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Neil Raden

Looking for Kool-Aid at the Tableau conference

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It’s no secret that some people hear about Tableau’s passionate users and wonder what all the fuss is about. Back in June, in fact, one skeptical industry analyst tweeted to a Tableau fan, “Pal, you seem to have had a bit too much Tableau Kool-Aid.”

Tableau users I know just shrug. People who say things like that find passion for data suspicious, and there’s nothing you can do for them.

Then Tableau itself invited a delegation of industry analysts, most of them from the traditional end of BI, to its annual conference at the Encore hotel in Las Vegas. The company hopes for their blessing to make that leap across the chasm from early adoption to early majority.… Read the rest “Looking for Kool-Aid at the Tableau conference”

Basking in a dashboard’s warm glow

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When some people look at dashboards, they want to see patterns but not reasons. “They don’t want to read the fine print,” said one attendee in Lyndsay Wise’s dashboards seminar at Enterprise Data World in San Francisco yesterday. That’s what the man learned in one data-quality project for a human resources department.

He was frank enough to call drill-down “the fine print” — the suggestion that the “why?” is just noise. He slipped out before I could find out more.

Had his complacent users been victims of abusive parents or bad teachers? I’ve worked with such users. I trust them, I like them, and most businesses couldn’t do without them.… Read the rest “Basking in a dashboard’s warm glow”

Less than meets the ear

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Last week, SAS Institute did what few other rearrangers of jargon have done: They got attention — in the way fashion hounds do. They’d like to replace “business intelligence” with “business analytics.” Why? Because “business intelligence is not “where the future is.”

Last year’s styles are never next year’s. Sooner or later, all clothes, cars and business terms become unfashionable. It’s not because anything really changed.

Neil Raden calls SAS’s move “all fluff,” and it is. Others I’ve heard from think so too, such as the eminent industry analyst I talked to weeks ago about another attempt at jargon-making. “What a bunch of b—” he said.… Read the rest “Less than meets the ear”