Two analysts’ paths
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 [...]
Also “not BI”
From a reader who identified with “That’s not BI“: His product has performed BI functions for many years, though it still goes unacknowledged except by users. “Sometimes the looking down the nose from the cognoscenti gets to you.”
That’s not BI
A pair of officials in double-breasted suits arrived at a New York school for a meeting with the principal. On their way to his office, a young student excitedly offered to demonstrate his skill at computer programming. In a story told in 1984 by Nicholas Negroponte, I heard echoes of today’s business intelligence industry. The [...]
Perfect BI tool is one that people actually use
People want to perform well, Frank Buytendijk believes. Management gets in the way with stupid, top-down games. It would be better to join people’s natural passion with corporate goals.
In dead bird vs. flow chart, bird wins
So many BI flow charts resemble the view out my hotel window in Las Vegas on the rooftop just below: a tangle of ducts, pipes, platforms, valves, and big metal boxes. What got my attention was a bird that had landed on a metal box and died.
Scary stories of information management today on DM Radio
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 [...]
Stories that tell the bigger story
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 [...]
Is BI boring yet?
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. [...]
User conference with a view
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 story here, a story there about “franken-measures”
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 [...]
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