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“BI for the other 80 percent” at Information Management

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How can business survive without data? Well, 80 percent of eligible users, according to most surveys, do seem to go without. The industry salivates in anticipation of someday colonizing that territory, and it shudders in frustration because they haven’t done it yet.

That topic came up last summer at the annual Pacific Northwest BI Summit. I’ve written here before about the session led by industry icon Claudia Imhoff and IBM vice president Harriet Fryman. Now I’ve published a column about it to a bigger audience at Information Management.

The column offers a strategy: storytelling. Humans are wired for it. The industry might as well take advantage.… Read the rest ““BI for the other 80 percent” at Information Management”

“Storytelling: Gimmick or Real?” My latest in Information Management

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I’m stalking the data-story story. One of the first stops is with a few smart people I know and trust to have given it thought. Scott Davis, whose name long-time Datadoodle readers will recognize, has thought about it deeply. I talked to him in June, and in August finally wrote it up.

By the way, part of the delay had to do with my attempt to make it into a podcast. That would have been a Datadoodle first, and there was no better way to start off than by hearing Scott say, “I’m going to give you a cliché that’s repeated so often it’s taken as truth, and I’m going to tell you it’s straight up false: Information is not derivative of data.”… Read the rest ““Storytelling: Gimmick or Real?” My latest in Information Management”

First comes the data story, then comes the shadow

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Nothing interesting goes without simultaneous celebration and condemnation. Back in 2008 when I wrote that “Tableau is the new Apple,” data visualization was widely pooh-poohed. “Pretty pictures,” I heard so many say.

Now the pretty boy is data storytelling. “Cue the data storytellers,” which ran in Information Management the other day, got a good round of tweets (62 by Wednesday night). But the few complaints were also fun.

It’s easy to brush off the silly stuff. One self-identified data scientist grumbled in a tweet the morning “Cue” appeared, “We don’t need more storytellers … We need more talent.”… Read the rest “First comes the data story, then comes the shadow”