culture

What’s that tool? It’s a macguffin, sir

March 24, 2011

When will someone write the first novel about business intelligence? Easier said than done!

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Getting over the ‘P’ word to expand BI horizons

August 27, 2010

Many in the business intelligence industry talk about organizational problems getting in BI’s way, but few talk about them very much. Scratch the surface of most presentations and conversations — such as last week at the TDWI conference in San Diego — and you find people problems bobbing right up alongside data problems: indifferent executives [...]

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Minding data’s pedigree

July 22, 2010

Does it seem to you like data analysis is busting out all over the place? It might become another fun game like chess or Chutes and Ladders — so this might be good time to recall an old admonition: Don’t just consume data, mind its pedigree. Repeating the warning, though, makes you look like a [...]

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Culture failure!

January 7, 2010

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 [...]

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Why tools take root, or not

November 30, 2009

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. [...]

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Rejecting stale tech marketing words

March 12, 2009

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 [...]

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How bad BI could dampen innovation

December 2, 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 [...]

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Does jargon sell tech products or not?

November 25, 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, [...]

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Dings to talk about when offshoring data

October 9, 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 [...]

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Privatizing data for Gov2.0?

June 24, 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?

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