Data

Fun with Ngrams – Art, Science, Programming

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 19, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

A recent gift from Google Labs – the NGram viewer, a fascinating tool that searches the Google Books database for words and phrases, and charts their relative frequency. For example – let’s take some of the themes of this blog … Apparently, Art and Science have grown closer, and enjoy a somewhat parallel existence together. [...]

Learning About Data Visualization

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 5, 2010 ⋅ 2 comments

Even though there is an art to visualization design, it stands to reason that this is a skill that can be taught / learned. I remember going to campus visits with my daughter, and hearing about a textbook considered to be a timeless classic – teaching students how to draw. What a concept – I [...]

A Little Too Literal (or, How to Teach Innovation)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ August 9, 2010 ⋅ One comment

Spoiler alert: It can’t be taught … One of the questions I get – and I’m getting this a lot lately – is how to get people to think more analytically, less literally. We need folks to stop focusing on the mechanical task of manipulating reports with Excel just to compute some answers. How about [...]

Data Visualization: Why (1 of 2)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 13, 2010 ⋅ One comment

Between business requests and breathless vendors, I am getting caught up in the growing tide of interest in “data visualizations” – managers requesting highly interactive, highly graphical, highly intuitive analytics interfaces (think Minority Report). But what are we trying to accomplish here? We keep on hearing about “executive dashboards”, a heads-up display of in-my-face KPIs, [...]

Bootstrap Market Research: Master Data Management (Results)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 17, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

As previously noted, I’ve been doing a lot of discussion and data crunching around “Master Data Management” lately – so I’ve “bootstrapped” a little market research project. It’s still a work in process – responses are trickling in – but I thought I might take some time to summarize what I am hearing to date. [...]

Bootstrap Market Research: Master Data Management (What, Who, How)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 30, 2009 ⋅ One comment

I’ve been asked a lot of questions about “Master Data Management” over the past few weeks – what does it mean, who does it, and what are some tools and metrics that organizations are using to reign in this important aspect of ERP and analytics systems. I started reaching out to the folks in my [...]

News for Wombats: Taming Unreasonable Requirements

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 26, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

I’ve heard from a couple of friends about some “classic” project requests – dilemmas they have recently faced. These unreasonable requests can be turned into something achievable and, potentially, more relevant / meaningful to the requestor, by approaching the problem from a different direction. Request for Data: the Analytics Project Classic scenario #1 arrives courtesy [...]

Redundant Tautology

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ April 18, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

Just something funny I heard today in passing – someone asking for “another duplicate copy” of that data file. More here.

Putting Data into Context

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ February 28, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

Another link to Thinking Faster – I like this blog. Not quite a peeve, but it amazes me how often presentations talk about numeric specifics like “increased revenue by $1.2M”. Is that a lot? For IBM, a failure, for my corner laundromat, a boom year. When presenting numeric data, always give it some context, like [...]

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