Bridging the Dashboard Communication Gap

The term “dashboard” provides a convenient metaphor because everyone has at least some idea of what a dashboard looks like – and therein lies the problem: our own idea of a dashboard may differ wildly from someone else’s idea of a dashboard.  When people talk about dashboards, there may be a huge communications gap and […]

The Power of In-House Analytics

A business associate recently forwarded a white paper by one of the global BI software companies with the comment “… it all sounds so simple, yet we both know the complexities are just under the table.”  Like all good marketing materials, this white paper talked about the current pain of the target audience and provided […]

Decision Making During Turmoil: How Well Are We Prepared?

In order to make profitable decisions, we need good information.  Whether we base our decisions on sales, customer perceptions or the number of widgets we shipped last month, our information comes from some system that collects and measures relevant data for us.

In my Six Sigma Black Belt class we recently discussed the challenges of developing […]

Looking Ahead: More Data, More Details – Less Work?

As companies grow, so do the demands on their Sales Operations and Marketing Research teams.  As new products are launched and sales forces grow, BI managers need to answer ever more questions from ever more people about ever more data and ever more details.  The “working smarter” solution to deal with this increasing demand usually […]

Making Time For The Future

Time acts like money: we have to invest a little up front to get much more of it down the road.  The initial time investment involves paper, pencil and some brainstorming.  We build on this investment with a little bit of research and use the research results to start building a case for stopping things […]

Three Steps To A Better BI Future

Managers who provide information to their sales and marketing organizations walk a tight line between drowning in data details and making sure that the information they provide leads to profitable decisions.  The daily fire fights do not leave much time for planning ahead, let alone for envisioning the future.  Yet, all successful managers know that […]