Category: Uncategorized

  • Data Quality and The Art of Despair?

    Courtesy of the despair.com site, Dr. E.L. Kersten uses a mailing list debacle to illustrate his Demotivators© organizational storytelling techniques. (more…)

  • Compare Yourself To a Hedge Fund Manager!

    Compare Yourself To a Hedge Fund Manager!

    Top hedge fund managers made over $657M last year. Use this handy calculator to work out how long it took them to make more than you do all year — the time to brush their teeth? Take a shower? Commute?

  • Business Objects Buys FUZZY! Data Quality

    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 integration easy The…

  • Cognos Buys Applix

    Only minutes after I post an entry on the acceleration of consolidation in the BI market, I see that Cognos has purchased Applix. The interesting part is TM1, which uses memory-centric BI technology that has been around for as long as I can remember, but which didn’t really come into its own until 64-bit platforms…

  • BI Market Consolidation?

    The BI market has been remarkably fragmented for a long time, but — following the trend of other technology markets — it seems that the spiral of increasing dominance of a handful of vendors has finally been unleashed.

  • Free-Wheeling Business Intelligence?

      Later today, the Tour de France will be rolling into Paris to complete the final leg on the Champs-Elysées, so it seemed a good time to share this story of business intelligence and bicycles. The city of Paris recently rolled out their latest big initiative in making Paris a more livable, green city: 10,000…

  • What Executives Want from BI?

    What Executives Want from BI?

    Joe McKendrick recently posted on the ongoing difficulties faced by companies trying to use business intelligence effectively, especially for executive users: Many of today’s BI solutions, in fact, ‘have only exacerbated the amount of information that is bombarding senior management and left it up to them to decipher, collate and try to find the nuggets…

  • Intestine-Based Decision-Making

  • Hansel and Gretel Explain Data Lineage?

    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. The importance of data lineage is in…

  • Performance Excellence, Past and Future?

    Performance Excellence, Past and Future?

    One of the problems of explaining the value of business intelligence is that every layer of computing has always promised some variation on “better management” as the ultimate benefit of purchasing the system. From 1959 mainframes (above), early “executive information systems”, the 1982 IBM PC (right), the first spreadsheets (far right), 1980s ERP systems and “decision…