Tag: Business Intelligence
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Business analytics & the Innovator’s DNA
The other day, I wrote about how Business Analytics can help create innovative businesses. For some reason, the topic kept hovering in my mind and I pulled out an interesting six-year study conducted by INSEAD professor Hal Gregersen, Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Clayton Christensen of Harvard. It is called ‘The Innovator’s DNA’.…
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How Business Analytics can drive creativity & innovation
Last weekend I was reviewing my recent photography portfolio. I noticed an interesting theme: my favorite photographs seemed to be clustered around certain months. There are a few months when my activity was low and the resulting photos were not that great. That raised an interesting question: Do we get more creative by being more…
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Is data valueable?
“How can data be so valuable?” That is the provocative question a friend asked me a few days ago. We had a good discussion about life, work and other fun things. My friend is an artist, by the way. Not a business person. And that created a bit of a challenge: how do you best…
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Waterfall charts, pareto analysis and beyond
Waterfall Charts? Do you like pies? I do! But not for analyzing data. Pie charts are just too busy and too hard to read in most situations. Yet they are the frequent tool of choice for visualizing the composition of a certain variable. Take a look at this example: I want to find out how…
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Scatter charts – Good for relationships
SCATTER CHARTS – THE BASIC IDEA One of the interesting and really fun things to watch is young kids learning about cause and effect. They pull on a string and music starts playing. They giggle. They push a car and the car begins to roll. And so we learn to be curious at an early…
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Three lessons from the Flip story
Did you read the news the other day? Cisco is shutting down it’s Flip business unit. I was a bit stunned. They had just bought them for around 590 million USD two years ago. The first Flip hit the markets less than four years ago (2007). And it was (and still is!) a huge success.…
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Vienna calling!
Greetings from Vienna: home of the schnitzel, yummy dumplings and lot’s of amazing history. But Vienna is also the hub of many successful companies. Today is the third European IBM Finance Forum 2011. We have had a great day so far. Lot’s of attendees from the Finance & IT departments of different Austrian businesses and…
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What cartoons can teach us about information delivery
A picture says more than a thousand words, right? Managers drown in pages of numeric reports. But as John Medina, author of the famous book ‘Brain Rules’ clearly pointed out: “Vision trumps all other senses“. In other words: we are much better at absorbing information through visuals than we are at reading numbers and letters.…
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Why bubble charts are cool
Things can be complex. Especially when we look at multi-dimensional data-sets. The objective of charts is to visualize data in the most effective and easy way. You shouldn’t need a PH.D. degree to decipher a complex chart. But it happens. There are a lot of complicated and useless charts out in dashboards. And it happens…
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The great productivity leap?
THE GREAT STAGNATION Last Wednesday evening while waiting for a connecting flight at Vienna airport, I came across an interesting eBook by Tyler Cowen: ‘The great stagnation“. Thanks to the iPad, I ended up reading the entire short book on the flight back home. To keep things short, Tyler Cowen looks at some of the…