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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 […]
How often have we seen a graph in an opinion piece without knowing how it was created, but somewhere in the back of our mind we suspected that it was tweaked somehow to make a point? How can we ferret out “creative analytics” from the true story? Remember Mark Twain’s famous quote about […]
Often we have to work with data without knowing all the details of how it was collected and processed. In those situations we first need to determine what information the data contains and what it can and cannot tell us. We need to ask questions of the data and determine whether it makes sense, […]
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 […]
With the massive recall due to sudden acceleration problems, Toyota’s reputation for superior quality has suffered a black eye – if not more. The future will tell how serious this injury is and whether it represents the tip of an ominous iceberg. Sprinkled amongst the news coverage are hints that Toyota has known about accelerator […]
Recently, while working on input for a decision tree, I ran into a scenario that reminded me of the fact that we cannot improve a decision simply by applying a tool or technique. We also need good data.
Here is a hypothetical example: Let us assume we are a contractor who is evaluating a fixed bid […]
Ted Cuzzillo, the author behind the datadoodle blog, got me thinking about data details today. When do they matter and when do they distract from what matters?
Being a data analyst means that I love details: the more the better, so I can understand how they form the Big Picture. Intrinsically, I am drawn to graphs […]
When we use analysis tools like Tableau software, it becomes very important to keep our bearings about the data we are investigating. For example, we need to keep in mind that Tableau retrieves and calculates information based only on the data needed to generate the graph. That statement sounds really, duh, obvious. But we can […]
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