tdwi

My latest at BI This Week: “What Shifting IT/Business Battle Lines Mean for BI’s Future”

April 9, 2012

Line-of-business analysts are advancing on IT’s old territory. Five thoughts on what it means for both parties. Read it here.

Read the full article →

Talking, talking, talking about big data

February 28, 2012

Hang out for a few days at an industry event and you’re doused in trends, hearsay, and preoccupations. It permeates your mind. Acquired phrases come out of your mouth, the hotel food starts tasting good, and at night your dreams may tell you more than you want to know about hot topics. Sometimes, I just [...]

Read the full article →

My columns on BI This Week

August 25, 2011

Sometimes I’m a complete idiot. I’ve been writing a monthly column for TDWI’s BI This Week since the beginning of 2011 — after a break of almost two years — and I have never posted a link. No good self promoter would have neglected to do that. Well, here’s a link to all of them. [...]

Read the full article →

Frank Buytendijk to keynote at TDWI Las Vegas 2012

August 8, 2011

The TDWI keynote speaker who told about jogging with a chip in his shoe is coming back. Frank Buytendijk, always entertaining and thought provoking, will be the Monday morning keynote speaker at next February’s TDWI conference in Las Vegas, according to TDWI education director Paul Kautza this morning. The chip counted his steps, which gave [...]

Read the full article →

Top three ways BI buyers choose badly

July 11, 2011

A veteran sales person at a major vendor of business intelligence products lists the top three reasons for buying decisions. The reasons are contrary to most people’s view of themselves as sophisticated.

Read the full article →

New hope for the “single version of the truth”

December 1, 2010

What will it be, a “single version of the truth” or unabated proliferation of ad hoc data? It’s a chronic dilemma, and its resolution is crucial to big-box business intelligence. Frank Buytendijk’s new book, Dealing with Dilemmas: Where Business Analytics Fall Short, offers a way out of this pickle.

Read the full article →

Wayne Eckerson, BI explainer, jumps to TechTarget

November 4, 2010

One of the business intelligence industry’s best explainers, Wayne Eckerson, is leaving TDWI for TechTarget. For the everyday BI expert, it’s good gossip. — But for those still on the learning curve, it’s a cue to switch channels. “It’s true,” he told me this morning about the rumors, “I’m departing the big TDWI in the [...]

Read the full article →

Tableau rising

September 17, 2010

As Stephen Few delivered his keynote address at the recent Tableau customer conference in Seattle, he suddenly broke his rhythm to look at someone in the audience. “Is that Howard Dresner?” he wondered, surprised. It was. Howard is the man who as a Gartner analyst in 1989 revived the term “business intelligence,” and he’s one [...]

Read the full article →

The basic skill they don’t teach in BI boot camp

September 8, 2010

One of the saddest phenomena in BI projects is also a classic: IT and Business stop talking, or else they never talked at all. Projects launch but then stall when the light from shiny things dims. It’s as good an example of bad politics as I’ve heard of. Jill Dychè, a principle at Baseline Consulting, [...]

Read the full article →

Getting over the ‘P’ word to expand BI horizons

August 27, 2010

Many in the business intelligence industry talk about organizational problems getting in BI’s way, but few talk about them very much. Scratch the surface of most presentations and conversations — such as last week at the TDWI conference in San Diego — and you find people problems bobbing right up alongside data problems: indifferent executives [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries