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8 reasons why you should love presenting
Do YOU love presenting? Too many people hate presenting. A few weeks ago, I wrote about some strategies to combat nervousness when presenting to a larger group of people. This post turned out to be extremely popular. However, I just realized that I had omitted an important point: Why would I want to present in […]
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Lessons from the discovery-driven planning approach
Discovery-driven planning A few weeks ago I researched ideas for improving current planning and forecasting approaches. I stumbled upon a methodology that I had long forgotten. It is called ‘Discovery-driven planning’ and it was developed by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan. The idea was first published in the July 1995 issue of the Harvard Business […]
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Updates, updates, updates
Busy times Wow. It’s been a busy but exciting week. There is a lot going on in the business analytics space these days. Here are some updates that you might find interesting. There is a new version of the IBM Cognos iPad app. You can download it from the iTunes store. The new version has […]
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TM1 – The swiss army knife for the finance department?
IBM Cognos TM1 No doubt, IBM Cognos TM1 is a unique solution. I have never met so many loyal and enthusiastic long-term customers than for any other finance-related software solution. TM1 is special indeed. There is a lot to like: it is lightening fast (64-bit in memory), configuration does not require rocket-science, it supports Excel, […]
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The robot – a case study about the value of process automation
The case for process automation Many business analytics programs follow a classic approach – they start with process automation. It is the low hanging fruit. Executives and project managers like process automation as it is usually easy to measure and identify the benefits (e.g.: cycle time reduced by 2 days, aggregation is 60% faster). However, […]
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Business Analytics Updates for June 14th
Greetings. It’s been an incredibly busy few weeks for me with lot’s of travel through Asia. The IBM Finance Forum events for that region were kicked off last Wednesday. I was pleasantly surprised by the huge number of finance professionals that joined the events in Taipei, Hong Kong and Shanghai. As I am still recovering […]
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David Parmenter’s reading list – Listen to the King of KPIs
David Parmenter Greetings from Shanghai. For the past seven days, I have had the pleasure of working with the thought-leader, book author and consultant David Parmenter. He is also known as the King of KPIs based on his best-selling book Key Performance Indicators (KPI): Developing, Implementing, and Using Winning KPIs. David and I have been […]
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How to confuse and distract your audience with poor visualizations
Excuse me? We often talk about how to best visualize data so that the audience can quickly discover the most important information in often complex data sets. But we cannot forget that it is also possible to achieve exactly the opposite effect: You can also leverage visualizations to distract and confuse people. As a matter […]
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Success with Performance Management – An interview with Mark Lack from Mueller Inc.
The 80 year-old company Mueller Inc is a a leading manufacturer of pre-engineered metal buildings and metal roofing products. Mark Lack is responsible for performance management at Mueller Inc. He delivered a great presentation about their IBM Cognos implementation at the recent IBM Vision 2012 event in Orlando. Following his session we sat down for […]
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Want to run a company? The Business Analytics Experience Workshop
You are the new CEO! What does it feel like to run a company? How cool would it be to make really important decisions? How awesome would it be to have all the critical information that you need to get your job done? Good questions? Here is the good news for you: You can certainly […]