Wednesday, August 5, 2009
I made this with Crystal Xcelcius:
Pretty pretty isn't it? It was pretty easy to use and to make, easier than with Visual Studio probably. Fairly intuitive for me, it's pretty windows-esc so it's got interfaces that look vaguely familiar and are fairly logically organised. I didn't really have a problem with the tool other than that it's flash, which I don't really like. Linking to flash is just a pain and is horrible for searching and indexing. Bu other than that it was okay. The spreadsheet was pretty damn simply really, and no real forecasting model would be that simplistic if it was any good. But it illustrated Xcelcius (i keep calling it the tool cos of its spelling) very well.
The lecture again seemed to be in the search of O'Donnell's law or should I say O\'Donnell's law as Moodle puts it [Every time i see that i think, shit if they can't clean SQL what hope to assignment submissions have and grade calculations, lol]. I felt like the whole way through the lecture i was being like one of those annoying ppl at magic shows who always asks the Magician how and then has to know how and goes home and is still thinking about it the next day. I was trying to figure out who the companies were in the case studies, the hints were unbearable, 2.5 hour flights, revenue figures, etc, all made me want to go home and look up the historical data for companies at said date. I did attempt to pay attention to what they did wrong or right in their BI system but it was always in the back of my mind that i was thinking about who they could be. It's okay, i think i have given up on trying to figure them all out now, Alex kinda helped a little bit and i resisted the urge to google and some of the hints i've forgotten or forgotten the details of and would have to go back to the lecture recordings to figure it out and that's just not worth the time and effort when I have amazing blogs to write.
The lecture made me think that maybe most BI is disposable, maybe we don't need really fancy systems to do these things, maybe we can just pull all the data together once and get the picture and then move on. Organisational memory is important though, you probably want to retain data, aggregated or otherwise about other times so that you can relate it to the present. Seeing the Development pattern of Case1: A mature system did remind me of Peter Keen's model before you pointed it out, i was feeling all clever after that.
To be honest I don't really rate these surveys you do. I'm not sure if people really tell the truth on surveys even if they are anonymous. They are all perceptions of reality heavily influenced by hindsight bias and groupthink (thanks George Orwell for bringing this term to my consciousness [i read 1984 recently]).
I really don't believe that outsourcing works well for BI, Arnott has me a bit brainwashed here, but it just seems like the kind of activity that you want to be better at your competitors at. If you understand your industry's customers better than your opposition you clearly stand to gain, i'm not sure that if you outsource BI you are going to have an advantage for very long because your competitor will get the outsourced BI system too and then it will be a level playing field. Sure there are different BI outsourcers, but you must be careful about contracts so that the outsourcers can't just sell your system to somebody else. [nb: this is not a well formed argument and i'm not sure i agree with everything i say; end disclaimer]
Pretty pretty isn't it? It was pretty easy to use and to make, easier than with Visual Studio probably. Fairly intuitive for me, it's pretty windows-esc so it's got interfaces that look vaguely familiar and are fairly logically organised. I didn't really have a problem with the tool other than that it's flash, which I don't really like. Linking to flash is just a pain and is horrible for searching and indexing. Bu other than that it was okay. The spreadsheet was pretty damn simply really, and no real forecasting model would be that simplistic if it was any good. But it illustrated Xcelcius (i keep calling it the tool cos of its spelling) very well.
The lecture again seemed to be in the search of O'Donnell's law or should I say O\'Donnell's law as Moodle puts it [Every time i see that i think, shit if they can't clean SQL what hope to assignment submissions have and grade calculations, lol]. I felt like the whole way through the lecture i was being like one of those annoying ppl at magic shows who always asks the Magician how and then has to know how and goes home and is still thinking about it the next day. I was trying to figure out who the companies were in the case studies, the hints were unbearable, 2.5 hour flights, revenue figures, etc, all made me want to go home and look up the historical data for companies at said date. I did attempt to pay attention to what they did wrong or right in their BI system but it was always in the back of my mind that i was thinking about who they could be. It's okay, i think i have given up on trying to figure them all out now, Alex kinda helped a little bit and i resisted the urge to google and some of the hints i've forgotten or forgotten the details of and would have to go back to the lecture recordings to figure it out and that's just not worth the time and effort when I have amazing blogs to write.
The lecture made me think that maybe most BI is disposable, maybe we don't need really fancy systems to do these things, maybe we can just pull all the data together once and get the picture and then move on. Organisational memory is important though, you probably want to retain data, aggregated or otherwise about other times so that you can relate it to the present. Seeing the Development pattern of Case1: A mature system did remind me of Peter Keen's model before you pointed it out, i was feeling all clever after that.
To be honest I don't really rate these surveys you do. I'm not sure if people really tell the truth on surveys even if they are anonymous. They are all perceptions of reality heavily influenced by hindsight bias and groupthink (thanks George Orwell for bringing this term to my consciousness [i read 1984 recently]).
I really don't believe that outsourcing works well for BI, Arnott has me a bit brainwashed here, but it just seems like the kind of activity that you want to be better at your competitors at. If you understand your industry's customers better than your opposition you clearly stand to gain, i'm not sure that if you outsource BI you are going to have an advantage for very long because your competitor will get the outsourced BI system too and then it will be a level playing field. Sure there are different BI outsourcers, but you must be careful about contracts so that the outsourcers can't just sell your system to somebody else. [nb: this is not a well formed argument and i'm not sure i agree with everything i say; end disclaimer]
0 comments:
Post a Comment