The Technobabblist

Well, I do not know about you but I think that says a lot.  I see that is when a real and expected email is grabbed by a spam handler and treated as spam.  As you can guess I took it from the term manhandled.  I envision the email getting “roughed up” as it is thrown in with all the “bad apple” spam.  I see all those movies and television shows where some innocent person is put in the jail with some rough looking characters.

It is not that I do not like the spam handlers.  They do a great job of keeping my email clear from email that I do not want and have not asked for.  But I have lost time thinking I did not receive an email only to find it in the spam box.  This was especially a problem when I was searching for a job and some request of resumes and job descriptions went into the spam/junk folder only to be discovered several days or weeks later.  I tend to add rules for those emails in hope that the next one does not get spamhandled.

spamhandled – when an email is put in the spam or junk folder by the automated spam filtering software when the recipient does not want it to be.

Well, day two was good.  It started with the keynote by Ian Ayres.  His key message was that if you are not doing randomized test then you are messing up.  Analyzing the numbers is not enough because randomized test shows you what really happens.  He gave some examples from Monster.com and eHarmony.com where they tested their interfaces and found the results showed that intuition was wrong.  I was later able to get his book which I plan to read.

I attended the “Workforce Analytics” which really is based on the HR side of the BI analytics.  KPIs are needed for each of the roles in an organization to really be able to measure how the recruitment and retention is performing.  An example of how Disney was exploring ways to improve the visitor’s experience showed that better selected and trained street sweepers would have the most impact was presented.  Also, there is not one tool for HR analytics.

My most informative session was “Maximizing Business Value and Avoiding the Fatal Flaws of Business Intelligence.”  Bill Hostmann did a great job again!  I have three pages of notes that talk about the six observations, cornerstones, and flaws.  I will be taking these back to our team at CyberData.  I am not going into very much detail because I am not sure how Gartner would react.

My least informative was “End-User Case Study” which was about BICC and Leadership.  The two panel members had very different stories about how the ended up where there were.  One kind of came from the tech side and just kind of ended up at a working organization.  The other had a very knowledgeable CEO that put measurable performance at the forefront. While each story was interesting I still was not impressed.  The give away that I did not pay attention to was that it was not well attended.

I will be taking a full suitcase home of goodies from the vendors.  So it was fun visiting the booths.  They also did a good job with the hospitality suites during the evening.

 More tomorrow.

I am at the Gartner BI Summit in Chicago. So far it has had some good information about BI and some of the directions.

Getting in was an adventure. I registered and paid on the Friday before but after waiting in line to check-in I found that my registration showed as not being paid. I move to the on-site registrations which move slow, so slow I missed the keynote. Jessica was the only person working the on-site and she was doing a great job. She did need some help but everyone else was working either sponsor registration or pre-registration check-in.

I attended the “How to Minimize BI Project Gambles with Effective Program Management” workshop and was disappointed. It was a workshop that after a brief introduction presentation, we worked in groups at our table to come up with common issues with BI projects from our experience. Then, we grouped them to a couple of high level issues, in our case they were grouped into Functional/Organizational issues and Governance. Each table, six in all, then presented what they found. After gathering and grouping those into six high level issues we regrouped into areas that interested us to discuss and come with an approach or solution to that issue. Lastly, we presented our findings.

What disappointed me was that it was more of a facilitated brain storming session with little to no input from the Gartner analyst. I would have liked more view into how the issues are being approached in the industry or ideas from Gartner on the approaches. Most of the attendee’s I have talked to were disappointed with this workshop.

Lunch was great.

I attended the after lunch session of “BICC: Shifting the Focus from Technology to Core Business Competency” and “Market Dynamics in BI”. Both of these were good sessions. The first talked about how the BICC should be focused on the business and not just the technology. The second talked about all the changes in the vendor space this past year and what we can look forward to in the coming years.

My evening was spent wander the vendor exhibition hall and enjoying the food and drink. I got lots of goodies and some contacts for partner programs.

More tomorrow.

I bet you are wondering why I chose Technobabblist. Well, it started several years ago thinking that I wanted to start a company that provided technology advisers. At the time I was talking to a friend about all the technobabble that existed. That when it came to me that I should call the company Technobabble and I would be the Chief Technobabblist. However, there is already a company called Technobabble and they own the domain (bummer). So I registered technobabblist.com a couple of years ago and parked it.

Now, I am starting on my third phase of my technology career by moving more into the business development. Phase one was development (Java, Ada, FORTRAN, SNAP, etc.). Phase two was software architecture (mainly Java-based web applications on different application servers). So now it is time for phase three.

However, I am more a techy than a sales person so I hope to keep up with all the different things going on and use this to blog about them. I am focusing on Business Intelligence because that is where CyberData Technologies, Inc. (whom I am work for) is focused. The funny thing is that I have been doing BI for a long time but now I have a name for it.

So I hope you come back and check out my post.