business+intelligence category archives

How could you possibly remember events that specifically, unless that happens to be the day you got married or some other key event in your life.

Malcolm Ryder has some fun with "Business Intelligence versus Business Knowledge: Who Cares?" I particularly like his thoughts about business intelligence, or more accurately, the process of seeing patterns in the constant wave of data, information and knowledge.

"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by John P. A. Ioannidis describes a statistical test for the likelihood of research being false, first without researcher bias and then a second test that includes bias. The result: it doesn't look good.

In "Data chief climbs the executive title tower," Chicago Tribune staff reporter Jon Van discusses data mining the importance of data to companies. I see the importance of the strategic view.

"Know how: Managing knowledge for competitive advantage" by Terry Ernest-Jones is an interesting survey and discussion of where knowledge management is headed from the perspective of senior leaders in western European businesses.

A partial review of "Great Information Disasters'' from 1991. The book is a collection of "Twelve prime examples of how information mismanagement led to human misery, political misfortune and business failure."

Duane McCollum, the information auditor, stumbled upon two interesting references about information disasters and the cost of them in his "Great Information Disasters?" An additional information "disaster" in my mind is that people get lost in analyzing the data and lose sight of the goal.

I attended an interesting seminar on Business Intelligence recently with Howard Spielman as an excellent keynote speaker. Data visualization has been around for a while. Companies should develop graphicacy standards.

Uncertainty is a critical thing to understand and too many people seem to gloss over it. How much would it take to add uncertainty to your timelines and reports?

Just because two factors are correlated does not mean that one causes the other. My favorite example of this is from my grad school days, when my advisor mentioned that the crime rate follows ice cream eating habit. Therefore ice cream eating causes crime, right? Well, no, both happen to be...

Ben Fry, a student at MIT is working his fingers off on a couple of data/information visualizaton projects. One of them is valence: I'm interested in building systems that create visual constructions from large bodies of information. The methods used in designing static chunks of data: charting, graphing, sorting and the...

From Wall Stree Journal Online, Jeanette Borzo writes Get the Picture Executives in a broad range of industries around the world are finding that information-visualization software helps them make critical business decisions by cutting through information overload. Instead of wading through endless spreadsheets and text analyses, executives can get a quick...

In ComputerWorld's Business Intelligence: One Version of the Truth, the storry suggests is that there is "one version" of the truth that can be extracted from the information swirling around an enterprise. Business intelligence systems promise to change that by, among other things, pulling data from all internal systems plus external...

It looks like Jakob Nielsen gets lost in the same hole many others do when using statistics to drive a point.

Frank Patrick has a piece today on the Otis Redding Theory of Measurement that he got from Fast Company via some Otis lyrics, "I can't do what 10 people tell me to do, so I guess I'll remain the same." Frank's summary: "Too many measures are not only distracting, but are...