indicators

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.

Read the full article →

You know it when they dance

November 17, 2009

Here’s that eternal question again: how do you know when whatever you’re working on is good enough? Today, two perspectives. The Oscar-winning sound designer Walter Murch, speaking Friday night at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael California, told about talking shop with Michael Jackson’s engineers. They told Murch that they had no special insight, [...]

Read the full article →

Tableau conference stats

July 20, 2009

Attendance at the Tableau Customer Conference in Seattle, which runs today through Thursday, will be above 300 — versus 187 last year. Tableau Software VP of marketing Elissa Fink says that of the 300, 112 have signed up for Tableau certification training. It’s impressive.

Read the full article →

San Francisco cab driver’s dashboard

July 13, 2009

I asked a San Francisco taxi driver I happened to sit next to about indicators he sees. I didn’t mean “low oil,” I meant big things. Whether the economy is still falling or not, for one. Figure out how to collect tip data from cabbies and waiters and you’ve have a good early indicator of [...]

Read the full article →

Perfect BI tool is one that people actually use

May 7, 2009

People want to perform well, Frank Buytendijk believes. Management gets in the way with stupid, top-down games. It would be better to join people’s natural passion with corporate goals.

Read the full article →

Fooled by proximity?

February 18, 2009

Almost the same moment I read that for the fourth year in a row executives rate BI the top tech priority in 2009, I hear Tableau Software’s news: last week saw the most downloads of trial software ever. “Not by a little, by a lot,” says marketing and PR VP Elissa Fink. The poll of [...]

Read the full article →

SAS finance architect is out to overhaul credit-scoring metrics

September 15, 2008

Some loan officers used to go by rules of thumb. There were “The Three B’s: never lend to beauticians, bartenders or barbers” and “The Three P’s: never lend to preachers, plumbers or prostitutes.” Now we have an automated system, but it can’t tell an upstanding banker from a down-on-his-luck bartender. Imagine a high-level banker who [...]

Read the full article →

The nose still knows better than Web 2.0

August 18, 2008

Several hundred practioners of the many aspects of business intelligence are gathering here in San Diego for this week’s TDWI conference. They know how to clean data, enable fast searches, design insight-accelerating tools and other wonders—and yet no one yet has a reliable metric to score restaurants. We still have to go out and sniff.

Read the full article →

How to pick a restaurant: the clean-door test

May 11, 2008

Rules of Thumb is a fine website for those of use who enjoy proxy metrics, the things you use to judge when you can’t judge the real thing. Picking a restaurant is an obsession on the site. One rule of its many rules is attributed to CBS’s Andy Rooney, who suggests you avoid cute names [...]

Read the full article →

A story here, a story there about “franken-measures”

April 12, 2008

I’ve almost got too much good stuff for my story in BI This Week about offbeat metrics. Stacey Barr, “the performance measure specialist” in Australia and Zach Gemignani at Juice Analytics in North Carolina both came through with insight-provoking cases. Zach calls metrics for those hard-to-reach places where bookkeepers don’t go “franken-measures.” Stacey calls them [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries