Posted in in media on Oct 30th, 2008
DM Radio editor Eric Kavanagh puts on a scary mask for a special Halloween show this afternoon: “Scary Stories of Information Management.” Scaring you will be quite a trick after a year of cadaveric prose in BI articles and blogs. But there’s probably more where that came from. He wants your stories of fright and [...]
Posted in marketing/PR, storytelling on Oct 6th, 2008
In a good example of “show, don’t tell,” Tableau Software’s weblog demonstrates the power of its product with a story: how rich, middle-income and poor voters compare in liberal, conservative and battleground states. The political story is awkward to tell in words, but it’s easy in pictures. Pictures that tell stories is what Tableau’s all [...]
Posted in trends on Sep 24th, 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. [...]
Posted in visualization on Jul 20th, 2008
I often have to suppress a question while I listen to pitches for BI “solutions.” I want to interrupt and ask, “Hey, isn’t most of what you’re saying just bullshit?”
I’ve found an exception. That voice didn’t even make a peep Sunday as the three-day Tableau Software user conference unfurled in Seattle. Last night at a [...]
Posted in indicators on Apr 12th, 2008
I’ve almost got too much good stuff for my story in BI This Week about offbeat metrics. Stacey Barr, “the performance measure specialist” in Australia and Zach Gemignani at Juice Analytics in North Carolina both came through with insight-provoking cases.
Zach calls metrics for those hard-to-reach places where bookkeepers don’t go “franken-measures.” Stacey calls them “proxy [...]
Posted in systems on Mar 11th, 2008
Why did New York governor Eliot Spitzer ever pay more than $100 for a call girl? That’s what scientists at a state-funded research lab freaked out about when the news broke yesterday. To them the scandal was that the rest of the money could have gone to science.
Posted in culture on Mar 10th, 2008
The story from Dave Wells, former TDWI education director, is that Seattle University’s big cheeses—all Jesuits—met to talk about the university’s new BI project. Dave said the provost had been listening throughout, and at the end endorsed the project. “I appreciate that we all pray,” said the provost. “But at times we might need help [...]
Posted in events, storytelling on Feb 28th, 2008
I was half asleep as the TDWI keynote warmed up early last Thursday morning. Bob Paladino is not a bad speaker, but at first the good scrambled eggs and coffee were better. Then he got into the Southwest Airlines story, and I looked up.
The five guys at my table also looked up. They picked up [...]
Posted in marketing/PR on Feb 12th, 2008
I went to the post office box and found a rhinoceros. He should have been a bull, bulls being more at home in marketing, but let’s not be picky. He’s a rhino, in profile, with spots. He’s hawking analytics software.
Posted in data management on Jul 12th, 2007
A friend of Dashboardist recalls this story: He stood before a room full of IT people who worked on mainframes and asked them, “‘How many of you feel responsibility for the quality of the data?’”
Not one raised a hand. He said to them, “OK, now you’re the CIO and I’m a salesman. And I [...]