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July 31, 2006
Looking for an answer
Have you ever had the experience when looking for an answer in some data that you rarely (never?) find the answer in the data that you start with? Invariably, you need more information, more observations, more columns of input (from some other department or even perhaps from outside your company) or you need to add additional structure to your data to support your analysis. The cards are stacked against you.
There is an institutional latency embedded into the IT process of delivering structured data to business users. Whether it is the IT department or Stats department, the business users wait-in-line-until-the-specialist-gets-to-their-question! The IT and Stats priesthoods remove flexibility and responsiveness by exerting control over the business users' question-asking capability. Of course, business people find their way around this - and I'd argue that in 80% of the cases the answer is found in the usage of Microsoft Excel. Not only that - I'd argue that 80% of the world's interesting business questions are answered in Excel.
Now that said - can't we do better than navigating table after table of textual data?
Posted by at July 31, 2006 12:45 PM
