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Quick Takes for the Week of April 27


May 1: Good Data founder and CEO Roman Stanek blogs at his own site about the economics of business intelligence, which he says “are broken.” Stanek says that BI platforms must be able to scale both up and down (or be elastic, in his terminology) and offer more flexibility and measureability than they do today.

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April 30: This is an interesting post from Ben Lorica at O’Reilly Radar. It features an embedded video from LinkedIn Chief Scientist DJ Patil, who addresses the career prospects of those seeking to enter the analytics workforce. The dynamic is that the amount of data companies collect is exploding, so folks accustomed to dealing with huge data sets will feel at home. Serendipitously, Patil says, tools are becoming less expensive and more diverse and accessible. The open source movement has a lot to do with this.

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April 29: Laura Madsen, who is the Health Care Practice Leader for Lancet and a contributor to the BeyeNETWORK, has very good article at the site on ROI in BI. Decision makers intuitively understand that BI is a good thing and tend to approve projects when the economy is strong. The problem is that gut level feelings don’t cut it when things turn sour, and the absence of specific ROI figures increase the chances that a project will be nixed. Another challenge is that projects tend to be costly, so positive ROI figures can be elusive. Madsen also offers a four-step guide to ROI and other advice.

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April 28: A decade ago, an IBM computer beat Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion. Now, Big Blue is challenging a human – who has not yet been determined – to a contest on the game show Jeopardy. Mark Hachman at AppScout says that this will in part be a test of business intelligence and how far it has come. The writer defines BI as “trying to find the interesting needles in a haystack of seemingly random data.” While that description is a bit broader than the everyday definition used by those in the industry, at a very high level it is on the mark.

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April 27: Robert Cain, who blogs under the name Arcane Code, has posted a .pdf of the slides from a presentation planned for the Atlanta SQL Saturday 2009 event this past weekend. The slides, which define business intelligence and data warehousing, get into a good level of detail. Of course, slides without commentary are a bit like a movie without the sound track. In some cases – and this is one of them – the glass is half full.