analysis

Just give me the data

July 16, 2009 by Ted Cuzzillo

Recent email to me from a passionate practioner of creative analysis tells how traditional BI is bad for genuine data analysis.

As I see it, traditional BI processes are still designed to start with the answers, not the questions: “Oh, we can’t give you access to the raw data. Your tools (old thinking) probably are not designed to handle that job.” What happens, as [Stephen] Few and [Christian] Chabot keep screaming from the rooftops, is that BI practitioners and business units, etc, never get to ask the right questions. They don’t get to practice what Tableau calls the Cycle of Visual Analysis.

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Robert McNamara: good analytics, bad judgment

July 9, 2009 by Ted Cuzzillo

Tom Davenport on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and how he failed despite good analytics.

McNamara was a hedgehog rather than a fox, an engineer rather than an ecologist. The hedgehog knows one big thing, and for McNamara that was rational systems analysis. If he’d been a fox, he’d have brought additional perspectives to America’s pressing problems. Like a dogged engineer, he believed that you could model and manipulate the inputs and outputs of any system. Unlike the ecologist, he didn’t seem to appreciate the complexity of systems involving living things. If the variables explaining poverty or victory in guerilla warfare were unwieldy or unmeasurable, he simply ignored them.

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Does “slice and dice” connote canned, pre-defined reports? An industry leader I talked to the other day used the term to describe data analysis based on aggregated data. Come to think of it, I don’t recall ever hearing those who like to receive their data raw ever using the term.