Oct 6th, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo
In a good example of “show, don’t tell,” Tableau Software’s weblog demonstrates the power of its product with a story: how rich, middle-income and poor voters compare in liberal, conservative and battleground states. The political story is awkward to tell in words, but it’s easy in pictures. Pictures that tell stories is what Tableau’s all about.
Oct 3rd, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo
Companies are looking to BI tools for help with rising energy costs, says Dan Esty, co-author of Green into Gold and the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University.
Oct 2nd, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo
Oracle OpenWorld’s strong theme of sustainability made me wonder if I might find something green on the exhibit floor. I went to the usual BI vendors and asked about aiming BI tools at carbon footprints.
Sep 29th, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo
Wouldn’t you know it. Follow BI around long enough and you come across family—if only the kind of family you see at funerals and weddings. Oracle finally brought us together again with its sustainability theme at last week’s OpenWorld.
The Sierra Club and I used to be close. My mother led San Francisco Bay Chapter hikes, and much later I found myself deep in greenhood as an editor and organizer. So imagine my surprise, having left “home” so long ago, to witness one-time Sierra Club president Adam Werbach on a panel of environmentalists on a stage. They debated “the economy or the environment?”
Sep 25th, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo
In the 32 days since the end of TDWI’s San Diego conference, one phrase has come to my mind repeatedly: “The soft stuff is always the important stuff,” uttered by Wayne Eckerson, director of TDWI Research. He was summing up a panel discussion, but the insight applies so broadly he could have used it for most other panels, too.
Sep 24th, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations author Clay Shirky says that a technology’s social effects—substitute “business” effects if you want — usually occur just when a technology has become boring. For example, email. It used to be something we talked about: “Do you have email?” “You mean the Internets?” And so on. Nowadays, everybody but John McCain uses it.
So it should be with business intelligence.
In a Harvard video, Shirky tells a story about his parents’ first date. His father borrowed his brother’s car, and on the date his mother ordered the most sophisticated drink on the menu: a root beer float. She actually hated root beer, though, and threw up in the car. Is that story about the internal combustion engine? Well, yes and no. Though those events would not have occurred without it, the boy and girl never even thought about it as events unfolded. It only enabled.
Today the only people who talk about automotive technology are backyard mechanics and industry experts. I’m happy to leave it to them.
Fortunately, we’re getting there in business intelligence with the emergence of things like LucidEra, Tableau and DataSelf. Keep the boredom coming.
Sep 23rd, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo
The reason most IT marketing puts features out in front, instead of benefits, is that marketers got in the habit of pitching to geeks. That audience craves obscurity. Imagine what would happen if the business people knew what all those BI tools did!
That’s not my observation. I heard it from a VP of business development in the exhibition hall at TDWI conference in Las Vegas earlier this year. (I just came across the conversation in my notes.) You may not be surprised that his company is absolutely post-geek.
He thinks that era is passing. A younger audience is upon us that grew up on data. They don’t put up with the old work-behind-the-curtain stuff.
Sep 15th, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo
Some loan officers used to go by rules of thumb. There were “The Three B’s: never lend to beauticians, bartenders or barbers” and “The Three P’s: never lend to preachers, plumbers or prostitutes.” Now we have an automated system, but it can’t tell an upstanding banker from a down-on-his-luck bartender.
Imagine a high-level banker who leaves his job for a promotion in another state. He’s trusted and respected for the job he did as senior risk manager, reporting to the board of directors, at a 19-branch bank in Atlanta. But for moving and taking that new job, his credit score declines. He’s forced to pay more for his new mortgage.
“That makes no sense,” he says, “It’s completely out of context,” says Clark Abrahams, SAS’s chief financial architect. He’s happily resettled, but he’s out to overhaul the U.S. credit scoring system.
The context the system missed is his ample capacity to repay the loan. He’s automatically put in the same basket as some other applicant who may live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Context is just what he would inject into the U.S. credit-scoring system. He calls the new system he’s promoting model CCAF (SEE-caff), for Comprehensive Credit Assessment Framework.
Today’s distorted scoring began decades ago, he explains. Before we had credit scoring, we had loan officers. They approved or denied loans based on their own experience and judgment. But that was unreliable and often unfair.
So when computers became available, banks developed scoring. Now we’ve swung the other way: proxy metrics, not common sense, rate credit applicants.
It’s a story in progress for TDWI’s BI This Week.
Sep 8th, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo
This public service announcement opens on a CSI-like scene. Let’s call it “CSI: Marketing Crimes Division.” The lieutenant asks the lab guy, “What have you got?”
“It’s a tough one,” says the lab guy.
Lying before them under bright lights on a stainless steel examination table is the weapon: an email printed on plain white paper. The lieutenant turns it gently with tongs to read it. “‘Brillo-BI is designed for the vast majority of businesspeople who do not have access to big BI solutions.’” A list of features follows in bullet points.
He snorts, “I don’t get it. The product can’t be for everybody. Who’s it really for? What’s it do better?”
“That’s just it,” says the lab guy. “We can’t tell. And the perpetrators left no fingerprints, no blood…”
“How many words?”
“About 150, start to finish.”
“What a waste.”
A junior detective bursts in with news. “The company’s on life support. They put everything into this marketing campaign, and now…”
“Same old story,” the lieutenant growls looking down at the email. “Just once, I’d like to see one of these marketing people indicted.”
A solemn screen finishes the ad. It says in stark white letters on black, “Remember the unique selling proposition.”
Sep 3rd, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo
It’s called “agile BI,” and it goes like this: forget the big meetings, forget the planning, forget the budgeting. Just get someone from IT and someone from business together and make a prototype in a week.
Dave Wells, an independent consultant after five and a half years as TDWI education director, reports that clients are asking for this. “Let’s just see what we can whip up in an hour or three,” he said. If the prototype doesn’t come up with the most useful answer, the two people on the team rework it until it does.
“People are no longer asking for the big heavy BI applications with a life span of five to ten years,” he said. “They want fast answers right now.”
It’s one solution for a chilled economy—and I’m looking for others for BI This Week. Have you heard any novel, out-of-the-box or off-the-wall ways that anyone has squeezed results from BI? Make a comment or use the contact form today.