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Ted Cuzzillo

Coffee with “Tiberius”

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I ran into one of my first and best TDWI friends this morning. Even after all this time, he cannot yet be named publicly and, perhaps because of that, is free with musings on the industry and other things. We’ve tentatively code-named him Tiberius, after a meeting room at Caesar’s Palace.

This morning he’s thinking of a New Yorker cartoon. Two men at a bar are talking, and one says, “Are you just pissing and moaning, or can you verify what you’re saying with data?”

Our conversations are not always fact based, but we do our best. This morning we did it over coffee and, in his case, a crepe, and in my case a yogurt parfait.… Read the rest “Coffee with “Tiberius””

Data intimacy

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Long before Scott Davis made the self-service ETL tool he calls Lyza, he tried to find out how analysts really work. He remembers in particular the woman in a focus group who said, “I want to stay close to the data.”

He didn’t understand at first. The data was right in front of her, neatly summarized. But she meant all of the data, every little bit of it. She wanted to snap open a zillion-row-long window that she could scroll down to see the figures flip by. (Yes, you can; I saw it yesterday.) She wouldn’t try to read them, she’d only see their shapes.… Read the rest “Data intimacy”

Fooled by proximity?

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Almost the same moment I read that for the fourth year in a row executives rate BI the top tech priority in 2009, I hear Tableau Software’s news: last week saw the most downloads of trial software ever. “Not by a little, by a lot,” says marketing and PR VP Elissa Fink.

The poll of Australian executives, by Gartner, also indicated that purchases faced more scrutiny. The press release mentions “CFOs doing final negotiations on pricing and maintenance.” I assume that Australian business is not significantly different from U.S. business.

Tableau, of course, lands like a mint on most CFOs’ pillows.… Read the rest “Fooled by proximity?”