Culture failure!
See Oscar Berg’s post “Did You Ever Hear anyone Shout ‘Culture Failure’?” on his weblog, The Content Economy.
A culture failure is much more alarming and also much more uncomfortable than a simple process or technology failure. It signals that something is fundamentally wrong, something which is very complex and hard to change. It means that [...]
Why tools take root, or not
The people in an audience who ask what seems like a rude question are often the ones worth listening to. Take, for example, one guy I heard recently. He talked about his old movie camera — which was relevant to the subject, cinema — but his question had parallels with a perennial issue in BI.
He [...]
Rejecting stale tech marketing words
Read a pile of technology marketing and you quickly assume that you alone despise many of the words you keep hearing. They’re words like optimize, leverage, synergy, and utilize. People in this industry don’t really talk like that, do they?
Many don’t, at least not in private, and they don’t tweet like that, either. One tweet [...]
How bad BI could dampen innovation
We all know BI’s ostensible price tag: the software, the hardware and the peopleware. But a new essay by Paul Graham, author of Hackers and Painters, programmer and venture capitalist, suggests that poorly managed BI might have yet another cost: the cost of thwarting creativity and zeal.
In business, we try to control what we must. [...]
Does jargon sell tech products or not?
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 [...]
Dings to talk about when offshoring data
Restless minds will want to know what Asian manufacture of furniture, clothes, electronics and other goods has to do with business intelligence.
A globe-trotting industrial engineer who’d rather not be named has been telling me about different perceptions of quality among nationalities. He works on contract to American companies to ensure that product quality lives up [...]
Privatizing data for Gov2.0?
If bureaucrats were to shut down their websites and simply fed data to whoever wanted to comb it out, as one group will soon propose, would we have failed at Government 2.0?
BI culture: not a science, more like an art form
At 8 o’clock Monday morning, a few hundred attendees at TDWI conference in Chicago will hear the organization’s former education director Dave Wells give his keynote, “People First: Creating a Business Intelligence Culture.” He’ll say something startling: there’s much more to BI than data.
Sierra Club’s global cooling
The Sierra Club, once a leader in bottom-up organization, is about to flip over and assume a top-down orientation–in fact, one much like the big corporations it usually opposes.
The systems perspective on the Spitzer scandal
Why did New York governor Eliot Spitzer ever pay more than $100 for a call girl? That’s what scientists at a state-funded research lab freaked out about when the news broke yesterday. To them the scandal was that the rest of the money could have gone to science.
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