Minding data’s pedigree
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 [...]
Feature lists miss the point
So many people who should know better seem to miss the point when they mention Tableau. Why? I asked BI veteran Stephen McDaniel for his thoughts — which he gave, but then went on to suggest an almost unheard of challenge: a data analysis face-off among vendors. Consider this description by a BI analyst: “Tableau [...]
Marco looks to BI for help
My friend Marco’s spam-bait operation was down last year, and he’s been asking me what business intelligence can do for him. He had just read one of TDWI’s promo emails last night when he called me again. “I like Vegas. Should I go?” he asked from somewhere that sounded far away. I said it all [...]
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 [...]
Blame it on PR
Apparently a true story I just heard from a former boss: Back when he managed Comdex, the giant tech show, he shared a PR manager with a rival VP. That VP often felt short-changed by the PR manager. At the 2000 Comdex, a reporter got food poisoning at an off-site event and died the next [...]
Upturn, downturn, hot dogs
Everybody’s talking about the recession, but that’s just theory at the buffet. There, mini-recessions come and go. One day it’s not-too-bad pork loin, and the next day it’s lukewarm hot dogs.
Scary stories of information management today on DM Radio
DM Radio editor Eric Kavanagh puts on a scary mask for a special Halloween show this afternoon: “Scary Stories of Information Management.” Scaring you will be quite a trick after a year of cadaveric prose in BI articles and blogs. But there’s probably more where that came from. He wants your stories of fright and [...]
Better than free food at TDWI San Diego
Two BI leaders walk into the Sunday night reception at the TDWI conference in San Diego. Each is as eminent as you get in BI, and they hadn’t seen each other in months. After hello, they got into what’s more important to them than the free food. One says, “Business Objects and Cognos just don’t [...]
My god, a BI ezine I’ve actually read
So many ezines, so many pitches, so much color, so much urgency, so much of so much. And then along comes—let me check the name—yes, Gordon Daly with a little ezine that’s nothing but a short letter (look it up: letter!) and I actually read it.
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.
keep looking »