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Still a “tool” by any other name

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A marketing manager I know stopped me in mid sentence. He didn’t want me to call his business intelligence product a “tool.”

Why? “It sounds small,” he said. But it is small, I pointed out. It’s smaller than many others in its space. It’s downloaded in under a minute and unpacks itself on a desktop in a few minutes.

But he waved that rationale away as if it were a fly, and I should have known. Marketing people, like the parents of gladiators, prefer their progeny to be perceived as big. Bigness casts dark shadows over competitors and conceals weakness. Industry insiders give big competitors good odds.… Read the rest “Still a “tool” by any other name”

Simple tool, same old resistance

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I’ve rarely heard resistance to BI expressed quite so well.

A woman at an oil company said to Metrics Insights founder Marius Moscovici, “If someone wants to know something, they pick up a phone.”

The hell with easy information delivery. Make them ask for it.

I might understand what Marius witnessed if the woman were faced with any of the heavy hitters in business analytics. These things come encrusted with big promises, but big promises come with big upheaval. Data gets disturbed that some people wish would stay buried. They want to say, “Everything’s fine here. Go away.”

You can imagine why.… Read the rest “Simple tool, same old resistance”

Data managers should emulate good librarians

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Haul away the hardware, peel off the software, rinse off the mystique and you see what the people who manage data really are: They’re librarians. That’s the role IT workers should model themselves on.

I’m not talking about technology. I don’t care what tools anyone uses. Whether we’re talking about bound paper known as “books” or bits magically transmitted over “wi-fi,” I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.

I know, the comparison may seem harsh. Librarians are said to shuffle silently among musty old books that no one ever reads. Or, as my friend Karen Schneider puts it, they’re “some misguided brontosaurus snuffling in the antediluvian biblioforest.”… Read the rest “Data managers should emulate good librarians”