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 party-pooper. In 2007 at the TDWI conference in Las Vegas, a keynote speaker raised it one morning. Jonathan Koomey — author of Turning Numbers into Knowledge and one of those voices the BI world needs more of — did his best. But I could see the unfolding disaster from my banquet table, as attendees glanced at each other in scorn. When the lights went up, not one person raised a hand with any question or comment.

Now Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict, edited by Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill, tries it again.

You may wonder what sex, body counts, and politics have to do with data analysis, but try to keep an open mind here. The book promises to let us spit out the usual cud of business intelligence, data quality, and get to the real spice: the politics of data. I can’t wait to read it. For now, see Jack Shafer’s review on Slate.

I won’t be surprised if the book points out how each organization’s core group subtly chooses the stories its data tells. I’ve just finished Art Kleiner’s Who Really Matters, which goes into detail on these groups’ formation and influence, including how they define who’s in, who’s out, and why. It’s the essence of politics.

Though core-group members may not ever lay their smooth palms on any data, data is nonetheless coiffed to suit these people. Through layers of managerial interpretation and re-interpretation, their influence cascades all the way down to tiny decisions about how data’s summarized, what’s measured, how it’s measured, and who measures it.

Like other forms of expression within an organization — speech, email, jargon, attire, hair style, suit or T-shirt — data is part of the politics. Though this has a big effect on decision making, it seems rare that I find it on a BI-event agenda. BI’s scope needs to widen.

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 provides business analysts speed of thought visual analysis on data held in memory on their desktop machines.” All that’s fine, but it may as well have been about a whole bunch of other tools, too.

At the root of this fuzz, explained McDaniel, is that most analysts who concern themselves with tools don’t actually use the tools. They rely on demos , marketing, and hearsay.

Though much of McDaniel’s recent work has centered on Tableau — his second book is Rapid Graphs with Tableau Software and he gives training sessions around the country — he also has a long, credible trail back through BI and data mining. He was director of analytics at Netflix, and has worked with more than 50 companies in BI. His first book was SAS for Dummies.

“I love SAS,” he says. Still, he remembers his sister in law’s reaction to his book on SAS. She was not an analyst but a “people manager.” These are the ones, he says, who have hated BI because “it had been made into a priesthood.” When she had looked through the book, she said, “Oh, this is great” and put it down. But she read the Tableau book for a half hour and said, “You should come talk to some people I work with.” She had recognized what she could do with the tool.

McDaniel’s sister in law and many like her don’t care whether the data is “in memory,” they don’t see themselves as business analysts, they take “desktop” for granted, and they know “speed of thought” is just gloss.

The list of features really doesn’t matter. All that really matters is whether someone can do what needs to be done with the tool.

McDaniel imagines a throw down, a data analysis match. It would be open to any BI vendor. Each vendor would send their best people, and each team would receive a uniform set of data. Over some defined period, teams would analyze and then present the results to a panel of vendor-neutral judges.

The reward? Perhaps a signed copy of a Stephen McDaniel book, or maybe a beer, possibly both. But certainly, repute.

What do you think of the face-off idea? Please write a comment.

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 depended on what he wanted to learn. Is making sense of his data important? If yes, go. But there seemed to be more to his question.

He’s gone through one shady business after another since the early ’60s, when as a teenager he sold drugs on the street. Now he sells fake email addresses in huge blocks to Eastern European spammers. All his customers have had a good education, he tells me, yet most retain some of their families’ traditional ways. He describes them picking over his blocks of email addresses as if over oranges in a bin, rejecting one, taking another. They seem to rely entirely on feel, and Marco makes sure each new batch feels “fresh” and authentic year after year.

“Cool. My data’s real, real important to me,” said Marco. “So’s my know-how, my experiments, my research. Those experts in Vegas dish on how to manage all that, man?”

Definitely the data, I said, but not much on the qualitative end of his research. He was disappointed. 

“You know, you got me going on this insight thing, man,” he said. “And then you change the story. This business intelligence takes care of only some of my insight? Only some of it? What do they think, data’s the only way you get insight?”

He had a point. I thought fast. I said he should think of his operation like a speeding car. He liked that. I said he needed a “dashboard” to let him know how he was doing. He liked that, too. There was a course on Tuesday, I said, all about that.

“Cool, man. But what about my research? I got these journals I keep with my results and theories and shit like that. What about all that? I keep losing track of it all.”

I said I thought he was talking about knowledge management or something. 

“Yeah, that sounds like what I want. Knowledge management. They don’t do that there?” 

I explained that data was this event’s main focus. Other events … but he cut me off.

“No, man. Here’s what it’s about,” he said. “It’s all about marketing. I don’t know much about business intelligence, but I bet that every benefit, feature, whatever comes from a different tool. Each comes from a different vendor,” he said in a tired sing-song, “and the producers of this event have a line on a certain kind of vendor. To protect their game, they make up a category. Get hip, man. It’s always like that.” 

He quickly added, as if he had already bored himself, “How’s the food there? Can a guy score somethin’ to eat?”

The best Caesar’s can offer, I said. Then he had to go answer the door. I heard urgent knocking.

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.

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 day. My former boss, Michael Goodman, now president of Extra Mile Audience Research, worked most of the day with the PR manager to smooth out the buzz.

That afternoon, Goodman pulled the PR manager aside to warn her the Interop VP was very upset. She had complaining bitterly to him, “She never kills anyone at my events.”

Everybody’s talking about the recession, but that’s just theory at the buffet line. There, mini-recessions come and go. One day it’s not-too-bad pork loin, and the next day it’s lukewarm hot dogs.

Those hot dogs, served for lunch last Monday at Sage Summit in Denver, came on the slowest day. My last nourishment was from Southwest peanuts hours before. So I took not one but two hot dogs, but then found just mustard, catsup and relish. That’s a downturn.

Things picked up on Tuesday. Shoppers arrived. For lunch, some kind of tasty chicken. Several department heads who came by on Monday returned with good questions. Upturn.

On the flight home, I had peanuts again—with a full can of orange juice. Upturn before the descent.

This week it’s turkey, and then around we go again.

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 demons. Details here.

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 get it,” by which he meant all the once-standalone vendors that disappeared last year. As these companies get dragged further into the new parent, they’ll get it less and less.

The other added, “They don’t get collaboration, and they don’t get visualization…The big vendors just can’t innovate fast enough for the market…The next generation of BI will come from a new generation of vendors.”

I just happened to witness this conversation, but the same thoughts seemed to be just under the surface for several other industry experts I’ve talked to here.

On Monday, I talked to one of those innovators. LucidEra CEO Ken Rudin uses an analogy for business intelligence I like: owning a car shouldn’t require fixing it yourself. He hopes that within the next five years, conferences like TDWI’s deemphasize the technology and instead discuss effective metrics.

His company’s offer is intriguing. Give LucidEra access to your data, and within 48 hours his people will deliver two things: a full analytic environment in which you can see your data anew, plus the BI equivalent of an EKG.

Earlier Monday, Howard Dresner said after his keynote that there’s a “vacuum” of innovation and it’ll be filled from the little vendors who’re now sprouting.

This afternoon, Mark Madsen presented “Clues to the Future of Business Intelligence” at the Executive Summit. (See his slides here.) Among other clues, he compared the clumsy map of Oakland crime—developed by the city for more than $300,000—with an intuitive, almost Google-like map developed by a developer in his spare time. (The city’s response was to ban his IP to stop the developer from collecting data.)

The iPhone, the Mac, Google, YouTube and others have shown users much better interfaces than BI vendors have been delivering. And they’ve allowed people to interact online.

That’s what users expect of their BI interface now. He says it’s what they’ll demand.

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.

I can’t explain. I don’t know what happens. It’s black on white with something colorful but not too big at the top. There are a couple of links in the second paragraph and below but not too many.

Today’s is the second one. I read the first one, too, but I brushed it off. A fluke, I said. Then I read today’s. Not a fluke. The guy has something. What is it?

He’s pitching for DataMentors. His signature identifies him as the director of marketing.

He writes simply with a hint of a story. No jargon meant to impress me (which just annoys me). No vague phrases that could apply to anything, anywhere.

Here’s yesterday’s first sentence: “If your database keeps adding the same customer records over and over again, it may be suffering from a severe technology affliction called Datadupitis (dā-tə-düp-ī-təs).” That’s funny. Not a side-splitter, but it works. It’s also a tiny surprise, just enough.

Next sentence: “The fundamental problem: your database(s) isn’t recognizing your customers.” I take off a half point for the “s” in parentheses, but I give him a full two points for getting me to read the second sentence. This is new territory.

Third sentence: “That’s a customer service wreck just waiting to happen. So, how can you expect to possibly develop a profitable relationship with them?” I get goosebumps just having read any ezine’s third sentence. More goosebumps for the simple writing.

Let me reveal something here. I don’t have anything like the problem he’s describing. I have FileMaker, and I enter everything by hand. Yet I’ve come all the way to the third sentence.

The fourth sentence gives me chills it’s so short, so simple. “A database is a wonderful thing.” Yes!! Not that a database is a wonderful thing. Sure, fine. It’s the simplicity!

Compare his opening with those of three other BI-related ezines I chose at random (and haven’t even opened before now):

• Ezine #1: Headline: “Improve Business Performance with an Open Business Intelligence (BI) Model.” Body: “A collaborative reporting architecture encourages participation across user and producer communities and fosters an iterative report development process which speeds development and adoption of the reporting application” and blah, blah, blah.
• Ezine #2: Straight to the body: “The scale and pace of today’s business change is challenging us all to do more – better, faster and with greater efficiency.”
• Ezine #3: A big, graphic headline reads, “Whitepaper of the day,” followed by a thick horizontal ad. The whitepaper’s title: “Optimizing Data Content To Improve Marketing Performance,” followed by, “The traditional data industry has not seen true innovation in decade [sic].”
• Ezine #4: Under the ezine’s name and issue number, it begins, “View these Online Events recently held on xxxx.com” followed by bullet points: “Executive Command & Control: Governance of Risk, Performance Assurance & Operational Excellence; Project Risk – Why are 50% of IT projects still failing; Improving Operational Efficiency and Business Performance in Midsize Retailers…”

Nothing concrete, no hint of a story, no surprises. They waste their bytes on me.

Good job, Gordon Daly.

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.

BI is no more about data alone, he has said, than Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is only about brush strokes. For those of you whose brains itch with a sense that BI is ultimately a social practice, this is for you.

Among other things, he will propose a new definition of business intelligence and talk about cultivating a BI culture, “not exactly a science…something more like an art form.”

I can’t be there, but this story is just beginning.