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Basking in a dashboard’s warm glow

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When some people look at dashboards, they want to see patterns but not reasons. “They don’t want to read the fine print,” said one attendee in Lyndsay Wise’s dashboards seminar at Enterprise Data World in San Francisco yesterday. That’s what the man learned in one data-quality project for a human resources department.

He was frank enough to call drill-down “the fine print” — the suggestion that the “why?” is just noise. He slipped out before I could find out more.

Had his complacent users been victims of abusive parents or bad teachers? I’ve worked with such users. I trust them, I like them, and most businesses couldn’t do without them.… Read the rest “Basking in a dashboard’s warm glow”

Perfect BI tool is one that people actually use

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The perfect BI tool is one that people actually use, says Frank Buytendijk. He’s found one.

It’s a Nike chip he puts in his running shoe. It collects data on distance and time. It makes a game of running.

“I hate sports,” he said. He’s stocky. “[The chip] is perfect because it makes the boring exciting.”

His new 10 kilometers-a-day jogging habit had been well established when one morning he came home early. His wife asked, “Is it raining?” No, his battery had run down. Without the data, there was no point to running.

In his Monday morning presentation at the TDWI conference in Chicago — the best TDWI keynote I’ve ever heard — he used just two slides.… Read the rest “Perfect BI tool is one that people actually use”