The always fascinating Donald Farmer, former Qlik exec and now Treehive Strategy principal, has news for users of data business: “Data isn’t the real world.” It’s just a reflection that’s framed by stories we tell ourselves. Stories come first, contrary to the data industry’s dubious vision. Data, the marketing likes to imply, is a divine […]
Donald Farmer
BI Summit / Goin’ up north where the wind blows tall
I’ve never figured out why one hard-thumping song by Tom Waits brings to my mind the annual Pacific Northwest BI and Analytics Summit. Yet it does, even now as I prepare for the six-hour drive up to Grants Pass, Oregon. It’s my sixth consecutive time, and the Summit’s sixteenth. I start out the drive with […]
Free-the-data movement meets privacy
Back when data was little and simple, self-service analysis advocates started the chant, “Free the data!” IT stood in the way, they said. Fast forward to 2016: “democratized data” has become common, but so has public concern over privacy. That nettlesome struggle drove a discussion that now stands as the data industry’s’ most important discussion […]
Qlik asks what a difference a device makes
When I first heard of Qlik’s research into use of mobile devices, I thought so what? It’s an engineering problem, I said. Just figure out how to make charts work on a laptop, a Mac, an smartphone, and a tablet and be done with it. That was months ago, when Qlik released its study of […]
People tell stories anyway
People tell stories wherever they are, in every medium, day or night, in business or not. What can software do to help tell data stories? Give them templates? Force suddenly mute would-be storytellers into a best practice? Probaby not. You can imagine the stories about the stories. “I knew it’d be another god damn story” […]