Users I interview for case studies tell me good stories. But most come with a poison pill: you can’t write it because it’ll embarrass someone. Just try getting it through the rounds of approval.

The smart marketer’s answer: Make up a composite!

If, as Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman writes, fiction is the best way to understand Libya under dictator Muammer Qaddafi, then it just might work to understand the drama within organizations.

How much do you really understand from news accounts from Libya? Before the current crisis, most news emphasized Muammer’s weird style of dress, his ranting speeches, and his “voluptuous Ukrainian nurse.” Here at home, case studies emphasize rational and unnamed executives weighing pros and cons and coming up with insight and decisions. The corporate story is all so safe and pure you find yourself hoping the nurse appears.

The average case study’s best hope is to be marked “present” and forgotten. Fiction — once set free with the clear label of “composite” — has freedom to imagine and dramatize. It is best at the subtlety you need for insight.

Obviously, you wouldn’t use nasty stuff. That stains everyone. But use the stuff that’s merely too much for the squeemish.

Here’s my rant: BI is made for stories. Each success is a story, starting with “we didn’t know” or even “we were so screwed up, we couldn’t even…” The story meanders through “we searched and tried.” The stories worth blasting from the roof tops end with the details behind “now we know, and we’re this much more profitable.” Everyone knows and understands composites.

By the way, I think the part about the nurse is true.

A young information technology worker in a large organization follows his common sense — and his boss scolds for it. The question is how to respond.

Back in 1980, he had just started at his first job, at the CBS Television Network. He soon noticed that every week business people asked him for the same data from the same source. So he did the logical thing: he wrote an algorithm for himself to save time.

Then he did the next logical thing: he gave the algorithm to the business people. They could do it themselves, and he didn’t have to do it for them. Everyone was happy.

That is, everyone was happy until the boss heard. The young man was called into the office.

“You gave them an algorithm?,” the boss asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“So now they can extract the data all by themselves?”

“Sure. They always ask for the same thing, so I thought they’d like it better if they didn’t have to ask me.”

“Lou, if they can do that, what’s our job?”

His ultimate response is a good product — which he won’t let me identify — that gives users control of their data.

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 money and which wasn’t. When she had organized the job into a routine, she handed it off to someone else and moved to the next question: What parts of the marketing was working? Again, she worked it into a routine and gave the task away. Next: what were visitors doing on the site? And now she has begun to answer similar questions for the company’s new site.

Not long ago, she was put into the IT group, among a bunch of guys coding in Java and doing other work she knows little about. She flashes a grimace at the mention.

She worries about her career. “How would I market this?” she asks.

• Another analyst was practically a librarian 15 years ago. People from other departments told him what reports they wanted — for example, SEC filings — and he delivered. Then some people asked for summaries, which made him think about other ways he could add value.

At some point, the value-adding incorporated data analysis, which grew. For years, he was the only analyst, but now he manages four others.

He’s the bridge between the data-generating IT department and the data-craving marketing department. He seems unconcerned about his career.

Complete versions may come next week.

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.”

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 boy had taught himself to program. The two visitors watched as he zipped through one thing after another on the computer, explaining everything. At one point, he couldn’t remember how to do something and flipped through a manual. He found the answer, and finished the code.

Upstairs, the visitors told the principal about the fantastic, articulate kid. “But there must be some mistake,” said the principal. “He can’t read!”

They all went downstairs. One of the visitors asked the boy, “Can you read?”

“No,” he said, “I can’t.”

“But you looked up instructions in that manual. How did you do that if you can’t read?”

“Oh, that’s not reading,” said the boy. “Reading is the junk they give me in little books. It’s irrelevant, and I get nothing for it.”

I can imagine a business owner’s answer to a similar question: “I don’t have time for that business intelligence stuff. I just use my accounting package, Excel and Tableau.” Pick your tools.

He has no data warehouse, no Moon-landing-size project. He’s never heard of MDM, data integration, or data modeling. But he does analyze the company’s data to help watch progress and decide what to do next.

Many people in the BI industry, I think, would say that what he does is not BI. Too bad. Vendors and those overlooked users lose out.

The perfect BI tool is one that people actually use, says Frank Buytendijk. He’s found one.

It’s a Nike chip he puts in his running shoe. It collects data on distance and time. It makes a game of running.

“I hate sports,” he said. He’s stocky. “[The chip] is perfect because it makes the boring exciting.”

His new 10 kilometers-a-day jogging habit had been well established when one morning he came home early. His wife asked, “Is it raining?” No, his battery had run down. Without the data, there was no point to running.

In his Monday morning presentation at the TDWI conference in Chicago — the best TDWI keynote I’ve ever heard — he used just two slides. His red shoelaces, against his all-black outfit, were more visible than PowerPoint. Instead, he told good stories — and the audience was rapt.

One morning, he said, he ran through a red light — and later paid a 35-euro fine — because stopping would have ruined his average. A show of hands in the audience confirmed his normalcy.

People want to do as well as they can. Why do managers so often fail to encourage better performance? Why do they insist on passion-killing top-down performance control? He believes it’s from laziness and ineptitute.

Other passion killers include accountability pushed too far, stressing system goals at the expense of higher, big-picture goals.

Also, many managers have forgotten what really drives performance: passion. Performance is “a matter of the heart,” he said. What works better is to strive for a higher, inspiring value that people believe in. Results show up as revenue and profit, but it’s better to look at the value delivered.

Best performance comes from correct targets, which leads to indicators that marry corporate goals with personal ones. “With the right indicators,” he said, “we can change the behavior of both.”

Read his book, Performance Leadership: The Next Practices to Motivate Your People, Align Stakeholders, and Lead Your Industry (2008; McGraw-Hill).

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.

Mark Madsen might have appreciated that bird. He’s the only one in the industry I can think of who’s able to grip an audience. In his presentations, you’re more likely to see Big Bird than dead abstractions. (Too bad he had to cancel his Night School session at TDWI on recommendation technology, “Books, Movies and BI.”)

Last year in Las Vegas, Bob Paladino woke up an audience with a story about Southwest Airlines. Dave Wells, Steve Dine, Steve Hoberman and others routinely tell stories to liven things up and make points that stick.

When speakers lose control of their message, only one point comes across: a speaker’s personal charm, knowledge and passion does not easily translate to the stage. Many in the audience, bored by slide after tedious slide, remember to check email on Blackberries or they simply glaze over.

Then you’re grateful for the suspense of a blinking Fresnel light: will it or won’t it burn out?

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 demons. Details here.

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 about.

Conventional software marketers would have beat the drum like high school cheerleaders: Faster! Better! Bigger! They would have also offered a demo with screenshots flipping by showing data that means nothing to you.

Tableau’s approach is subtle. In “More can be simpler when telling data stories,” Tableau director of visual analysis Jock Mackinlay critiques a chart from Andrew Gelman’s new book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. The obvious story is, of course, the political one. In a chart borrowed from the book, you see that poor voters have similar opinions on social and economic issues whether they’re in a mostly conservative, liberal or battleground state. Rich voters are much different from each other, and middle income voters are the most disparate of all.

I start playing with theories. What is it about poor voters that makes them align like this? What makes the rich voters different from each other? The important thing is not my theories but that I got involved with the story.

Then Jock offers more: He says he can improve the chart. The minute I wonder how he might do it, I’m into the next story. He ponders, “Another way to add more to this data view is to back it with the raw data so that I could add to the story by creating new views. In particular, this view causes me to wonder what would happen if there is a shift in the relative importance of social and economic issues. Are there red and blue states that might turn into battleground states because they contain a large percentage of poor voters?”

What stories does his improved chart tell? Just download and open it in Tableau. And if you don’t yet have Tableau on your desktop, it’s always available for a free tryout. In any case, he just gave you a demo of visual analysis that actually caught your attention.

Other products might not lend themselves to this approach, but many would with a little creativity. I just don’t understand why more software marketers don’t try it.

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. Nowadays, everybody but John McCain uses it.

So it should be with business intelligence.

In a Harvard video, Shirky tells a story about his parents’ first date. His father borrowed his brother’s car, and on the date his mother ordered the most sophisticated drink on the menu: a root beer float. She actually hated root beer, though, and threw up in the car. Is that story about the internal combustion engine? Well, yes and no. Though those events would not have occurred without it, the boy and girl never even thought about it as events unfolded. It only enabled.

Today the only people who talk about automotive technology are backyard mechanics and industry experts. I’m happy to leave it to them.

Fortunately, we’re getting there in business intelligence with the emergence of things like LucidEra, Tableau and DataSelf. Keep the boredom coming.