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The basic skill they don’t teach in BI boot camp

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One of the saddest phenomena in BI projects is also a classic: IT and Business stop talking, or else they never talked at all. Projects launch but then stall when the light from shiny things dims. It’s as good an example of bad politics as I’ve heard of.

Jill Dychè, a principle at Baseline Consulting, hears about such pain in her popular TDWI conference course held on Sundays, “BI from Both Sides: Aligning Business and IT.” It’s full of the “war-wounded” who’ve come to learn how to get moving again.

She finds a common root to many stories: neither side knows how to engage with the other.… Read the rest “The basic skill they don’t teach in BI boot camp”

Getting over the ‘P’ word to expand BI horizons

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Many in the business intelligence industry talk about organizational problems getting in BI’s way, but few talk about them very much.

Scratch the surface of most presentations and conversations — such as last week at the TDWI conference in San Diego — and you find people problems bobbing right up alongside data problems: indifferent executives who undermine BI, short-sighted silo keepers, and IT people who enrage business users with paternalism, to name a few top quirks. If only data were all we had to transform!

One business manger at last week’s TDWI conference in San Diego told me that one of his most daunting tasks during a recent data warehouse implementation was persuading silo managers to release their death grip.… Read the rest “Getting over the ‘P’ word to expand BI horizons”

Minding data’s pedigree

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Does it seem to you like data analysis is busting out all over the place? It might become another fun game like chess or Chutes and Ladders — so this might be good time to recall an old admonition: Don’t just consume data, mind its pedigree.

Repeating the warning, though, makes you look like a party-pooper. In 2007 at the TDWI conference in Las Vegas, a keynote speaker raised it one morning. Jonathan Koomey — author of Turning Numbers into Knowledge and one of those voices the BI world needs more of — did his best. But I could see the unfolding disaster from my banquet table, as attendees glanced at each other in scorn.… Read the rest “Minding data’s pedigree”