“We’re confusing folks who can benefit from this. It’s sleight of hand.”

– On drifting BI terminology by a keen observer who’d rather not be named

If you haven’t already, ask around: Exactly what is “business intelligence”? Some say it’s all about business decision making, and others seem to think it’s all about tools.

We struggle with definitions, but usually not in public. Perhaps that’s why the recent uproar on the weblog of eminent visualization critic Stephen Few felt like a refreshing breeze.

It all began with Few’s damning review of a product whose promoters tripped and gave it the now-sexy “visualization” label. Oops.

Usually, Few’s readers sit back and enjoy the show. He’s one of the few Bi writers with the courage to call out a stinker. But this time, several people sat up in protest. Comments erupted into a weeks-long discussion-turned-scholarly-fistfight over definitions.

After a few swipes at his “mean-spirited” tone—which I don’t see—and other complaints, they found the deeper issue. Colin White, president of BI Research and a keynote speaker at this year’s TDWI World Conference in Las Vegas, arrived late to the discussion but soon led the charge.

One term they fought over was data visualization. To Few, it’s a business function. He wrote that it’s “the use of visual representations to explore, make sense of and communicate data…”

White disagreed. He prefers a more “pragmatic” definition to accommodate the term’s variety of uses. He wrote, “If data or information is presented to a user in a format that aids decision making, then that contitutes data visualization.”

Though White writes that experts must “use clear definitions and terminology,” he wrote in the next sentence, “However, it is important that we accept that other people may have different definitions, and we need to find common ground.” He went on, “We also have to accept that business users may employ technology and use some terms in a completely different way, and it is important to adjust our positions and explanations accordingly.”

Did he mean that terms mean what the person who uses them says they mean? White leaves that and other things unclear in his careful yet still foggy pronouncements. He doesn’t even state his definitions of business intelligence and data warehousing, even when he condascends to Few that his definition is “outmoded.”

Few politely called White’s definition of data visualization “not useful,” and I agree. No term can be useful that has lost its meaning. As Alice said to Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Label inflation makes it tougher to find a toehold in the market, to write about techniques and tools, and even to have a conversation. When marketing collateral shouts “data visualization” to the general BI market, who will look up if it could mean bad Powerpoint slides? It hurts the whole industry if worthy products can’t find words that make would-be buyers listen.

Few’s review of Lyza looks to me like a case of mistaken identity. Perhaps the company should never have entered the visualization arena. Also, according to at least one BI expert I respect, it is actually a valuable tool. A bloody nose for nothing.

To Alice’s question about making words mean many things, Humpty Dumpty replied, “The question is which is master. That’s all.”

If everyone’s a master, we have label chaos. Instead, industry leaders, journalists and smart marketers should use words as they’re most widely understood. As a rule, the master should be business, the data train’s final stop.

Also see sascom editor Alison Bolen’s “What we call what we do: a lesson in evolving industry key words.”

Those of us in the tech world who shun jargon may forever remain an underclass. We may never rise to the mainstream, where today tech-centric vendors rule. So I’m delighted when I meet another one of our clan who declares proudly his rejection of tech-speak.

Don Farber, vice president of sales and marketing at KnowledgeSync, says that to reach business customers, you have to use words they understand. For many buyers in the mid-market, that means avoiding any jargon at all.

Here’s how he orders a steak: “I ask for ‘pink in the middle.’ When the waiter asks me, ‘Rare?’ I say, ‘I don’t care what you call it, just give me a steak that’s pink in the middle.’”

We have to be careful, though. Some buyers in the mid-market watch for tech words as if it were a secret handshake. One insightful Datadoodle reader read about Farber’s approach last week and posted a reply that began like this:

This is so true. And it cuts both ways. Larger midsize companies have IT teams who are knowledgeable about BI, and if you don’t use all of the most proper complex jargon with them, they think you’re a lightweight solution that doesn’t do what they need or, worse, that you’re a team of idiots who just happened to create what they wanted the first time…

Take that, Strunk and White (Elements of Style).

A trade pub dear to my heart praised the healthy “buzz” at February’s TDWI conference. Yeah, but some of it sounded an ungrounded circuit.

So much jargon, so little meaning. Kevin Brown of Tableau Software and I were talking about it. He said, “Marketing should be simple.” For example, “if you don’t give the price out front, you’re hiding something.” I say the same goes for jargon-encrusted features and benefits.

If this year’s economic slowdown lets BI-ready companies “kill the competition,” as one consultant I talked to last week expects them to, BI itself will win in not-so-obvious ways.

First, if BI really does show its stuff, projects will attract and keep good people more easily. “Every BI client have been people-short,” says Sid Adelman, “either with no headcount or unable to attract good people.”

Second, BI will finally get the attention of company “big guys,” as one guy puts it (who can be called only a senior ETL architect at a major BI vendor).

Mr. Anonymous says, “I find it astounding that people go into project wo looking at power dynamic in an organization. They just kind of do stuff without thinking who’s going to look at this….If we’re competing with Little League and seat-of-the-pants, no one’s going to look at BI unless the big guy does.”

People think that good data makes for good decisions, he says. Well, no. “What about that French bank [Société Générale]? Did they really now know?” And, “Take Enron. They knew the facts.”

It’s that nasty human side showing its inconvenient face again.

BI was made for turbulent times, wasn’t it? At least the handful of consultants think so whom I talked to this week for my TDWI article. Unlike at the gloomy economic forum in Davos, these guys have not a shred of fear among them.

BI leader Claudia Imhoff warns, “The glory days are gone,” you need BI to aim well at the right customers and products. Esteemed consultant and author Sid Adelman says, “Companies with good BI are going to kill the competition.” Jill Dyche, also a well-known consultant, tells a story about a medical-supply company that’s using BI to trump the competition. Others report similar things.

How does this season compare with the past recession? Tom Quintal at the LoganBritton consulting group in Boston says it’s unlike 2001. Then some client or other called up every day to cancel or curtail. This time, not one has.

Frankly, though, all that optimism may be great, but it’s not so much fun to write the rah-rah-rah. A story that’s all good news lacks salt.

One senior ETL architect whom I can’t name is the most fun. What troubles him is not BI’s value. It’s that the “big guys” don’t buy into it.

Just having good data doesn’t necessarily lead to good decisions. He says, “Take Enron. They knew the facts.”

I’m filing the story with the editor late Saturday, and it comes out late Tuesday Tuesday, February 5. If you have anything to add, please do. Either submit a comment or use the contact form.

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.

If he did, we might have had more fun with predictions for 2008. Now we’re stuck with these: Consolidation will continue, smaller vendors will sprout, deployment will be easier, software as a service will take off, visualization will emerge… Did I miss any? Well, who cares?

Where are all the tech-savvy clairvoyants when you need one?

A friend of mine used to swear by someone she called “the common sense psychic.” She’d get her on the phone and tell her all about the problem of the day. Yes, said the psychic, and what happened then? And then? After a while, the psychic put the phone down and came back a few minutes later. Her perception was always right on, and no wonder.

In the trade, that’s called a cold reading. You gather facts and spill them back in such a way that you cover all the bases.

Foretelling the next 12 months of BI is a warm reading. What started to happen will continue to happen.

I myself was one of those year-end wizards, but I was able to produce little contrast with everybody else. Perhaps I should have consulted a horoscope and summarized all the signs, like this.

Your star is on the rise. Changes over the next three months will inspire you to expand your horizons. Though prospects look uncertain at the beginning of the year, give it time. The surprise opportunity thrusts you into the spotlight amid roadblocks. Just keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll be fine.

Oh, hell. Let’s cut the crap and skip to the one interesting and courageous prediction from any BI leader. It comes from Mark Madsen, who looks ahead and sees that goatees are going out of style.

Look closely at business intelligence and you see the world. Larissa T. Moss writes today in TDWI Flashpoint about the “the new debate” over enterprise data warehouses vs. personal data warehouses.

One side believes in one-for-all. The other side believes that by taking care of Me first, I can take care of You.

Where have you heard this before? That’s easy: look at the front page of a newspaper. It’s at the core of so many public debates going on now. The environment: should land be protected or should anyone be allowed to run over anything with an SUV? Taxation: should the poor pay less in taxes, or should rich people pay less so they can provide jobs?

Your heart rate might have risen as you read that last paragraph–and so heart rates rise when people think about what happens with their data. Do they get to harbor it in a “personal data warehouse”? Or should they trust the enterprise to give them what they need?

In his 2000 campaign, George W. Bush proclaimed, “It’s your money!” Yeah, it’s your data, too. Even now, six years after the first tax cuts, we’re still debating the wisdom of “it’s your money.” And a decade from now we might still be debating the wisdom of “it’s your data.”

It’ll be decided, I think, by the quality of the people on each side.

Back in the late ’90s at NetWorld+Interop, they debated another hot issue: whether DSL or cable internet would dominate in the long run.

After many insightful comments, one guy said what I still think was the most insightful of all: what would matter most is which side employed smarter people. DSL had the edge so far, he said, because the phone companies had expertise in networking. Cable would lag because its roots were with the guys who used to pave driveways.

The verdict on that one is still not in. So don’t hold your breath over enterprise data warehouses vs the “personal data warehouses.”