Tableau caught them looking
Wipe away that tear you have shed for BI marketing. Take heart in this: The golden oldies — those tired verses like “faster, better decisions” — have never come closer to receding into the support roles where they belong. A new strategy has been proving itself able to hook even onlookers who swore they really [...]
Self tracking is business intelligence
Back when secretaries were common, you could have had yours track your day in 15-minute increments. In his book The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker suggested this as a way to find out what you really did all day. The picture usually wasn’t so pretty. Tracking your time then and now is personal, it’s messy, and [...]
Bring in the shrinks for decision analysis
Now comes the hard part in business intelligence: figuring out how the humans can make better use of all our data and tools for decision making, writes Wayne Eckerson, director of TDWI Research. Let’s bring in the shrinks. When Wayne points to a trend, it’s news even if others might have already foreseen it. He’s [...]
BI’s next round: What’s going to dominate?
With all the talk about technology, let’s pause to refresh with three basics — culture, conversation, and collaboration. These basics will take center stage in BI’s future, and they’ll help decide which tools dominate.
Time for traditional BI vendors to “pass the baton”
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 [...]
Predicting BI trends and saying you’re sorry
We forget most failed predictions quickly. If you make a bad one, you just say “let’s move on,” and you’re as good as moved on. But sometimes you meet the kind of guy I say hello to near my office—the kind professional forecasters hope they never meet.
Craving value: sparks for a new economic engine
It’s hard to see through the smoke as our financial house burns down, I know. But what I’ve noticed is more interesting: the first signs of rebuilding. This month, three experts I read—visual analytics expert Stephen Few, Competing on Analytics author Tom Davenport and digital-media economy specialist Umair Haque—all seem to have knit recent blog [...]
Companies look to BI to reduce energy cost
Companies are looking to BI tools for help with rising energy costs, says Dan Esty, co-author of Green into Gold and the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University.
Is BI boring yet?
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations author Clay Shirky says that a technology’s social effects—substitute “business” effects if you want — usually occur just when a technology has become boring. For example, email. It used to be something we talked about: “Do you have email?” “You mean the Internets?” And so on. [...]
Agile BI for a chilled economy
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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