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A reason for BI failure: knowledge requires a knower

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What can explain business intelligence’s poor adoption rate? Are tools not easy to use? Or is there a deeper reason?

A book from 2000, The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, suggests that BI designers have neglected basic human needs. Jack Vinson, of Knowledge Jolt with Jack fame, has just posted a worthwhile review that sent me scurrying over to Amazon.

Failure begins early for many new, supposedly revolutionary information systems. Designers “assume that the way people operate with respect to information has to do with only the information. … But there is a social life that revolves around the information that is much harder to capture and codify,” Vinson writes.… Read the rest “A reason for BI failure: knowledge requires a knower”

Self-tracking: “If man were meant to fly” and other objections

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Self tracking for performance has a place on the map now thanks to the May 2 New York Times Magazine article by Gary Wolf. But along with praise and interest, “The Data-Driven Life” also drew harsh, skeptical reactions.

Many of the objections were of the “if man were meant to fly, he’d have wings” variety. But many others were valid.

The practice will run over a few bumps before it joins mainstream performance management and business intelligence. Unlike the impersonal data we know and love, keeping data about oneself can be uncomfortable, difficult, and downright weird.

One of the articulate skeptics called it “robot envy.”… Read the rest “Self-tracking: “If man were meant to fly” and other objections”

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Our Department of Unwanted Customers has heard from Don Farber of KnowledgeSync about an inquiry from the Strategic Air Command.

As you may know, the KnowledgeSync tool monitors activity and generates alerts. Event A occurs and, bang, an alert flies off by email, text, perhaps even ICBM. New sales inquiry? The tool can even issue a reply.

What could SAC want to do with such automatic alerts? Don, who is VP of sales and marketing, recalls saying to his boss, “‘You can take this customer if you want to, but do you really want to take that support call?'” Nope.

He and I went on to fondly recall those two 1962 films, “Dr.… Read the rest “No reply”