innovation

No dashboard, just an ironing board

June 14, 2011

As if to renounce one more convention of business, a Berkeley-area businessperson I know couldn’t find data, so he went out and got some of his own. He had to evaluate market areas. For three days, he stood by an ironing board with a map on top in front of the Cheese Board in Berkeley’s [...]

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Put a mobile device on your dashboard

December 7, 2010

What if you could snap an iPad into your car’s dashboard to let the device listen to your car’s murmurs? Perhaps it could receive its maintenance-alert emails, the ones that let you know when it’s ready for an oil change or new seat covers. If you also kept your calendar on the iPad — and [...]

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Look, Ma. No ETL

July 13, 2010

One of the first things you learn about in business intelligence is ETL. Raw data gets harvested, washed and served. But Sandy Steier hadn’t heard. Sandy had been busy analyzing data. For years on Wall Street, he pored over mortgage-backed securities with a tool he and peers developed for themselves. He only learned of ETL [...]

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A sweet solution for cherry picking

September 30, 2009

Don’t say “cherry picking” to people at information-intensive businesses like banks, airlines, and telecommunications companies. You can spoil their lunch if a big customer has just run off to a competitor. Mark Albala says he has a tool that will warn of such a move. He’s president of InfoSight Partners, and he’s about to offer [...]

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Blog for the times: on high-value, low-cost BI

July 20, 2009

Dan Murray expects to take another step this week in his thrilling rebellion, spreading the word on high value, low cost BI. Though it’s a rebellion and may burn with Che Guevara-type zeal, Dan’s methods actually lean way over toward Darwinian evolution. Revolution is expensive and risky, he writes, while evolution is intelligent and incremental. [...]

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A new game for BI

May 19, 2009

BI might be best made into a game. Tableau Software, for example, doesn’t call its tool a game, of course. You don’t sell business software that way. But to many of its users, it might as well be a game. Tableau looks like more fun than any other computer game I know of. We’ve seen [...]

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Time for traditional BI vendors to “pass the baton”

February 17, 2009

The shouts from the back of the BI room seem to be getting louder. In various ways, they’re saying let Big BI die. Former TDWI education director Dave Wells, visual analytics critic Stephen Few, and Tableau Software CEO Christian Chabot are back there. Others, too. Last spring, Wells proposed a new, people-centric definition of business [...]

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How bad BI could dampen innovation

December 2, 2008

We all know BI’s ostensible price tag: the software, the hardware and the peopleware. But a new essay by Paul Graham, author of Hackers and Painters, programmer and venture capitalist, suggests that poorly managed BI might have yet another cost: the cost of thwarting creativity and zeal. In business, we try to control what we [...]

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Agile BI for a chilled economy

September 3, 2008

It’s called “agile BI,” and it goes like this: forget the big meetings, forget the planning, forget the budgeting. Just get someone from IT and someone from business together and make a prototype in a week. Dave Wells, an independent consultant after five and a half years as TDWI education director, reports that clients are [...]

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Privatizing data for Gov2.0?

June 24, 2008

If bureaucrats were to shut down their websites and simply fed data to whoever wanted to comb it out, as one group will soon propose, would we have failed at Government 2.0?

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