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Let your gray hair light your way through unfamiliar data

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How do you approach unfamiliar data? An investment banker I talked to last week — one I know from a client’s whitepaper — rejects the “don’t think” method, advocated in my earlier post about Dan Murray. Instead, he thinks first, on paper.

“My approach is driven by having a bunch of gray hair,” says Michael Princi, managing director of ThoughtStorm Strategic Capital, a boutique investment bank and advisory firm in northern New Jersey. “I want to use my business acumen to tease out what might be the underlying issues.”

Experience counts The naive mind is prone to bad mistakes, he says.… Read the rest “Let your gray hair light your way through unfamiliar data”

Feature lists miss the point

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So many people who should know better seem to miss the point when they mention Tableau. Why? I asked BI veteran Stephen McDaniel for his thoughts — which he gave, but then went on to suggest an almost unheard of challenge: a data analysis face-off among vendors.

Consider this description by a BI analyst: “Tableau provides business analysts speed of thought visual analysis on data held in memory on their desktop machines.” All that’s fine, but it may as well have been about a whole bunch of other tools, too.

At the root of this fuzz, explained McDaniel, is that most analysts who concern themselves with tools don’t actually use the tools.… Read the rest “Feature lists miss the point”

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”