Just by chance, two ostensibly unrelated items arrived here at Datadoodle headquarters on the same day last week.

First, the Department of Here and There received notice of a comment on a post by Information Management editorial director Jim Ericson about his video interview of eLearning Curve director of education Dave Wells. In the interview, Dave described a convergence of forces, a “perfect storm,” that will overwhelm IT shops. Comments ensued, including this one:

… I only hope those who refuse to be intimidated by “IT buzzwords” understand that it’s not going to happen by magic … someone still needs to know what they are doing … and it ain’t glamorous.

Mere hours later came this from the editor on duty at the Foreign Desk. It’s an excerpt of a conversation intercepted in early February between then-ruler of Egypt Hosni Mubarak and an unnamed fellow Middle East dictator presumed to be Muammar Qaddafi:

“I’m tellin’ ya, Mu [Muammar], those kids [the protesters] have no idea what it takes to run a country. Look at ‘em down there [in Tahrir Square]. What a mess! They can’t even pick up after themselves and they think the garbage will still be picked up if I take early retirement!”

I assume the IT person who wrote the blog comment would have nothing to do with the former Egyptian dictator, and vice versa. But the two do have things in common.

First, both have a point. They know that running their vast machinery, whether it’s an IT infrastructure or a medium-size country, is a task for which the barbarians at the door are under-qualified.

Second, some among their peers feel sorry for themselves. Oh, poor us, no one appreciates us! It’s a dirty job, etc. You’ll appreciate us when we’re gone!

But the smarter IT people, like the more sophisticated military professionals of the world, will see this “storm” for what it is: merely a transfer to civilian authority. The smart ones don’t want to run the show. Advanced organizations and countries have managed to shed that spooky awe of power that the less advanced project onto things like the military and technology. This is a step up.

IT budgets may decline and come under more scrutiny. Business people will take more responsibility for some traditional IT tasks, and things may get messy for a while. But isn’t that as it should be?

In any case, the Datadoodle editorial council met overtime on this one. As they say, it’s “a breaking story.”

Lyzasoft wasn’t among the 38 exhibitors in TDWI’s Las Vegas exhibit hall. Lyzasoft sponsored no part of the lunch, and they hired no stage magician. But their buzz was the loudest I heard over the event’s five days.

Others may have heard different buzz because buzz varies. Business intelligence elites gather every year at TDWI’s big Las Vegas event to teach, and they end up schmoozing, too. Over beer, food, and sometimes playing cards, they compare notes.

Is anyone seeking a consensus? I suppose someone might, but the interesting ones just play with ideas, reflect on what others say, make a joke, and think about it. If there’s any “truth,” it develops during a lot of talk and thought, whether it’s about politics, tofu, the future of passenger rail in America, or business. That goes for any kind of conversation, whether the medium is words or data.

In business, the conversation is somehow forgotten in favor of the data. But to Scott Davis, CEO of Lyzasoft, the conversation is critical to understanding the data. “A chart has no context at all,” he said in mid February. “The conversation is what’s really valuable.”

The conversation-free, top-down “single version of the truth” isn’t always useful for those who need to manage data for specific uses and contexts. Its “truth” may in fact be no better than Soviet planners’ forecasts of market demand for women’s lingerie. “A single version of the truth,” said Third Nature research director Mark Madsen in Las Vegas, “is true for a single beat of the corporate heart.”

Enter Lyza 2, Lyzasoft’s new version of its data-wrangling and collaboration tool made for data analysts determined to create truth for specific uses and context. The first edition of Lyza offered Excel-like personalization. In the new edition, collaboration seems to have been the guide.

You could see this year’s improvements coming in last year’s email from Lyzasoft CEO Scott Davis: “Even though they are quants, their world is personal,” he wrote. “Relationships are vital. They think in terms of ‘who do I know who knows X type of information sources?’” He could have also been talking about journalists, artists, and anyone else who has to hear signals within noise.

In the new edition, Lyza encourages fluid interactions with a variety of social-media tools: email, Twitter-like messaging, SMS messaging, bookmark collections with annotations, and other tools track and fortify discussion. Lyza lets people work easily with other smart people they trust. If “Steve” believes that “Brian’s” work is good and “George’s” work is not, he can work with only Brian’s data. It also publishes to the new tool, Lyza Commons, for even greater collaboration while retaining users’ ability to interact with data. Lyza 2 loves a good conversation.

The data and everything that happens to it gets tracked automatically. Unlike in Excel worksheets, changes are transparent. Automatic documenting allows any change to be dug up and fixed. If only the data-free conversations in politics and other parts of business had such a tool.

I was surprised to hear spontaneous praise for Lyza’s new version. eLearningCurve education director Dave Wells and Third Nature principal and one of the event’s keynote speakers Mark Madsen both did. I heard the same from several other BI experts, too. Madsen even gave a brief look at Lyza in his Executive Summit presentation on the future of BI.

I harmonize with people who appreciate Lyza at least partly because I think it’s smart to let people work the way they want to work — the way people have always worked. They prefer working with people they trust and with tools that respond. Everything else is static.

What a radical idea: break business intelligence down by the types of work to be done — financial intelligence, human-resources intelligence, risk intelligence, etc. — instead of by the technology — data warehousing, data integration, dashboards, etc.

“If I put my feet in the shoes of a business person listening to someone pitching ‘business intelligence,’ what I hear is another IT silver bullet,” eLearningCurve education director Dave Wells said recently.

If you’re talking to a finance officer, for example, about forecasting cash flows or predictive analytics based on the economy, you might call be describing “financial intelligence.” If you’re talking to an HR manager about retention, recruiting and pay scales, you might be talking about “human-resources intelligence.”

Imagine: BI terms that mean something — exactly what he’s trying to promote. Radical, but smart.

There’s a new way to learn BI skills — at the desktop. eLearningCurve launched May 15. Former TDWI education director Dave Wells directs the program.

He’s excited. “We’re trying to fill a space that no one else has filled,” he says. No one else has done a good job of training over the Internet, which requires a different set of skills than training in conferences.

“Just in time training” has a solid place in this economy, he says. With smaller teams trying to do more with less, fewer companies can afford to send people away or wait for the right course at the right event. “You need to get really relevant education when you need it. ”

The out-of-pocket funded company launched with five courses in data quality. “Sale” prices for each course range from $266 to $356.

By the end of the year, Dave hopes to have 60 courses in four curricula, including data modeling, data governance and master data management. Then they’ll move into business intelligence and data warehousing, agile development, enterprise architecture, and IT governance.

He emphasizes that he does not want to compete with TDWI or anyone else. In fact, he hopes that eventually eLearningCurve can offer courses in partnership with others.

It all started, says Dave, when he was approached by Arkady Maydanchik, now managing director. They’ve spent nine months developing the business. Also on the team: operations director John Toepfer, director of engineering Noah Mentakoff, and director of marketing Erik Kavanagh.

“The stars were aligned,” Dave says. “I’m never going to be very good at retirement.”

Former TDWI education director Dave Wells keeps running into users whose BI reports might as well be printed. These users simply accept the data as presented and don’t ask questions. That’s nothing new, of course. The difference is that Dave has a way to deal with it.

I caught part of his session today at TDWI World Conference in Chicago: “Understanding Cause and Effect: An Introduction to Systems Thinking.”

For the incurious, Dave prescribes causal-loop diagrams. When he starts drawing, and people can visualize a complex system — especially when they work inside it — they quickly get involved with the analysis. Once involved, they can’t avoid asking questions.

Take the case of the healthcare insurer, for example. His simple lines and arrows demonstrate how badly thought out incentives for data entry clerks actually increases the rate of bad data entering the system.

Available systems-diagramming tools, however, just aren’t good enough yet to do all he needs to do, he says. He showed one, MapSys, that comes closest.

He’s going to go looking. Over the next six to nine months, he’s going to be “that pain-in-the-ass guy from BI” attending every systems-thinking conference he can.

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 trail at Gartner BI Summit complained about exactly this kind of word — these miserable words with all the wild flavor bred out of them like factory-farm tomatoes.

On the list of suggested extinction, Jill Dychè listed optimize and fact-based. Scott Davis listed leverage, co-optition, and dot-bomb. Someone also threw in win-win, synergy, and the lovely utilize.

Mark Madsen cautioned that banning all those words would leave marketing with nothing but proper names and prepositions.

The whole discussion started off when Dychè posted a link to David Silverman’s article in Harvard Business “10 Business Words to Ban.”

Now Dave Wells has followed with a weblog post. He left the TDWI conference in Las Vegas last week with his head “afloat in buzzwords.” So many new terms every quarter, and so much ambiguity. ” Maybe its time that we define our terms and differentiate between similar sounding terms.” He goes on to list a few he’d like to see on the endangered list.

Let the movement flourish.

The shouts from the back of the BI room seem to be getting louder. In various ways, they’re saying let Big BI die.

Former TDWI education director Dave Wells, visual analytics critic Stephen Few, and Tableau Software CEO Christian Chabot are back there. Others, too.

Last spring, Wells proposed a new, people-centric definition of business intelligence. (See my Q&A with him for TDWI.). On November 18, he published “The Changing Face of Business Intelligence.” He predicted that the industry will soon “experience change that will have broad, deep and lasting impact.”

In early January, Tableau CEO Christian Chabot talked about the failure of BI platforms to deliver the BI promise. He seemed to laugh in surprise at interviewer Carl Weinschenk’s comparison of Chabot’s thoughts to Ronald Reagan’s 1987 challenge, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The comparison was apt.

Now last Thursday, Few sounded like he’d had about enough with BI tools “entrenched in a techno-centric paradigm.” He wrote in his weblog, “It’s time for traditional BI vendors to pass the baton.”

I believe it’s now time for the vendors with real decision support solutions to thank the BI industry for the technical infrastructure that it’s provided, but then set themselves apart as a new industry, different from but complementary to BI. Much as groups of people throughout history have arisen and set themselves apart to fix what cannot be fixed within the reigning power structure, the decision-support solutions that people need will only make their mark on the world by leaving the calcified fortress of BI.

Thomas Jefferson might have put it this way.

When in the course of business it becomes necessary to dissolve the bands which have connected us to failed technology, after a long train of abuses and usurpations, it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such technology and to adopt new tools for decision making.

Big changes can seem to come suddenly. The Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union, the Tech Bubble of the ’90s, and Lehman Brothers all came down to widespread surprise.

I don’t put much faith in predictions. But these three independent thought leaders are all pointing in about the same direction. I’ll be looking for changes coming that way.

This time of year it’s tempting to sit under a tree and wait for the apple to drop. Aha, a trend! But it’s better to go asking smart people what they think, and Dave Wells—former TDWI education director and now a consultant—is one of the smartest I know.

He says the one-tool-fits-all scenario is going to fade. Instead, how about the right tool on my desktop for me and the right one on your desktop for you? They both draw from the same set of standard data, of course. “As long as we’re both making good business decisions, how significant is [the difference in tools]?”

Among his leading candidates for desktop is Quantrix Modeler. “It’s truly impressive,” he says. For example, it expresses formulas not as cell references it expresses them in business terms. He also likes, among others, Lyza and eThority.

With permission from IT, business users can connect and manipulate data on their own. “If we put the right tools in the right places to support that, it’s a perfect evolution. IT does what it’s good at, and we put the responsibility for business analysis back into the business where it belongs.”

This is all just my first blast at what will help form my trends story for BI This Week, to appear later this month.

A recession would benefit business intelligence, say two industry experts I talked to last week.

Former TDWI education director Dave Wells sees new, leaner BI practices emerging. That will start with companies insisting that they do more BI with less money. “Decision makers will ask for speedier responses from BI teams while they keep team sizes the same. It’ll be uncomfortable, but it’s healthy.”

Doing more with less will make BI teams more focused and efficient. “The problem with BI today is that it has gone the way of all IT things: centralized, slow, expensive, and inefficient.” Only good can come from greater agility, faster delivery, and adoption of tools that remove the need for anyone between a business person and the data can only be good.

A data architect at a leading tech vendor who asked for anonymity foresees a new crop of data-friendly executives. Traditionally, “business people have pushed away the IT stuff,” he told me. “It’s not fun for them. Why muddy the water when IT doesn’t even support what we need? The IT guys get to play with toys and be smart and on top.” Organizations keep measuring old, irrelevant stuff, he said, and data quality problems get swept under the rug. All that leads to “BI that’s not believed.” The new people, he believes, will be more analysis savvy.

Those newly empowered, analysis-savvy executives probably have the same appetite for the big, expensive solutions, several experts predicted. Instead, decision makers will move to smaller tools. One person advocated “getting beyond Cognos and Business Objects” and move toward smaller tools like Polyvista and Tableau.

It’s called “agile BI,” and it goes like this: forget the big meetings, forget the planning, forget the budgeting. Just get someone from IT and someone from business together and make a prototype in a week.

Dave Wells, an independent consultant after five and a half years as TDWI education director, reports that clients are asking for this. “Let’s just see what we can whip up in an hour or three,” he said. If the prototype doesn’t come up with the most useful answer, the two people on the team rework it until it does.

“People are no longer asking for the big heavy BI applications with a life span of five to ten years,” he said. “They want fast answers right now.”

It’s one solution for a chilled economy—and I’m looking for others for BI This Week. Have you heard any novel, out-of-the-box or off-the-wall ways that anyone has squeezed results from BI? Make a comment or use the contact form today.