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Stephen Few

Tableau rising

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As Stephen Few delivered his keynote address at the recent Tableau customer conference in Seattle, he suddenly broke his rhythm to look at someone in the audience. “Is that Howard Dresner?” he wondered, surprised.

It was. Howard is the man who as a Gartner analyst in 1989 revived the term “business intelligence,” and he’s one of the industry’s patriarchs. He holds a seat on the TDWI faculty, and he founded Gartner’s business intelligence event.

In that world, Tableau is still an insurgent. Tableau usually bypasses IT buyers on its way to data analysts, who only want to soak insight from data and then show others the results.… Read the rest “Tableau rising”

“Streetlights and Shadows”

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Some of the books Stephen Few reviews may at first glance to have little to do with data analysis. On second glance, though, they have everything to do with it. He often goes into the essence of thinking, insight, and decision making — core knowledge for BI practitioners.

See his latest, posted yesterday afternoon, on Gary Klein’s Streetlights and Shadows.

Just give me the data

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Recent email to me from a passionate practioner of creative analysis tells how traditional BI is bad for genuine data analysis.

As I see it, traditional BI processes are still designed to start with the answers, not the questions: “Oh, we can’t give you access to the raw data. Your tools (old thinking) probably are not designed to handle that job.” What happens, as [Stephen] Few and [Christian] Chabot keep screaming from the rooftops, is that BI practitioners and business units, etc, never get to ask the right questions. They don’t get to practice what Tableau calls the Cycle of Visual Analysis.

… Read the rest “Just give me the data”