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A reason for BI failure: knowledge requires a knower

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What can explain business intelligence’s poor adoption rate? Are tools not easy to use? Or is there a deeper reason?

A book from 2000, The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, suggests that BI designers have neglected basic human needs. Jack Vinson, of Knowledge Jolt with Jack fame, has just posted a worthwhile review that sent me scurrying over to Amazon.

Failure begins early for many new, supposedly revolutionary information systems. Designers “assume that the way people operate with respect to information has to do with only the information. … But there is a social life that revolves around the information that is much harder to capture and codify,” Vinson writes.… Read the rest “A reason for BI failure: knowledge requires a knower”

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”

A long look at Stephen Few’s “Now You See It”

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Stephen Few gave a snappy name to his new book, Now You See It, and a cover that signals a gem — all black with a slice of sunset that highlights the “see.”

Inside, many charts are so beautiful — at least to a visual analysis fan — that they rival the waterfalls and trees of old Sierra Club coffee table books. It’s on paper so thick — and even smoother than Few’s first book, Show Me the Numbers — that you might feel like you’re flipping postcards.

While Show Me the Numbers was about how to present visualized data, he explains, Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques
for Quantitative Analysis is about understanding them, which apparently includes how to make them.… Read the rest “A long look at Stephen Few’s “Now You See It””