Feature lists miss the point
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 [...]
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 [...]
Basking in a dashboard’s warm glow
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 [...]
Mapping the many faces of “retention”
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 [...]
Hoping for Citizen 2.0
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” [...]
No wizard, just you and the data
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 [...]
Spam barely pays, says spamalytics
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.
Lessons from LucidEra on BI for the mid-market
Here are two tips from LucidEra veterans Ken Rudin and Darren Cunningham about BI in the mid-market: Forget “freemium” — the new term for free service leading to paid service — and be wary of users’ ability to analyze data. Rudin co-founded the company and in June saw it fold for lack of renewed funding [...]
Just give me the data
Recent email to me from a passionate practioner of creative analysis tells how traditional BI is bad for genuine data analysis. As I see it, traditional BI processes are still designed to start with the answers, not the questions: “Oh, we can’t give you access to the raw data. Your tools (old thinking) probably are [...]
Robert McNamara: good analytics, bad judgment
Tom Davenport on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and how he failed despite good analytics. McNamara was a hedgehog rather than a fox, an engineer rather than an ecologist. The hedgehog knows one big thing, and for McNamara that was rational systems analysis. If he’d been a fox, he’d have brought additional perspectives to [...]
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