Posted in visualization on Jul 20th, 2008
I often have to suppress a question while I listen to pitches for BI “solutions.” I want to interrupt and ask, “Hey, isn’t most of what you’re saying just bullshit?”
I’ve found an exception. That voice didn’t even make a peep Sunday as the three-day Tableau Software user conference unfurled in Seattle. Last night at a [...]
Posted in innovation on Jun 18th, 2008
I was thinking about Government 2.0 at about midnight last night—when the dark, quiet world gives way to ghosts. Then it’s easy to imagine BI tools and methods opening government to the masses.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Ghostly outlines of Government 2.0″, url: “http://datadoodle.com/2008/06/18/ghostly-outlines-of-government-20/” });
Posted in trends on May 6th, 2008
I’ve been asking known BI mavens what they make of thoughts by TDWI’s recently departed education director, Dave Wells. I summarized our Q&A a few days ago here
Among those who’ve responded, the consensus is that, as one person put it, “he’s got something there.” They’ll all be watching for it all to develop.
The BI This [...]
Posted in trends on Apr 25th, 2008
TDWI’s just-departed education director Dave Wells wants the BI industry to put better focus on seeing trends in data and not so much on cleaning the data.
Posted in indicators on Apr 12th, 2008
I’ve almost got too much good stuff for my story in BI This Week about offbeat metrics. Stacey Barr, “the performance measure specialist” in Australia and Zach Gemignani at Juice Analytics in North Carolina both came through with insight-provoking cases.
Zach calls metrics for those hard-to-reach places where bookkeepers don’t go “franken-measures.” Stacey calls them “proxy [...]
Posted in indicators on Apr 9th, 2008
If you want to come up with effective metrics, forget brainstorming. Drop the creativity. Done well, it’s an analytical exercise, says Stacey Barr, aimed at deriving concrete, sensory effects to measure.
Posted in indicators on Mar 31st, 2008
I could easily find a parking place in Berkeley on Saturday! What could it mean? On a normal afternoon in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto, I usually find just one space open, and often I have to drive around the block once…. Ah, it’s the end of Easter week and a bunch of the university people have [...]
Posted in culture, indicators on Jan 31st, 2008
A new source in the education-testing business tells me about a “huge cultural collision” between the “sensate, feeling types and the new racetrack bettor types.”
Posted in BI industry on Jan 27th, 2008
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 [...]
Posted in BI industry on Jan 25th, 2008
BI was made for turbulent times, wasn’t it? At least the handful of consultants I talked to this week think so. There seems to be not a shred of fear among them. I’m writing the story for TDWI.