Datadoodle

Home » Baseline Consulting

Baseline Consulting

What goes on at the Weasku Inn

by

If you’re out for networking in the BI industry and keeping score in sheer numbers, you still attend TDWI or Strata. But to go deep with smaller numbers, you try to get into the tiny Pacific Northwest BI Summit, held every July in remote southern Oregon. There’s room for about two dozen people, including press.

It sprang from publicity consultant Scott Humphrey’s file of clients and friends 11 years ago. Then year after year, almost all of his attendees returned. Once you have a seat, you don’t give it up. It’s turned into the BI industry’s Bohemian Grove.

The basic skill they don’t teach in BI boot camp

by

One of the saddest phenomena in BI projects is also a classic: IT and Business stop talking, or else they never talked at all. Projects launch but then stall when the light from shiny things dims. It’s as good an example of bad politics as I’ve heard of.

Jill Dychè, a principle at Baseline Consulting, hears about such pain in her popular TDWI conference course held on Sundays, “BI from Both Sides: Aligning Business and IT.” It’s full of the “war-wounded” who’ve come to learn how to get moving again.

She finds a common root to many stories: neither side knows how to engage with the other.… Read the rest “The basic skill they don’t teach in BI boot camp”

Getting over the ‘P’ word to expand BI horizons

by

Many in the business intelligence industry talk about organizational problems getting in BI’s way, but few talk about them very much.

Scratch the surface of most presentations and conversations — such as last week at the TDWI conference in San Diego — and you find people problems bobbing right up alongside data problems: indifferent executives who undermine BI, short-sighted silo keepers, and IT people who enrage business users with paternalism, to name a few top quirks. If only data were all we had to transform!

One business manger at last week’s TDWI conference in San Diego told me that one of his most daunting tasks during a recent data warehouse implementation was persuading silo managers to release their death grip.… Read the rest “Getting over the ‘P’ word to expand BI horizons”