Tuesday, January 8, 2013

My New Business Intelligence Blog

Dear Friends,


Since last year I began supporting a new Business Intelligence blog on the Sandhill.com website, called "Dresner's Point". Each week (or so) I'll post my synthesis and commentary on the previous week's #BIWisdom Tweetchat.


If you're not familiar with our weekly TweetChat, it occurs on Friday's at 1PM ET. Each week I am joined by Business Intelligence and information management experts (e.g., providers, customers, vendors and other analysts) to discuss important topics related to BI. 


Below are summaries and links to my articles posted thus far:



January 7, 2013



Dresner’s Point: Three Don’ts, Four Do’s for Business Intelligence in 2013


What will we see cropping up in the business intelligence space in the coming year? At the past couple of tweetchats at my Friday #BIWisdom group, we spent some time tracing the journey of where we’re headed based on current trends. Check the list of do’s and don’ts that I found notable from the discussion and determine where your organization is in the journey.



December 18, 2012



Dresner’s Point: Will Amazon’s Redshift Become a BI Swiss Army Knife?


Once upon a time . . . actually just two months ago . . . #BIWisdom tweetchat tribe members were facing off in response to the question of whether the EDW (electronic data warehouse) is dead. But then at the end of November, along came Amazon Web Services with its preview-launch of Redshift, a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. So is the sense of talking about the valid future of the EDW diminished by the new reality of Redshift? I don’t think so, for the controversy exposes the criteria necessary for Redshift’s success.


December 11, 2012


One of the memorable scenes in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz” is when Dorothy and her three fellow travelers of the Yellow Brick Road finally reach the castle and are promised a meeting with the Wizard known as The Great and Powerful Oz. Certain that he will give them some innovation to address their challenges, they’re at first impressed with the flashy “bells and whistles.” Then they’re stunned when they see the reality: a very non-wizard-looking kind of guy operating the bells and whistles behind a curtain. And they hear a booming voice warning them to “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”


December 6, 2012


At one of my recent Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats, we began talking about innovation in business intelligence products. But that quickly exposed a controversy that changed the direction of our chat to a common ailment in today’s business world: the business side, end users and IT can no longer exist as though they are in a parallel universe.


November 13, 2012


On any Friday at my #BIWisdom tweetchat, you’ll find a tribe of followers who are keenly interested in discussing how to achieve better outcomes from business intelligence solutions. In chatting last week about what will be hot in business intelligence in 2013, the tribe focused on analytics and a prediction that Big Data will shift next year from tech talk to talking about business value. And ETL (the Extract, Transform, Load process) comes into play.


November 6, 2012


It’s that time of year when everyone’s predicting what will be hot next year. My prediction: embedded BI will be one of the hot topics in the business intelligence space in 2013. How do I know? One of the things I’ve done lately (besides our formal research studies on expectations in business intelligence solutions), is ask the tribe at my #BIWisdom’s Friday tweetchat what they see around the bend.


November 1, 2012


Last Friday at the weekly tweethat I host on Twitter (#BIWisdom), I asked: What is the definition of a data scientist? An important topic, wouldn’t you agree, given that an article in this month’s Harvard Business Review deemed it the “sexiest career of the 21st century” and businesses are developing courses for how to become a data scientist even while job ads appearing on the web are still wildly disparate in describing the data scientist role.