las vegas

Frank Buytendijk to keynote at TDWI Las Vegas 2012

August 8, 2011

The TDWI keynote speaker who told about jogging with a chip in his shoe is coming back. Frank Buytendijk, always entertaining and thought provoking, will be the Monday morning keynote speaker at next February’s TDWI conference in Las Vegas, according to TDWI education director Paul Kautza this morning. The chip counted his steps, which gave [...]

Read the full article →

How Lyza stole the show at TDWI Las Vegas

March 11, 2010

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Tools and those who enable their misuse

February 1, 2010

To get a data architect I know worked up, just ask him about how customers end up buying the wrong tools. How about sales people who push federation tools on those who actually need data warehouses? “It all sounds extremely sexy,” says my source, who works for a major business intelligence vendor and whom I [...]

Read the full article →

In dead bird vs. flow chart, bird wins

March 2, 2009

So many BI flow charts resemble the view out my hotel window in Las Vegas on the rooftop just below: a tangle of ducts, pipes, platforms, valves, and big metal boxes. What got my attention was a bird that had landed on a metal box and died.

Read the full article →

Let’s call the whole thing DI

February 26, 2009

You say dayta and I say dahta. You say business intelligence—and now Colin White and Claudia Imhoff say “decision intelligence.” They may want you to say it, too, depending on what you mean. Now or later—yesterday afternoon it didn’t sound clear just when—they’d like you to say “decision framework.” Perhaps that’s in addition to “decision [...]

Read the full article →

The trouble with IT marketing

September 23, 2008

Why does so much IT marketing put features out in front instead of benefits?

Read the full article →

Pay no attention to that little product behind the jargon

March 3, 2008

A trade pub dear to my heart praised the healthy “buzz” at February’s TDWI conference. Yeah, but some of it sounded an ungrounded circuit. So much jargon, so little meaning. Kevin Brown of Tableau Software and I were talking about it. He said, “Marketing should be simple.” For example, “if you don’t give the price [...]

Read the full article →

Brutally amazing: how not to pitch analytics

February 12, 2008

I went to the post office box and found a rhinoceros. He should have been a bull, bulls being more at home in marketing, but let’s not be picky. He’s a rhino, in profile, with spots. He’s hawking analytics software.

Read the full article →

Eyes on the ball in Las Vegas

February 6, 2008

The greatest BI show of them all opens a week from this Sunday in Las Vegas, the TDWI World Conference. Naturally, anything about Vegas and The Strip draws my attention—such as Sunday’s story about the local paparazzi.

Read the full article →