Posted in innovation on Dec 2nd, 2008
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. [...]
Posted in marketing/PR on Nov 25th, 2008
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 [...]
Posted in culture, data management on Oct 9th, 2008
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 [...]
Posted in innovation on Jun 24th, 2008
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?
Posted in culture on May 9th, 2008
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.
Posted in culture on Mar 27th, 2008
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.
Posted in systems on Mar 11th, 2008
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.
Posted in managing on Mar 10th, 2008
The business people didn’t show up to the meeting. They’d been invited to come and talk with IT about the new BI project and in the same stroke help launch it.
This is one of the first stories I ever heard about BI. Though daddy of data modelers Steve Hoberman didn’t say what happened next, I can imagine: all the usual suspects in business were soon rounded up for a later attempt.
The usual suspects are almost always the ones with positional power, the ones with staffs and budgets. But an article in the current strategy+business magazine says that sometimes—such as when creating a politically risky new system—what matters most is trust. Yes, an old story, but for once there’s a prescription.
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 culture on Jan 28th, 2008
“IT Guy” hits the spot with his response to Ann All’s post “Translate IT into English for Big Business Benefits.”