Shadows”

January 15, 2010

Some of the books Stephen Few reviews may at first glance to have little to do with data analysis. On second glance, though, they have everything to do with it. He often goes into the essence of thinking, insight, and decision making — core knowledge for BI practitioners. See his latest, posted yesterday afternoon, on [...]

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Rolling heads can’t think

January 12, 2010

Wolf Blitzer calls for heads to roll after the Christmas Day attack. But Jill Dychè is a data pro, and she’d rather let the heads think. “Who should get fired?” is the same conversation as after screwups in corporations, writes Dychè, principal at Baseline Consulting. Instead, the government should be addressing process issues. Indeed, the [...]

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Choices are never the same twice

October 13, 2009

George Packer wrote in the New Yorker (quoted in Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire) on the books that Obama and his generals are reading. He wrote this about making public policy, about the difficulty of basing decisions on the past. Making policy is about making choices, and they are never the same twice. Over the past [...]

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A long look at Stephen Few’s “Now You See It”

July 15, 2009

Stephen Few gave a snappy name to his new book, Now You See It, and a cover that signals a gem — all black with a slice of sunset that highlights the “see.” The question, though, is who the “you” is.

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As if there there can be a single version of the truth

July 8, 2009

The popular New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman often disagrees with his fellow economists. Let’s all raise our eyebrows in shock. Not! My shock is at the idea among some of his readers that there’s a right and wrong answer. Today, for example, Krugman again refers to his opinion that the stimulus [...]

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Some of us like to name things in BI

January 6, 2009

Stephen Few’s damning review of a new BI tool prompted a weeks-long discussion-turned-scholarly-fistfight over definitions.

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