Why should the smart people have all the fun with year-end predictions? You can issue your own! At this time of year, even hopeless nitwits can seem smart.

Once you set up a blog — any free service will do — all you have to do is throw together your trends. Keep these easy-to-use techniques in mind.

• Re-use last year’s trends. Does anyone really believe that 2010′s trends sat down in December for a cosmo and never stood up again? You can safely predict that this year’s trends will be next year’s, too.

• Search in Google for your industry’s name and “trends.” Take notes, rewrite a little bit and, boom, you’re an expert.

• Water the evergreens. For 2009, someone predicted, “Data interpretation will become a significant challenge for new BI users.” Will become? Can you imagine fewer business people having trouble interpreting data no matter what year it is?

• Follow in the draft of top vendors. Competition cyclists know that the easiest place to ride is just inches behind another rider. See where Oracle, IBM say they’re going and point in that direction. If a gang of marketing departments push an idea, it’s guaranteed to find at least a few new customers.

• Quantifying is risky but, done cleverly, it adds credibility. Just make sure your numbers can’t be verified. One clever expert sees 15 chiefs of analytics being hired in 2011. Bingo! The mere presence of a number, any number, gives the feel of certainty. Even if someone wanted to count, how would they do it?

• It’s good to be vague, but better to be incomprehensible. Suppose your crystal ball shows video becoming a big deal in 2011 (as if it weren’t already). Don’t just write “video,” as one hapless analyst did. Instead, pile on enough mumbo jumbo to let readers feel smart for having understood anything at all. Those who’ve tried to read 50 or 100 words will tweet about your “great” predictions.

• Aim for the horizon. Don’t let yourself be bound by others’ definition of “year.” If your vision fails to come true in 2011, you’re just that much further ahead of your time.

Above all, you must enter to win. After the first weeks of January, normal standards set in. If you feel like a fraud, remember that last week’s predictions are like last night’s eggnog. All people remember is the party, and all your readers will remember is your name.

We forget most failed predictions quickly. If you make a bad one, you just say “let’s move on,” and you’re as good as moved on. But sometimes you meet the kind of guy I say hello to near my office—the kind professional forecasters hope they never meet.

When he and I get stuck in line together at the little grocery store, we talk mostly about the weather, and lately the forecasts for rain have been wrong. The other day he grumbled, “And they never apologize.”

The weatherpeople never apologize? I’d never heard that before. What if there are more of these guys out there—reading my trend predictions for 2009?

Last January, after of having to predict trends for 2008, I bought a book about forecasting—actually, fortune telling, which is similar. The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading (2005; Ian Rowland) is practically a how-to for would-be psychics. I read about it in a New Yorker article’s unflattering comparison of the FBI’s profiling operation with storefront psychics.

The trick, essentially, is in the phrasing. Say it so you’re right no matter what the truth is. It works because most consumers want to believe you. But you knew that.

In early 2009, when all the forecasts are all in, when the last drop has fallen, I’m going to put them all together to look at the trends foretold by all the trend-spotters. All in one bucket. Bucket of what? We’ll see.

“Black swans” are the anti-gravity of predictive analytics. These events are so far off the charts that we dismiss the possibility out of hand. But when one occurs, it’s a doozy.

The Panic of ’08 may lead us straight into one of these, says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness among other works. He and his mentor, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, told NewsHour’s Paul Solman last week that what’s coming might make the Great Depression and the Long Depression of the 1870s seem small.

But before you lose sleep, mind this caveat: Taleb himself calls predictions “bullshit.” In a talk he gave in 2006 he said, “We’re suckers for anyone who talk to us about the future.” (Listen here.)

He’s getting lots of attention these days. Taleb foresaw this financial crisis. Lately, he has made money for investment clients based on that prescient gloom. Others saw it coming, too. A banker told me in 2003 when I asked for his outlook, “Oh, pal! You’re talkin’ to Darth Vader,” and he sketched the scenario that began unfolding last year.

It’s all about turbulence, Taleb theorizes. Our system is “over-optimized” and has too little slack. It can’t absorb much shock. Taleb says that’s how a small shortage of oil sent the per-barrel price from $25 to $150. It’s also how a small mistake in one big bank sends shivers through other banks.

Perhaps it’s also how a dollar bill on a Wall Street trading floor—imagined last week by The Onion—caused a surge of optimism.

The Onion’s jokes often come true, but optimism is out for now. Today the world feels like it did after September 11, when we assumed the terrorists had another one coming at us. Or after the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco. I had grown up in the area and had felt lots of quakes, but a year my stomach clenched whenever a heavy truck rumbled by.

If there’s any comfort, it might be in what the ever-entertaining Ed Brown said once in a talk at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. He told about a middle-aged man he’d seen at the baths, submerged in the hottest water. A few kids watched him as he encouraged them to try it. The man said, “Don’t resist the heat. You just kind of let it enter you.” Ignore the voice in your head that screams at the unknown.

While there’s time, read Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness. I haven’t yet read The Black Swan, but I’ve heard it’s also very interesting. Available now.

Oh, and take off your scary mask when you walk through any financial district on Halloween.

Last January, I surveyed BI consultants to see what the season’s recession was doing to BI. Things were going fine, most reported. This week I’m following up with them on the Panic of ’08.

Those who look at how things are say the outlook is mixed: big projects already under way will continue, while smaller ones will stop.

Those who look at how things could be say the outlook is bright: BI is critical to more organizations than ever before.

“It’ll be an enormous shot in the arm,” said one data architect at a big, big vendor. Banks, for example, will find new fondness in their hearts for BI. It will be their new compass for navigating a new world of regulation.

Closer to D.C, another data man also sees a bonanza, though his optimism is measured. Mark Albala, president of the recently formed InSight Partners, said, “It’s not a BI issue it’s a trustworty information issue and BI is part of the puzzle.” More on that soon.

Almost no one has mentioned Government 2.0 in the same breath as business intelligence—yet they’re destined for each other.

Government 2.0 is about turning the old one-way dialog, from all levels of government to you, into genuine collaboration. Voting as we know it is “dumb,” while blogging, wikis, mashups, collaborative filtering, social networking sites and other Web 2.0 stuff is “smart.” Government will listen. Government will engage. We’ll all have a great time just being citizens. Perhaps when we do vote, the choices will make sense.

Even if, as I suspect, all that takes decades to play out, the technology to run it will march to the front line right away.

In back of all that cool Web 2.0 stuff will certainly be the data wrangling technology and methods for managing the wisdom deposited by you and me: master data management, data warehousing, data mining, harvesting of unstructured data, and visualization.

Can government do it alone? Not likely. One of the most intriguing ideas—to be proposed this fall in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology—would have government provide just an API: take your data to mine it, store it, repackage it, and visualize it at will. Plug’n'play.

It’ll be a new day for data and for an industry that knows how to make sense of it.

Three years ago, I spent four months in my Sicilian grandmother’s home town editing a book I had begun to hate. Time cues were sparse: I church bells four times an hour, a nearby friend for coffee once a day, and cannoli once a week. To ensure I made progress, I clung to my homemade FileMaker Pro-based timekeeper.

At first, the dismal results came in every day: When I felt that I had put in a good five or six hours of steady work, the end-of-day tally—with all the breaks for email, meals, snacks, and quick walks—usually amounted to about two hours of actual work.

That’s what got me thinking. Who says one-person operations can’t use business intelligence?

I don’t want MicroStrategy to outfit my tiny office, now near San Francisco, with its latest and greatest. No, but I do want a company like Intuit, ever more interested in the one-person market, to understand that money isn’t the only data individuals should track.

Time isn’t money, it’s more important than that. Productive time is the most consistent leading indicator there is. Waste your time and you’ll have no money to track.

This is business intelligence for the lone wolf, even the herded wolf.

Sure, you can use your own FileMaker setup or any of those client-billing applications. You click this button to start a billing period and that one to end it. But that takes discipline. I don’t know about you, but I exert every ounce of mine on staying on the program. I forget to click the little button and, damn!, at what point did that consultant’s column send me into a stupor?

If there’s one thing I’d like to find under the Christmas tree, it’s an application that does personal performance analytics.

It automatically tracks and categorizes work done on the computer. Out of the office, it works on an iPhone.

It detects what time I start in the morning and what time I drift away into surfing. It knows the difference between work, goofing off or eating at my desk while I scan email.

It considers all the clues to take a guess. The little brain inside says, “Let’s see, he was clicking away at Word until 9:21…” After that point, its log shows no phone calls, no Web pages downloading, no email opened or sent. The little microphone detected less noise than usual at 9:22, so no visitors had come by. “Hmm, let’s mark it at 9:21 and see what he says.”

A more forgiving “preferences” setting might guess a few minutes later. Like a loyal assistant, it would offer its guesses for review and approval.

“Sir, I would say you had a less than productive day yesterday. Am I correct?”

“No, you fool! I was thinking!”

“How much of it was productive, sir?”

Time tracking is just the beginning. It would also let me define my own, weird key performance indicators. Did I hit my daily hurdle of contact attempts? Did I run? Did I spend enough time this week actually working?

It would scan every scrap of evidence it could get its hands on to detect patterns.

Once in a while, I issue a grand invitation to myself. Come and see the trends. Buffet served.

There, after “brief introductory remarks,” the application offers rich what-if visual analysis, Tableau-like. I see what times of day I actually produce the most words, talk the most, listen the most, field the most email. Correlate production of words and phone calls with arrival of checks. Correlate this or that individual with checks or mood.

It’s like a smart, statistics-savvy aide. The difference is that when a human aide finds you passed out from exhaustion, it brings you a glass of water. But I don’t want that. I’m a lone wolf, and I get it myself.

If there’s one reliable sign that a recession is coming, it’s when the experts say they see none coming. I’ve survived four. “Oh, maybe a slowdown, yes…” they say. Now, in today’s New York Times, Charles Duhigg argues that what’s unlikely is a “full blown depression.” Quoth Duhigg:

Why? Because so many of them have spent so much time studying the Great Depression and trying to figure out how to react more effectively if things turn really bad again.

Would that be the same kind of study France and Britain did after World War I to avoid World War II? The kind General Motors did to sustain its dominance over the pre-hybrid Toyota?

Quick, buy gold!

Really, to infer from this that a depression is likely could be just as silly as the people who take official denials about Martian spaceships as proof that they really exist.

I don’t infer anything. I just don’t remember hearing the D word during past recessions.

If this year’s economic slowdown lets BI-ready companies “kill the competition,” as one consultant I talked to last week expects them to, BI itself will win in not-so-obvious ways.

First, if BI really does show its stuff, projects will attract and keep good people more easily. “Every BI client have been people-short,” says Sid Adelman, “either with no headcount or unable to attract good people.”

Second, BI will finally get the attention of company “big guys,” as one guy puts it (who can be called only a senior ETL architect at a major BI vendor).

Mr. Anonymous says, “I find it astounding that people go into project wo looking at power dynamic in an organization. They just kind of do stuff without thinking who’s going to look at this….If we’re competing with Little League and seat-of-the-pants, no one’s going to look at BI unless the big guy does.”

People think that good data makes for good decisions, he says. Well, no. “What about that French bank [Société Générale]? Did they really now know?” And, “Take Enron. They knew the facts.”

It’s that nasty human side showing its inconvenient face again.

BI was made for turbulent times, wasn’t it? At least the handful of consultants think so whom I talked to this week for my TDWI article. Unlike at the gloomy economic forum in Davos, these guys have not a shred of fear among them.

BI leader Claudia Imhoff warns, “The glory days are gone,” you need BI to aim well at the right customers and products. Esteemed consultant and author Sid Adelman says, “Companies with good BI are going to kill the competition.” Jill Dyche, also a well-known consultant, tells a story about a medical-supply company that’s using BI to trump the competition. Others report similar things.

How does this season compare with the past recession? Tom Quintal at the LoganBritton consulting group in Boston says it’s unlike 2001. Then some client or other called up every day to cancel or curtail. This time, not one has.

Frankly, though, all that optimism may be great, but it’s not so much fun to write the rah-rah-rah. A story that’s all good news lacks salt.

One senior ETL architect whom I can’t name is the most fun. What troubles him is not BI’s value. It’s that the “big guys” don’t buy into it.

Just having good data doesn’t necessarily lead to good decisions. He says, “Take Enron. They knew the facts.”

I’m filing the story with the editor late Saturday, and it comes out late Tuesday Tuesday, February 5. If you have anything to add, please do. Either submit a comment or use the contact form.

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.

If he did, we might have had more fun with predictions for 2008. Now we’re stuck with these: Consolidation will continue, smaller vendors will sprout, deployment will be easier, software as a service will take off, visualization will emerge… Did I miss any? Well, who cares?

Where are all the tech-savvy clairvoyants when you need one?

A friend of mine used to swear by someone she called “the common sense psychic.” She’d get her on the phone and tell her all about the problem of the day. Yes, said the psychic, and what happened then? And then? After a while, the psychic put the phone down and came back a few minutes later. Her perception was always right on, and no wonder.

In the trade, that’s called a cold reading. You gather facts and spill them back in such a way that you cover all the bases.

Foretelling the next 12 months of BI is a warm reading. What started to happen will continue to happen.

I myself was one of those year-end wizards, but I was able to produce little contrast with everybody else. Perhaps I should have consulted a horoscope and summarized all the signs, like this.

Your star is on the rise. Changes over the next three months will inspire you to expand your horizons. Though prospects look uncertain at the beginning of the year, give it time. The surprise opportunity thrusts you into the spotlight amid roadblocks. Just keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll be fine.

Oh, hell. Let’s cut the crap and skip to the one interesting and courageous prediction from any BI leader. It comes from Mark Madsen, who looks ahead and sees that goatees are going out of style.