by Ted Cuzzillo
The TDWI San Diego conference opens in just 10 weeks, and some people are already thinking about who they hope to avoid.
“We’re sure not going to hide out in a stairway,” one promises but has no other strategy so far. Speculation about who’d win should it come down to a good old bar fight, yes. But only in fun.
One of these knows what an accidental meeting can be like. After avoiding someone for two days, he slipped into an elevator to find his nemesis there filling the space. Going down?
by Ted Cuzzillo
In the 32 days since the end of TDWI’s San Diego conference, one phrase has come to my mind repeatedly: “The soft stuff is always the important stuff,” uttered by Wayne Eckerson, director of TDWI Research. He was summing up a panel discussion, but the insight applies so broadly he could have used it for most other panels, too.
by Ted Cuzzillo
I’ve heard some BI leaders this week complain of stalled innovation by the vendors. But Sid Adelman says, “I think the tools are fine… We’ve handed a Stradivarius to a kid after a couple of lessons and we wonder why the violin doesn’t sound so good.”
We’ve done a “shitty job” of the basics, he says. Too much metadata lacks adequate definitions and genealogy—resulting in distrust among business users—and testing and training are too often done poorly.
The most troublesome basic is the human factor. “The organizational and cultural issues will screw us every time,” he says. People who don’t like each other but have to work together, for example, will too often let their adversaries crash on the rocks at the organization’s expense.… Read the rest “Don’t blame the BI tools”