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 him reason to run. It seemed like his only reason, he recalled in a TDWI keynote two years ago. One day he returned after only 10 minutes. His wife asked, “What, is it raining?” No, the battery had run down and there was no reason to run.

Frank emails from home in the Netherlands that he’ll speak on “philosophy, discussing truth, reality and what is good.”

Until February, read his weblog. See “Medieval Best Practices,” “What is fact-based, anyway?,” and “Marx, Google and Facebook.”

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.

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 can’t identify. “You have a lot of people who exaggerate their ability to combine data to provide business solutions. … They don’t prototype, they don’t profile, they don’t actually think about the problem or do testing or even send some high school data analyst out with Excel to put something together that [the customer] might want. They don’t do that.”

Many sales people tout EII because that’s what they have to sell, he says. “The EII tools give you your data, warts and all,” he says. It’ll work fine as a data warehouse substitute “if the data’s pretty clean to start with, if it has a somewhat similar structure, if you can define the data you need, if the data’s relatively common across all the sources, and if there’s not much duplication.”

Even if the salesperson has a more appropriate tool than what the customer asks for, the customer may never hear about it. “‘Fine!,’” thinks the salesperson. “‘If you want to buy a hammer, that’s fine. If you want to buy a wrench, that’s fine. It’s not like I care. It’s just sales to me.’”

Just once, says my source, he’d like to hear one of these questions: “How long does it take for a novice to become OK at this task?” Or, “How long would it take for an expert to become proficient at these two things?” Or, “If I have a failure, what is your tool’s usual process for recovery, and what gives your tool more integrity than others?”

Mark Madsen, meanwhile, has been been thinking about similar problems but from a different perspective. He’s research director at the Third Nature consultancy and a keynote speaker at this month’s TDWI conference in Las Vegas.

One source of problems he sees is vendor marketing. “It’s all about ‘our tool does this’ or ‘has these features,’” he writes in email. “A lot of people don’t think about them that way. They think about them as ‘what this tool is for.’” People end up using an ETL tool for real-time synchronization, for example, or a federation tool in place of a data warehouse.

Even product documentation can lead users down dark paths. “All those docs that say what the features are help when you know what feature you want,” he writes. “When you’re trying to accomplish a task, you’re thinking in a different way.” A common result: convoluted solutions.

“I once did something in an ETL tool,” he writes, “and the product developer said, ‘That’s not how you do that.’ They had built around an improper conception of how users apply it.”

Design schools tell you that every user has a theory of how anything works, he writes, which determines their approach to it. Wrong theories explain why people push on doors that need to be pulled, for example. He says that this insight has made him change his approach to teaching his courses or showing clients.

“I’ve realized that I need to start with the ‘what this thing is for’ and move into what you do with it, and how it works.”

Mark may go into this more in his keynote at this month’s TDWI World Conference in Las Vegas. His long-running “Clues to the Future of Business Intelligence” — perhaps the “Cats” of tech presentations — has been one of the most interesting I’ve seen in any tech industry. I expect “Stop Paving the Cowpath” to be worthwhile.

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.

Mark Madsen might have appreciated that bird. He’s the only one in the industry I can think of who’s able to grip an audience. In his presentations, you’re more likely to see Big Bird than dead abstractions. (Too bad he had to cancel his Night School session at TDWI on recommendation technology, “Books, Movies and BI.”)

Last year in Las Vegas, Bob Paladino woke up an audience with a story about Southwest Airlines. Dave Wells, Steve Dine, Steve Hoberman and others routinely tell stories to liven things up and make points that stick.

When speakers lose control of their message, only one point comes across: a speaker’s personal charm, knowledge and passion does not easily translate to the stage. Many in the audience, bored by slide after tedious slide, remember to check email on Blackberries or they simply glaze over.

Then you’re grateful for the suspense of a blinking Fresnel light: will it or won’t it burn out?

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 intelligence” or instead of it. I’m not sure.

They’re both veterans of technology wars, fads, shifts, realignments and convergences. Both are among the most eminent of BI thought leaders. They’ve given their suggestion a lot of thought.

You may ask why? For one thing, they explain, business intelligence has become too closely associated with analytics and data warehousing. They decided it would be easier to offer a new term than try to straighten out the old one. What will keep the same thing from happening to the new term? A fair question.

A second reason for the new term: they’d like to get your attention.

They hope to have the attention of several hundred attendees tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. at TDWI World Conference in Las Vegas. They’ll explain in detail during their keynote. The hot breakfast, restored by popular demand since last August, won’t hurt.

The reason most IT marketing puts features out in front, instead of benefits, is that marketers got in the habit of pitching to geeks. That audience craves obscurity. Imagine what would happen if the business people knew what all those BI tools did!

That’s not my observation. I heard it from a VP of business development in the exhibition hall at TDWI conference in Las Vegas earlier this year. (I just came across the conversation in my notes.) You may not be surprised that his company is absolutely post-geek.

He thinks that era is passing. A younger audience is upon us that grew up on data. They don’t put up with the old work-behind-the-curtain stuff.

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 out front, you’re hiding something.” I say the same goes for jargon-encrusted features and benefits.

I went to the post office box and found a rhinoceros. The clever people who produced this brochure should have used a bull instead, bulls being more at home in marketing, but let’s not be picky. He’s a rhino with spots, and he’s hawking analytics software.

He’s leading the “British invasion” with software that’s like him: “brutally forceful” and “amazingly agile.” Best of all, he’s going to be at a reception in Las Vegas serving bangers and mash, fish and chips, single malt scotch and leading some go-go girls.

Go-go girls? Yes, after all, business intelligence is all about the human story. Let’s have more humans! Bring in the humans! You can hear the marketing and PR people scribbling furiously on the yellow pads: business intelligence needs human stories.

You’ve got to feed humans, someone says above the scribbling. Ah! More scribbling.

What’ll we feed them? Long discussion. Let’s break for lunch.

It’s the new marketing: get attention but ignore the hangover. It’s like Rumsfeld’s war machine gadget, with the ultra-light infantry (amazing agile, brutally forceful) sweeping through and leaving everybody who was there before to close in behind.

I just don’t understand why business intelligence marketers don’t make better use of stories. I know, It would take guts. It would take guts to get actual customers to let their stories be told. Who wants to admit that, gosh, they didn’t have total control before the miracle solution arrived and saved butts across the enterprise? Well, I bet there is someone. In fact, here’s one I researched and wrote.

It would take guts, and that’s why we’ll never see much of it. But at least it would be more credible, and would say more, than a rhino with spots.

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.

They just can’t get a break there. Celebrities come and go, often in private garages, and the poor picture poppers mope around like neutered cats.

Las Vegas is where the money-makers have their eyes on the ball: the little guys who lay down their spare change at the roulette wheel, Keno parlor and slot machine.

At Harrah’s casinos and probably others, they do more than watch. It’s all about data, and like good card counters everywhere they keep figuring the odds on every known player.

Harrah’s customer-relationship management, aka CRM, won recognition from our very own TDWI in 2000. Harrah’s is said to know, for example, that gamblers who lose money (forget winning) for 18, 20, 24 hours or more actually give up less money than those who go for shorter stints with breaks in between.

What’s a casino keeper to do? Well, he goes down to the hard-working but about-to-be-fatigued player and presents a nice little meal voucher. “Mr. Player, we’ve noticed that you’ve been losing money for five hours straight. We’d like you to have dinner now—on the house—at Bad Restaurant With A View.”

The player, rested and fed, almost always returns to play more than he would have otherwise.

The money’s in the data.