analysis

Survey of people who analyze data

March 8, 2011

Data analysts, data champions, and others who analyze data are some of the most interesting and valuable people in business today. If you think you might be part of this group, please take part in my new survey. Go to www.datadoodle.com/analysts/. Later, you get a preview report.

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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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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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Feature lists miss the point

June 29, 2010

So many people who should know better seem to miss the point when they mention Tableau. Why? I asked BI veteran Stephen McDaniel for his thoughts — which he gave, but then went on to suggest an almost unheard of challenge: a data analysis face-off among vendors. Consider this description by a BI analyst: “Tableau [...]

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Self tracking is business intelligence

May 10, 2010

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 [...]

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Basking in a dashboard’s warm glow

March 19, 2010

When some people look at dashboards, they want to see patterns but not reasons. “They don’t want to read the fine print,” said one attendee in Lyndsay Wise’s dashboards seminar at Enterprise Data World in San Francisco yesterday. That’s what the man learned in one data-quality project for a human resources department. He was frank [...]

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Mapping the many faces of “retention”

January 15, 2010

Everybody knows what “retention” means until they have to design a metric. Ken Rudin, once of LucidEra and now general manager of analytics at the games site Zynga, thought that he and his team could “put something together” quickly — but it actually took “four solid weeks of discussion and debate.” About 50 million people [...]

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Hoping for Citizen 2.0

January 6, 2010

I like the sound of Government 2.0: Collaborate with citizens online and you can change government from a sewer-dwelling raccoon into a purring housecat. Social media lets us try for a kind of politics that was impossible until now. I hope for great results. For many, Government 2.0, or “collaborative government,” will mean just “friending” [...]

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No wizard, just you and the data

November 3, 2009

What’s the hardest part of training a new data analyst? Resetting the trainee’s mindset. “They start out with the idea that there’s a right answer,” says Joe Mako. Joe’s leaving his job — where about one year ago he began analyzing data — to go work for the producer of Lyza. Lyzasoft CEO Scott Davis [...]

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Spam barely pays, says spamalytics

September 22, 2009

With all that email that piles in for vi*gra and unlucky Nigerian princes, we assume that someone, somewhere, makes tons of money on it all. But some stealthy University of California researchers at Berkeley and San Diego concluded that spammers may be easier to thwart than we thought.

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