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“Don’t call it BI” begins my new column on Information Management

September 30, 2011

“Don’t bother me with petty distinctions between BI, analytics and decision support. I want meaning, not tools for their own sake – and here I see glimmers.” Read it here. Twenty tweets the first day!

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What took so long for viz?

September 23, 2011

Visualized data seems as natural as eating and sleeping, doesn’t it? Yet the first economic time-series wasn’t plotted until 1786, according to our patriarch of viz Edward Tufte in his 1983 book Visual Display of Quantitative Information. What took so long? I suppose humanity really did suffer from lack of an Excel chart wizard. People [...]

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My columns on BI This Week

August 25, 2011

Sometimes I’m a complete idiot. I’ve been writing a monthly column for TDWI’s BI This Week since the beginning of 2011 — after a break of almost two years — and I have never posted a link. No good self promoter would have neglected to do that. Well, here’s a link to all of them. [...]

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What would Machiavelli do? Frank Buytendijk wants to know

January 3, 2011

One of the most interesting people in the wide world of information technology — Frank Buytendijk — has been hard to keep up with lately. OK, you know about his recent book. But his blog is something else, and he’s moved it again. Active minds can be like that. Now over at BeyeNetwork, he introduces [...]

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Answering the real questions in data analysis

December 15, 2010

A guy walks into your cube and asks you to whip up an econometric model. You’re a statistician, after all, and you’ve got a Ph.D. in something or other. You do this for lunch, he figures. He “over-thought,” says the one whose cube such a guy walked into. Theresa Doyon has been routinely navigating datasets [...]

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Let your gray hair light your way through unfamiliar data

November 8, 2010

How do you approach unfamiliar data? An investment banker I talked to last week — one I know from a client’s whitepaper — rejects the “don’t think” method, advocated in my earlier post about Dan Murray. Instead, he thinks first, on paper. “My approach is driven by having a bunch of gray hair,” says Michael [...]

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Getting over the ‘P’ word to expand BI horizons

August 27, 2010

Many in the business intelligence industry talk about organizational problems getting in BI’s way, but few talk about them very much. Scratch the surface of most presentations and conversations — such as last week at the TDWI conference in San Diego — and you find people problems bobbing right up alongside data problems: indifferent executives [...]

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Stay agile

October 1, 2009

Mark Albala witnessed something through a client that helps explain the cloud’s ascent: The client bought a $25,000 product, and got a bill from their technology group of almost $150,000 to install it. The client’s response: “What is this s—-?” They’re now seriously considering SaaS. He is president of InfoSight Partners. “[SaaS] is not catching [...]

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Visual analysis is pragmatic, not just “pretty”

September 17, 2009

So many of us who feel drawn to visual analysis can’t understand why everyone can’t see the value. “Pretty pictures,” the skeptics mutter. On Eager Eyes, Robert Kosara makes important points that I haven’t seen before. Toward the end of his post he writes, “We need a new term.” He rejects the aged and indefinite [...]

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Another night on Earth

June 24, 2009

In the film “Night on Earth,” Italian comic Roberto Benigni plays a taxi driver tooling around Rome one August morning at four. His flag’s up, he’s bored, and the streets are empty. “Dove sono i romani?” he asks himself, “Where are all the Romans?” Where were all the BI people last week? Did they all [...]

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