I guess even the guys who live and breathe data get lost in it sometimes.
At one power company that enlisted the help of Houston-area Visual Numerics, there was so much data that no one knew how to start pulling it apart. Only when company analysts saw it visualized did they know what questions to ask.
Marketing director Alicia McGreevey said, “There’s such a difference looking over rows and rows of numbers versus a 3D picture with peaks and troughs.”
I’ve read about an 84-year-old farmer in North Dakota who reads pig spleens the way mainstream fortune tellers read tarot. Sadly, he doesn’t service the business intelligence industry.
If he did, we might have had more fun with predictions for 2008. Now we’re stuck with these: Consolidation will continue, smaller vendors will sprout, deployment will be easier, software as a service will take off, visualization will emerge… Did I miss any? Well, who cares?
Where are all the tech-savvy clairvoyants when you need one?
A friend of mine used to swear by someone she called “the common sense psychic.” She’d get her on the phone and tell her all about the problem of the day.… Read the rest “BI predictions out the other end”
Events and Trends: A Conversation About 2007 and 2008 (12/19/2007)
Acquisitions of pure-play BI vendors was the big story, but the meaning will play out in 2008. How will the smaller vendors find a place in the new ecosystem?