Category archive for ‘Reality Check’ 
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When the right tool is not a standard tool.
Phil Simon (@philsimon) tweeted a link to an article in the Harvard business review that talks about the dangers of being "overly tool standardized" within an organisation that I thought was very interesting. Now, of course, standards are needed, and for a broad range of tools its counter productive (and horrifically expensive) to let everyone [...]
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Let’s admit it- centralized business intelligence alone just doesn’t work
One version of the truth. Data warehouses. Centralized business intelligence teams. This has been the best practice for business intelligence for the last two decades. Users taking the initiative with data has been seen as the enemy of a successful business intelligence program. This needs to change. In a world of ever increasing data volumes [...]
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Estimating the cost of Business Intelligence
How much does a single Business Intelligence report cost a company? Well, obviously there is no single answer- but Boris Evelson of Forrester took a shot at it recently in a blog post. Even when it's not an easy question, it is worth pursuing, and Boris lays out a useful discussion. $150 000 is the [...]
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Spreadsheet errors- Fear, uncertainty and doubt
I love the acronym FUD which stands for "Fear, uncertainty and doubt". What I don't love is the underhanded use of FUD to manipulate peoples behavior. Spreading FUD is not about creating something new, but destroying- destroying someones confidence in something, clouding the real issue, stopping a new or creative direction from being taken. FUD [...]
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The tragedy of anti-data leadership and dataphobia
There has been a lot of discussion in the last year or so about how important data analysis is becoming. IBM made a major move into data analytics by establishing a new organisation "Business Analytics & Optimization Services" with 4000 people in it. There was the much quoted Hal Varian of Google who predicted that [...]
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Business Intelligence adoption low and falling
It seems that the level of adoption of business intelligence tools as a percentage of users is much lower than typically thought. The data warehouse institute (TDWI) published a commentary on the latest business intelligence survey. This survey, published by the business application research center, reports that although your BI vendor might be telling you [...]
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Being led astray by numbers
Hindsight is oh so clear, but the recent (ongoing?) meltdown of the credit market still amazes me. There is a good article in Wired this month, talking about some of the math that led everyone astray. In the end, there is a lesson for data analysts in all this too; Do not believe the numbers [...]
