When, when will someone write a novel about business intelligence? I can see it now. Amazon will try to sell me From Here to Analysis, Data in the Afternoon, and Lolita, DBA.

But titles are easy. Writing the novel might be tough, since the author would have to run on sheer imagination. There’s no apparent intrigue. The BI crowd plays it safe. Forget sex. The BI crowd works too hard. Forget guns. The BI crowd shoots only bullet points.

In fact, the best strategy might be Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite: the macguffin. It’s a plot element, often ephemeral, that drives the main characters to do what they do regardless of the macguffin’s value. As the plot moves along, the macguffin fades into the background.

In BI, the most common mcguffin is technology — while the real issue is effective use of data in business decisions.

Remember “Psycho”? The woman steals money from her boss and flees. Her boss is sure to follow. We’re looking off in that direction when out of nowhere comes the shower scene. Holy crap! We never saw that one coming!

Hitchcock’s aim was fear, but McGuffins have other uses, too. In business intelligence, the macguffin creates comfort. In the BI plot, the shower scene is instead endless talk about technology, data quality, data this and data that. All the time, lurking in the culture, unexamined and feared, is classic business dysfunction. But leadership can’t fix it, so they go shopping.

What’s a novelist to do? Use it all. Study up on the technology for a week and interview people on the front lines. Then drape BI technology over a standard plot set in an enterprise.

Business people buy BI tools, and so they’ll buy the BI thriller.

Why should the smart people have all the fun with year-end predictions? You can issue your own! At this time of year, even hopeless nitwits can seem smart.

Once you set up a blog — any free service will do — all you have to do is throw together your trends. Keep these easy-to-use techniques in mind.

• Re-use last year’s trends. Does anyone really believe that 2010′s trends sat down in December for a cosmo and never stood up again? You can safely predict that this year’s trends will be next year’s, too.

• Search in Google for your industry’s name and “trends.” Take notes, rewrite a little bit and, boom, you’re an expert.

• Water the evergreens. For 2009, someone predicted, “Data interpretation will become a significant challenge for new BI users.” Will become? Can you imagine fewer business people having trouble interpreting data no matter what year it is?

• Follow in the draft of top vendors. Competition cyclists know that the easiest place to ride is just inches behind another rider. See where Oracle, IBM say they’re going and point in that direction. If a gang of marketing departments push an idea, it’s guaranteed to find at least a few new customers.

• Quantifying is risky but, done cleverly, it adds credibility. Just make sure your numbers can’t be verified. One clever expert sees 15 chiefs of analytics being hired in 2011. Bingo! The mere presence of a number, any number, gives the feel of certainty. Even if someone wanted to count, how would they do it?

• It’s good to be vague, but better to be incomprehensible. Suppose your crystal ball shows video becoming a big deal in 2011 (as if it weren’t already). Don’t just write “video,” as one hapless analyst did. Instead, pile on enough mumbo jumbo to let readers feel smart for having understood anything at all. Those who’ve tried to read 50 or 100 words will tweet about your “great” predictions.

• Aim for the horizon. Don’t let yourself be bound by others’ definition of “year.” If your vision fails to come true in 2011, you’re just that much further ahead of your time.

Above all, you must enter to win. After the first weeks of January, normal standards set in. If you feel like a fraud, remember that last week’s predictions are like last night’s eggnog. All people remember is the party, and all your readers will remember is your name.

One part of data analysis is deciding which data to look at and which to ignore. Now “America’s finest news source” illustrates the task in “Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics to Find Cause of Dorm Fire” in its usual, thoughtful manner. Yes, I mean The Onion.

The TDWI San Diego conference opens in just 10 weeks, and some people are already thinking about who they hope to avoid.

“We’re sure not going to hide out in a stairway,” one promises but has no other strategy so far. Speculation about who’d win should it come down to a good old bar fight, yes. But only in fun.

One of these knows what an accidental meeting can be like. After avoiding someone for two days, he slipped into an elevator to find his nemesis there filling the space. Going down?

This public service announcement opens on a CSI-like scene. Let’s call it “CSI: Marketing Crimes Division.” The lieutenant asks the lab guy, “What have you got?”

“It’s a tough one,” says the lab guy.

Lying before them under bright lights on a stainless steel examination table is the weapon: an email printed on plain white paper. The lieutenant turns it gently with tongs, then reads it. “‘Brillo-BI is designed for the vast majority of businesspeople who do not have access to big BI solutions.’” A list of features follows in bullet points.

He snorts, “I don’t get it. The product can’t be for everybody. Who’s it really for? What’s it do better?”

“That’s just it,” says the lab guy. “We can’t tell. And the perpetrators left no fingerprints, no blood…”

“How many words?”

“About 150, start to finish.”

“What a waste.”

A junior detective bursts in with news. “The company’s on life support. They put everything into this marketing campaign, and now…”

“Same old story,” the lieutenant growls looking down at the email. “Just once, I’d like to see one of these marketing people indicted.”

A solemn screen finishes the ad. It says in stark white letters on black, “Remember the unique selling proposition. It’s life or death.”

Do the TDWI San Diego organizers think we’re on a diet? Are attendees and exhibitors no longer paying full fare? I try, but I can’t quite forgive the elimination of hot breakfast.

You may recall the spread that once honored us: chafing dishes full of scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, potatoes, biscuits alongside gravy, crisp red seedless grapes and fans of sliced honeydew and cantaloupe. Also three kinds of muffins, cold cereal and hot cereal, too. All were continually refilled to encourage bountiful first and second helpings.

At this show, sadly, there are no hot chafing dishes, there is no melon, there is no cereal of any kind. There are just muffins and, far off to the side as if to retard consumption, a tray of bagels.

Though I cannot imagine why TDWI would risk everlasting shame in Chowhound or Yelp, I do know one thing. Muffins alone don’t cut it. Bring back the hot breakfast.

Please give two hands, clapping, for this new BI haiku from the Business Intelligence Portal in the UK. (It was submitted as a comment to my original post, “BI haiku.”)

extract from your systems
leave overnight to churn
predict the future
:)

“Eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables.” That’s Michael Pollan’s haiku-like dictum for eating. Let’s have some faux haiku, or senryū, to describe business intelligence, defined broadly. That could take lifetimes to ponder, or at least a couple of fiscal quarters.

First, we must bow to the ancestors. The eldest and most revered is Charlie Varon, who with unknown accomplices enriched the world with haiku error messages. A more recent ancestor is Juice Analytics. Compared with them, we are but pale shadows.

So far, here’s what I have:

Have you got one? Post it as a comment.

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.

I’ve read about an 84-year-old farmer in North Dakota who reads pig spleens the way mainstream fortune tellers read tarot. Sadly, he doesn’t service the business intelligence industry.

If he did, we might have had more fun with predictions for 2008. Now we’re stuck with these: Consolidation will continue, smaller vendors will sprout, deployment will be easier, software as a service will take off, visualization will emerge… Did I miss any? Well, who cares?

Where are all the tech-savvy clairvoyants when you need one?

A friend of mine used to swear by someone she called “the common sense psychic.” She’d get her on the phone and tell her all about the problem of the day. Yes, said the psychic, and what happened then? And then? After a while, the psychic put the phone down and came back a few minutes later. Her perception was always right on, and no wonder.

In the trade, that’s called a cold reading. You gather facts and spill them back in such a way that you cover all the bases.

Foretelling the next 12 months of BI is a warm reading. What started to happen will continue to happen.

I myself was one of those year-end wizards, but I was able to produce little contrast with everybody else. Perhaps I should have consulted a horoscope and summarized all the signs, like this.

Your star is on the rise. Changes over the next three months will inspire you to expand your horizons. Though prospects look uncertain at the beginning of the year, give it time. The surprise opportunity thrusts you into the spotlight amid roadblocks. Just keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll be fine.

Oh, hell. Let’s cut the crap and skip to the one interesting and courageous prediction from any BI leader. It comes from Mark Madsen, who looks ahead and sees that goatees are going out of style.