muses

New data analysts and teenage love

January 4, 2011

Search all the business literature you can and you’ll never find data analysis compared to romantic love. But, hey, why not? Love’s trajectories might hint at what the business world’s newly enabled generation of data analysts can expect. These data analysts tend to be independent, are often creative and at least partly self-trained. They’re strapped [...]

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Coffee with “Tiberius”

February 26, 2009

I ran into one of my first and best TDWI friends this morning. Even after all this time, he cannot yet be named publicly and, perhaps because of that, is free with musings on the industry and other things. We’ve tentatively code-named him Tiberius, after a meeting room at Caesar’s Palace. This morning he’s thinking [...]

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Upturn, downturn, hot dogs

November 24, 2008

Everybody’s talking about the recession, but that’s just theory at the buffet. There, mini-recessions come and go. One day it’s not-too-bad pork loin, and the next day it’s lukewarm hot dogs.

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Heard at TDWI: “The soft stuff is the important stuff”

September 25, 2008

In the 32 days since the end of TDWI’s San Diego conference, one phrase has come to my mind repeatedly: “The soft stuff is always the important stuff,” uttered by Wayne Eckerson, director of TDWI Research. He was summing up a panel discussion, but the insight applies so broadly he could have used it for [...]

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BI haiku

May 21, 2008

“Eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables.” That’s Michael Pollan’s haiku-like dictum for eating. Let’s have some faux haiku, or senryū, to describe business intelligence, defined broadly. That could take lifetimes to ponder, or at least a couple of fiscal quarters. First, we must bow to the ancestors. The eldest and most revered is Charlie [...]

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Eyes on the ball in Las Vegas

February 6, 2008

The greatest BI show of them all opens a week from this Sunday in Las Vegas, the TDWI World Conference. Naturally, anything about Vegas and The Strip draws my attention—such as Sunday’s story about the local paparazzi.

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BI predictions out the other end

January 3, 2008

I’ve read about an 84-year-old farmer in North Dakota who reads pig spleens the way mainstream fortune tellers read tarot. Sadly, he doesn’t service the business intelligence industry.

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Reading the signs

August 14, 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. [...]

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Managing by walking around with a dashboard on your head

August 7, 2007

Imagine an executive walking around with a “dashboard” on his head. It looks like a pair of sporty sunglasses, but it does much more. Whereever he turns his head, pop-up windows tell him what he’s looking at. He doesn’t even have to ask “What’s going on in that cubicle?” Detailed background on everyone from temps [...]

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“Poets are the original systems thinkers”

July 26, 2007

Here’s a morsel with possibly no practical value at all. It’s from last Sunday’s New York Times on what CEOs read: “I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers,” says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports … [...]

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