Category: Uncategorized

  • Which BI Product Skills Are Most Lucrative?

    I missed this post from odinjobs’s Carl Williams. It’s very interesting reading. It seems to provide tangible proof that the acquisitions of last year have raised interest in business intelligence across the board. And it seems that SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects has driven far more demand for skills than IBM’s purchase of Cognos.

  • One Picture to Sum Up our Data Activity?

    One Picture to Sum Up our Data Activity?

    Courtesy of Wordle, here’s a representation of the words in all my blog postings of 2008. Wouldn’t it be great to have one of these for our business data?

  • Review of 2008 Predictions: How did I do?

    Last February, I chose my top 5 BI predictions for 2008. It’s now almost the end of the year and I’m thinking about 2009 predictions but before that post, how do last year’s stack up?

  • If Europe Could Vote in the US Elections?

    Some fun with Xcelsius, using polling data gathered by the Economist. Click on the different countries to see the percentages. Use the slider to see how many times more votes McCain would need to have a chance of winning such an election… Download a model as a PowerPoint slide

  • BI: Strategic but not Trendy?

    Just in case you missed it — BI is (somewhat predictably) one of Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2009. Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence (BI), the top technology priority in Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey, can have a direct positive impact on a company’s business performance, dramatically improving its ability to accomplish its mission by making…

  • The Pie is Shrinking?

    The Pie is Shrinking?

  • Are CFOs Good for Business Intelligence?

    Are CFOs good for Business Intelligence

  • Bad Incentives

    An example of the problem of aligning incentives and objectives — paying doctors to ignore patients

  • Risky Performance?

    Time and time again, organizations merrily optimizing their business bite the dust because of “unforeseen circumstances” — i.e. badly-managed risk and compliance. Today’s example is San Francisco’s FiberWan network…

  • Public Sector BI Incompatible with “Leaps of Faith”?

    A couple of recent Boston globe articles talk about IBM/Cognos returning $13m because of bidding irregularities and questions over conflict of interest. The biggest net result is that some 20,000 people have been prevented from accessing information that could help improve the state’s education systems.