stories

User conference with a view

July 20, 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 [...]

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A story here, a story there about “franken-measures”

April 12, 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 [...]

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The systems perspective on the Spitzer scandal

March 11, 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.

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The blessing

March 10, 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 [...]

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How one keynoter distracted everyone from breakfast

February 28, 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 [...]

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Brutally amazing: how not to pitch analytics

February 12, 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.

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That old clunky thing

July 12, 2007

A friend of Datadoodle 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 [...]

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