Basking in a dashboard’s warm glow
When some people look at dashboards, they want to see patterns but not reasons. “They don’t want to read the fine print,” said one attendee in Lyndsay Wise’s dashboards seminar at Enterprise Data World in San Francisco yesterday. That’s what the man learned in one data-quality project for a human resources department. He was frank [...]
Robert McNamara: good analytics, bad judgment
Tom Davenport on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and how he failed despite good analytics. McNamara was a hedgehog rather than a fox, an engineer rather than an ecologist. The hedgehog knows one big thing, and for McNamara that was rational systems analysis. If he’d been a fox, he’d have brought additional perspectives to [...]
Craving value: sparks for a new economic engine
It’s hard to see through the smoke as our financial house burns down, I know. But what I’ve noticed is more interesting: the first signs of rebuilding. This month, three experts I read—visual analytics expert Stephen Few, Competing on Analytics author Tom Davenport and digital-media economy specialist Umair Haque—all seem to have knit recent blog [...]
Government 2.0 vs. Tom Davenport 0.2
My friend Marco called me up scared of what Internet visionary Don Tapscott had said on Tuesday’s Talk of the Nation. Tapscott foresees a day when technology makes government—such as spending—directly accessible to the masses. “Do you realize,” Marco said, “that all this Government 2.0 stuff, where just anyone could see where the money’s going [...]
