ESP and Business Analytics

The New York Times reports that a respected psychology journal is due to publish a paper purporting to show “strong evidence” for extra-sensory perception: “A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other — but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on... [Read More...]

Another Step for Google into Business Analytics? EIM with Google Refine 2.0

Google has announced Google Refine 2.0, “a power tool for data wranglers”. It’s an open-source tool for cleaning and enhancing “messy” data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases. How does it shape up from a corporate point of view? Is this another step for Google into enterprise information... [Read More...]

Over 100 Free SAP BusinessObjects Web Seminars

Looking for some free training in these difficult economic times? Here’s a long, long list (OK, so there are “only” 96 of them) of free web seminars courtesy of the SDN BusinessObjects Web Seminar Series and Jason Cao. They cover almost every aspect of the BusinessObjects Intelligence Platform. And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can register to be notified by email of upcoming BusinessObjects webinars and suggest topics... [Read More...]

Data Governance? What’s That? (And How Can Companies Fix It?)

A recent survey of business and IT leaders carried out by Kalido shows that over two thirds of businesses have no clear data governance program, and have no plans to implement one — and 13% are unclear as to what data governance even is. The research also reveals that nobody knows who is supposed to be responsible for maintaining the accuracy of data. In 31% of the companies questioned, this role is held by the IT department – but IT organizations... [Read More...]

Data Quality and Bandit Sheep?

It was widely reported this week that more than one out of every 100 Americans is a criminal. That’s nothing… There’s a country that I can’t name (but they play rugby and have lots of sheep). The national police force wanted a “single view of the criminal”, and so created a central data warehouse from a variety of operational and legacy systems. The ended up with a database of 4.5 million names. This was a problem,... [Read More...]

Data Quality and The Art of Despair?

Check out the deeply subversive management videos at the despair.com site. Here, Dr. E.L. Kersten uses a mailing list debacle to illustrate his Demotivators© organizational storytelling techniques. Remember — it could be worse…  Read More →

Business Objects Buys FUZZY! Data Quality

Yet another acquisition: Business Objects purchases FUZZY! Informatik, based near Stuttgart, Germany, terms not disclosed The important: A “challenger” in Gartner’s 2007 data quality magic quadrant Adds European address databases to Business Objects’ existing portfolio and improves European customer base/sales expertise/coverage Vertical solutions for Postal, Financial services, and Telco SOA-enabled, which should make... [Read More...]

BI 2.0 News Briefs

More on how Web 2.0 companies are helping people collect, analyze, and share structured information — i.e. providing some of the functionality now associated with business intelligence vendors. Information display: Google makes it easier to show data on their maps. Data cleansing: Google submits a patent for “online data verification of listing data”. According to Intelligent Enterprise: “The application describes a system... [Read More...]

Why Data Quality is Important…

 A true story of data quality problems. Just for fun. (2 mins) The Camtasia Studio video content presented here requires JavaScript to be enabled and the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player. If you are you using a browser with JavaScript disabled please enable it now. Otherwise, please update your version of the free Flash Player by downloading here. // More seriously, data quality is a real issue for today’s organizations.... [Read More...]