The trouble with IT marketing
Posted in marketing/PR on Sep 23rd, 2008
Why does so much IT marketing put features out in front instead of benefits?
Tag Archive 'TDWI World Conference'
Don’t blame the BI tools
Posted in BI industry on Aug 20th, 2008
I’ve heard some BI leaders this week complain of stalled innovation by the vendors. But Sid Adelman says, “I think the tools are fine… We’ve handed a Stradivarius to a kid after a couple of lessons and we wonder why the violin doesn’t sound so good.”
We’ve done a “shitty job” of the basics, he says. [...]
Not by muffins alone
Posted in events on Aug 20th, 2008
Do the TDWI San Diego organizers think we’re on a diet? Are attendees and exhibitors no longer paying full fare? I try, but I can’t quite forgive the elimination of hot breakfast.
You may recall the spread that once honored us: chafing dishes full of scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, potatoes, biscuits alongside gravy, crisp red seedless [...]
Better than free food at TDWI San Diego
Posted in BI industry on Aug 19th, 2008
Two BI leaders walk into the Sunday night reception at the TDWI conference in San Diego. Each is as eminent as you get in BI, and they hadn’t seen each other in months. After hello, they got into what’s more important to them than the free food. One says, “Business Objects and Cognos just don’t [...]
The nose still knows better than Web 2.0
Posted in indicators on Aug 18th, 2008
Several hundred practioners of the many aspects of business intelligence are gathering here in San Diego for this week’s TDWI conference. They know how to clean data, enable fast searches, design insight-accelerating tools and other wonders—and yet no one yet has a reliable metric to score restaurants. We still have to go out and sniff.
BI culture: not a science, more like an art form
Posted in culture on May 9th, 2008
At 8 o’clock Monday morning, a few hundred attendees at TDWI conference in Chicago will hear the organization’s former education director Dave Wells give his keynote, “People First: Creating a Business Intelligence Culture.” He’ll say something startling: there’s much more to BI than data.
How one keynoter distracted everyone from breakfast
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 [...]
Visualize this, Harrah’s
Posted in events on Feb 25th, 2008
Around the corner from the TDWI World Conference I spotted a billboard-size sign: “We have 22 years left on our lease. We are here to serve you.”
What’s it mean? I understood other signs nearby, such as the $14.95 and the “chopsticks combo special.” I also understood “we are here to serve you.” But for 22 [...]
The greatest BI show of them all opens a week from this Sunday in Las Vegas, the TDWI World Conference. Naturally, anything about Vegas and The Strip draws my attention—such as Sunday’s story about the local paparazzi.