muse

Is BI boring yet?

September 24, 2008

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations author Clay Shirky says that a technology’s social effects—substitute “business” effects if you want — usually occur just when a technology has become boring. For example, email. It used to be something we talked about: “Do you have email?” “You mean the Internets?” And so on. [...]

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Ghostly outlines of Government 2.0

June 18, 2008

I was thinking about Government 2.0 at about midnight last night—when the dark, quiet world gives way to ghosts. Then it’s easy to imagine BI tools and methods opening government to the masses.

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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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Dave Wells “is on to something”

May 6, 2008

I’ve been asking known BI mavens what they make of thoughts by TDWI’s recently departed education director, Dave Wells. I summarized our Q&A a few days ago here Among those who’ve responded, the consensus is that, as one person put it, “he’s got something there.” They’ll all be watching for it all to develop. The [...]

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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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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.

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BI predictions out the other end

January 3, 2008

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.

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Managing by walking around with a dashboard on your head

August 7, 2007

Imagine an executive walking around with a “dashboard” on his head. It looks like a pair of sporty sunglasses, but it does much more. Whereever he turns his head, pop-up windows tell him what he’s looking at. He doesn’t even have to ask “What’s going on in that cubicle?” Detailed background on everyone from temps [...]

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“Poets are the original systems thinkers”

July 26, 2007

Here’s a morsel with possibly no practical value at all. It’s from last Sunday’s New York Times on what CEOs read: “I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers,” says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports … [...]

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