Data Lens Turns 20 LinkedIn reminded me that Data Lens, the data consulting practice I started, is now 20 years old this month. I originally started the company as a solo BI practitioner, but as I brought in consultants, I never stopped to think about the longevity of Data Lens. I just immersed myself in the work. Data management consulting is a great field, and […]
In the data world, one of the big takeaways from 2020 was the need to reassess existing metrics. With businesses seeing their revenue fall off a cliff, the analysis shifted from performance trend to performance recovery. Looking Back After the fallout, the focus was on both damages and recovery. Below are some questions you might see with each focus. Damage analysis How did business change […]
For some reason, people really dislike scatter charts. They understand them well enough, but they do not LIKE them. These charts are also referred to as “scatter diagrams” or “scatter plots”, and that says a lot about their lack of popularity – nobody cares enough to know their name. I get it – scatter charts might appear too academic or mathematical at times. Presenters might […]
Even before mainframe computing became an enterprise standard, system managers had to monitor resource usage to control costs, govern processing loads and make decisions about system capacity. Granted, this topic today seems so 1960’s… only to be discussed in the smoking lounge at NASA, but these concerns still exist in both mainframes and cloud computing environments. Today the concerns have shifted somewhat from processing costs […]
Misleading Metrics For data pros, defining performance metrics is an important job that requires using the right data and some trial and error to deliver accurate measures. Since the subject of defining metrics is boring to a lot of people, I thought I’d illustrate some points by poking fun at one of the most abused consumer metrics relied on during the holiday shopping season: customer […]