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Self tracking is business intelligence

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Back when secretaries were common, you could have had yours track your day in 15-minute increments. In his book The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker suggested this as a way to find out what you really did all day. The results were usually, let’s say, a starting point for improvement.

Tracking your time then and now is personal, it’s messy, and it’s the essence of business intelligence: collecting data and reading it for guidance in business activities that matter. Is there anything that matters more to an organization than productivity of its people? For a small office or home-based business, this might be the best BI there is.… Read the rest “Self tracking is business intelligence”

Librarian looks up a real “solution”

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A friend of mine runs the library at a small university near me, and she hears pitches all the time for neat technology. I suppose she doesn’t hear much about BI, just library stuff, but let’s not get hung up on the details.

To keep her priorities straight, she keeps a “ruthless focus” on the library’s real needs. She keeps Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in mind, the theory that people satisfy needs in order, from basic needs like breathing all the way up to “self actualization.”

She tells about one upstate New York librarian she heard about back when libraries were first urged to go online.… Read the rest “Librarian looks up a real “solution””

“Streetlights and Shadows”

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Some of the books Stephen Few reviews may at first glance to have little to do with data analysis. On second glance, though, they have everything to do with it. He often goes into the essence of thinking, insight, and decision making — core knowledge for BI practitioners.

See his latest, posted yesterday afternoon, on Gary Klein’s Streetlights and Shadows.