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Learning from earthquake relief to design BI tools

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You might say I’m crazy to see any connection between some big IT deployments and typical responses to big natural disasters — but that’s what I see. It fits a recurring theme across many disciplines of big interventions versus smaller, more humane and often more effective effort.

Yesterday on the PRI program The World, Associated Press reporter Jonathan Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, talked about what he saw in Haiti.

There was one mistake that was made over and over in Haiti: The people of Haiti were looked at as being bystanders, as obstacles or as security threats.

… Read the rest “Learning from earthquake relief to design BI tools”

Still a “tool” by any other name

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A marketing manager I know stopped me in mid sentence. He didn’t want me to call his business intelligence product a “tool.”

Why? “It sounds small,” he said. But it is small, I pointed out. It’s smaller than many others in its space. It’s downloaded in under a minute and unpacks itself on a desktop in a few minutes.

But he waved that rationale away as if it were a fly, and I should have known. Marketing people, like the parents of gladiators, prefer their progeny to be perceived as big. Bigness casts dark shadows over competitors and conceals weakness. Industry insiders give big competitors good odds.… Read the rest “Still a “tool” by any other name”

Top three ways BI buyers choose badly

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Most people shopping for business intelligence tools think they’re sophisticated, observes a sales person who often represents a large vendor in TDWI exhibit halls. Most of these people are deluded.

He may sound harsh, but he observes all this not bitterly but with good humor.

“They buy [BI] like anything else they buy,” he explains. “They put out a bunch of RFPs and go through this whole process and stuff, and eventually they buy the one that’s maroon.”

Over years, he has identified the top three reasons people buy, and the underlying motivation:

1. Career. The chosen tool decides the career of those who will learn it, massage it, and become co-dependent with it.… Read the rest “Top three ways BI buyers choose badly”