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Google guys come to shake up BI with natural language

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Kindergarten may have taught you all you need to know about life. But you may need to watch “Mr. Peabody and His Boy Sherman,” an animated, 1960s-era TV series for kids, to truly appreciate an interesting new natural-language product called ThoughtSpot.

ThoughtSpot’s natural-language querying represents a new stage of maturity for casual BI users — a step up even from visualization, which was a step up from rows and columns. ThoughtSpot users get data with natural language queries, otherwise known as questions.

ThoughtSpot opens with a Google-like interface. In a demo, a search for “total revenue last year” and visualized data appeared quickly with a simple dollar amount and, below it, bar charts with some detail.… Read the rest “Google guys come to shake up BI with natural language”

Uber and AirBNB hint at BI’s future

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You may have seen yesterday’s New York Times story about ratings on Uber, AirBNB, and similar outfits. Customers rate providers, but providers also rate customers. And guess what: As coarse as a five-point scale may seem, actual ratings tend to be worse. Forget the shades of gray, you’re probably either terrific or terrible.

Welcome to a chilling thought. This is what a “data driven culture” could be among the late adopters— a warning those of us who worship “data-driven culture” should be careful what we wish for. Is the failure of business intelligence’s failure to penetrate beyond the present beachhead such a bad thing?… Read the rest “Uber and AirBNB hint at BI’s future”

BI’s “promised land”: bigger than tech

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At first glance, this pair of tweets last week sounds like a version of BI’s traditional campfire song:

I’ve seen the promised (BI) land, and we are there: databases that fly and process any data; BI tools that are easy to use and fast. Wow! I’d retire but mainstream firms will take 10 years to capitalize on all the new technology & overcome dirty data & politics.

The refrain might go, “When tools fly, they will fly by themselves!” Other lines would caution us to update often, eliminate “politics,” and eat our carrots.