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Mark Madsen

Mark Madsen’s three indications of uselessness

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If you dropped into an organization, how could you tell who did real work? Mark Madsen has developed clues.

Most people probably know him as the insightful and entertaining creator of “Clues to the Future of Business Intelligence” and more recently of “Using Open Source BI in the Real World.” But when he’s not on stage or preparing for it, he’s consulting on BI projects.

“On almost every project,” he emailed me recently, “I find people whose task can be perfectly explained by watching Office Space, the scene where the two Bobs interview Tom and he explains what he does.”… Read the rest “Mark Madsen’s three indications of uselessness”

Rejecting stale tech marketing words

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Read a pile of technology marketing and you quickly assume that you alone despise many of the words you keep hearing. They’re words like optimize, leverage, synergy, and utilize. People in this industry don’t really talk like that, do they?

Many don’t, at least not in private, and they don’t tweet like that, either. One tweet trail at Gartner BI Summit complained about exactly this kind of word — these miserable words with all the wild flavor bred out of them like factory-farm tomatoes.

On the list of suggested extinction, Jill Dychè listed optimize and fact-based. Scott Davis listed leverage, co-optition, and dot-bomb.… Read the rest “Rejecting stale tech marketing words”

Why they resist open source

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In defense of the lively, Mark Madsen observes the nature of resistance to open source BI tools. An excerpt:

Overcoming someone’s resistance to open source in your organization means that you probably need to educate them, given that they use open source every day without thinking about it. It’s in everything from cars to cell phones, as well as almost all the commercial BI tools shipping today. More likely, they are resistant because they (a) are threatened in some way by the change you propose, (b) face organizational obstacles like educating the legal department about licenses or (c) face political consequences you aren’t aware of.

… Read the rest “Why they resist open source”