metaphors

Data intimacy

February 25, 2009

Long before Scott Davis made the self-service ETL tool he calls Lyza, he tried to find out how analysts really work. He remembers in particular the woman in a focus group who said, “I want to stay close to the data.” He didn’t understand at first. The data was right in front of her, neatly [...]

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BI culture: not a science, more like an art form

May 9, 2008

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.

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99 and 44/100ths pure data

April 25, 2008

TDWI’s just-departed education director Dave Wells wants the BI industry to put better focus on seeing trends in data and not so much on cleaning the data.

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Facing up to the dashboard metaphor

July 27, 2007

After about three quarters of an oatmeal stout, my old friend Sam the BI developer wondered aloud, “What is the ideal dashboard?” There was no need to call Steve Few or Edward Tufte. I had the answer right away. (I had been sipping an oatmeal stout myself.)

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Blinded by the “check engine” light

June 13, 2007

Late last month on the Juice Analytics weblog, they were talking about Stephen Few’s new concept, the “faceted analytics display.“ I like the idea, and I’m sure FADs are important. I just hate to see Few resort to a new term because inept designers have spoiled “dashboard.” Dashboard is a valuable metaphor and should be [...]

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