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Facing up to the dashboard metaphor

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After about three quarters of an oatmeal stout, my old friend Sam the BI developer wondered aloud, “What is the ideal dashboard?”

There was no need to call Steve Few or Edward Tufte. I had the answer right away. (I had been sipping an oatmeal stout myself.)

The ideal dashboard, I said, is like the human face. You can read the big, obvious signs at a glance: whether the person is smiling, frowning, snarling, or foaming. You know right away whether things are OK.

If things are not OK, you know you’d better ask. That is, you drill down.

If you can’t be direct, you might go on a hunch.… Read the rest “Facing up to the dashboard metaphor”

“Poets are the original systems thinkers”

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Here’s a morsel with possibly no practical value at all. It’s from last Sunday’s New York Times on what CEOs read:

“I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers,” says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports … “Poets are our original systems thinkers,” he said. “They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”

More BI writers need “Made to Stick”

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I comb through a lot of business intelligence-related press releases and articles, so I was surprised to hear that the new book Made to Stick is popular among PR people.

In fact, the fact that the book is more popular among PR people than any other profession is co-author Chip Heath’s main disappointment. Last Wednesday night at his Global Business Network talk, he said he’d hoped to reach more HR and engineering types. Marketing and PR people already know the principles the book spells out, he says.

How many of them know those principles?

If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s worth reading.… Read the rest “More BI writers need “Made to Stick””