Posted in indicators on Sep 15th, 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 leaves [...]
Posted in indicators on Aug 18th, 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.
Posted in indicators on May 11th, 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 because [...]
Posted in indicators on Apr 12th, 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 “proxy [...]
Posted in indicators on Apr 9th, 2008
If you want to come up with effective metrics, forget brainstorming. Drop the creativity. Done well, it’s an analytical exercise, says Stacey Barr, aimed at deriving concrete, sensory effects to measure.
Posted in indicators on Mar 31st, 2008
I could easily find a parking place in Berkeley on Saturday! What could it mean? On a normal afternoon in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto, I usually find just one space open, and often I have to drive around the block once…. Ah, it’s the end of Easter week and a bunch of the university people have [...]
Posted in indicators on Mar 23rd, 2008
If there’s one reliable sign that a recession is coming, it’s when the experts say they see none coming. I’ve survived four. “Oh, maybe a slowdown, yes…” they say. Now, in today’s New York Times, Charles Duhigg argues that what’s unlikely is a “full blown depression.” Quoth Duhigg:
Why? Because so many of them have spent [...]
Posted in culture, indicators on Jan 31st, 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.”
Posted in indicators, muses on Aug 14th, 2007
While we’re talking about leading indicators, there’s the Iraqi “fixer’s” story on Fresh Air (August 9) about knowing when a car bomb will explode.
Ayub Nuri solved reporters’ everyday logistical problems and helped conduct interviews with local sources. He was the insider.
One afternoon his car was ordered into an area he knew was seething. He put [...]