marketing

Still a “tool” by any other name

April 20, 2012

A marketing manager I know stopped me in mid sentence. He didn’t want me to call his business intelligence product a “tool.” Why? “It sounds small,” he said. But it is small, I pointed out. It’s smaller than many others in its space. It’s downloaded in under a minute and unpacks itself on a desktop [...]

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The Dow of BI

June 23, 2011

How do we take the pulse of the BI/analytics industry? What if those who promote the technology, advise the clients, and build the systems actually measured their collective progress with a number? It would be an ongoing, forever-updating, simple benchmark. It would be the industry’s Dow Jones Industrial Average.

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Antidote for too-dull-to-read case studies: fiction

March 21, 2011

Business intelligence involves the most triumphant stories. In the best cases, they meander all the way from “we were really screwed up” all the way down to “new knowledge, new profits.” Yet too many case studies are too dry to stick. Marketers know that the human part of those stories is what makes them stick, yet it’s hard to reveal anything publicly. Now a Financial Times writer argues that fiction — not non-fiction — is the best way to understand Libya under its dictator, so perhaps it’s the best way to understand some organizations. So try fiction.

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Smarter, faster, roomier inside

February 2, 2011

What do you get if appliances keep getting smarter, faster, and roomier inside? Choice A: abolition of IT, because who needs geeks? Choice B: license to be sloppy. You guessed it: sloppy and proud. Out of the loud, unruly marketplace we have now for analytics appliances will come new, bold categories to satisfy every need. [...]

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Librarian looks up a real “solution”

April 21, 2010

A friend of mine runs the library at a small university near me, and she hears pitches all the time for neat technology. I suppose she doesn’t hear much about BI, just library stuff, but let’s not get hung up on the details. To keep her priorities straight, she keeps a “ruthless focus” on the [...]

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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 [...]

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Lessons from LucidEra on BI for the mid-market

August 3, 2009

Here are two tips from LucidEra veterans Ken Rudin and Darren Cunningham about BI in the mid-market: Forget “freemium” — the new term for free service leading to paid service — and be wary of users’ ability to analyze data. Rudin co-founded the company and in June saw it fold for lack of renewed funding [...]

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Two analysts’ paths

July 21, 2009

Yesterday I asked business analysts at the Tableau conference in Seattle about their work. Here are two quick sketches. • One of the two arrived at her present employer six years ago to do the company’s first analysis of its website sales. She used several years of accumulated data to show which content was making [...]

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Rejecting stale tech marketing words

March 12, 2009

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 [...]

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Fooled by proximity?

February 18, 2009

Almost the same moment I read that for the fourth year in a row executives rate BI the top tech priority in 2009, I hear Tableau Software’s news: last week saw the most downloads of trial software ever. “Not by a little, by a lot,” says marketing and PR VP Elissa Fink. The poll of [...]

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