-
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 […]
-
Are CMOs in denial of the new normal? The IBM CMO Study
The IBM CMO Study Last week, I wrote about Dan Zarrella’s book ‘Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness‘. The author declares that many marketing professionals often follow fluffy ‘guesswork’ when it comes to social media. The book implies that the marketing profession is struggling with social media. Is that really so? Are professionals maybe in denial of […]
-
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 […]
-
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 […]
-
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. […]
-
Why sparklines sparkle in a dashboard
SPARKLINES SPARKLE One of the key features of the dashboard in any car is the fact that it is on a ‘single page’. Car dashboards are usually very simple and it doesn’t take us more than a few seconds to familiarize ourselves in a new vehicle. Could you imagine driving a car with a complicated […]
-
Hands-up! Here comes a bullet chart
Executives often want to have a quick overview of some key metrics to find out what the state of their business is. Questions like: Are my margins on target? Is customer satisfaction within an acceptable range? What is the size of my pipeline? All this information is typically summarized in a dashboard. The easy thing […]
-
What photography taught me about dashboards
Photography and dashboards? Huh? Fire and Ice? Photography is a big and important hobby of mine. And it is a tough hobby. There is a lot to learn and the opportunity to make mistakes (read: create photographs that really suck) is huge. It starts with understanding your camera, deciphering basics like Aperture, Shutter Speed and […]
-
IBM Business Analytics at the Gartner BI Summit 2011
It’s that time of the year! The annual Gartner BI Summit is just around the corner. This year’s edition will take place from January 31st through February 1st at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge in London. IBM is one of the main sponsors for this event, and my team and I will be quite busy […]