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Arms race environments

Steve Miller at Information Management interviews Revolution Analytics CEO Norman Nie. Nie makes the important point that when Business Analytics is central to an organisation it won't be acknowledged:

One of the biggest challenges of working in our industry is that it’s difficult to find public customers. Nobody wants to share their “secret sauce” with competitors, so the vast majority of companies that we work with wish to remain anonymous.

Our term for these competitive situations is "arms race environments". Companies mentioned in the piece are Google, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn and Amazon.

Presales versus postsales

People who haven't been intimate with the enterprise software game tend to underestimate the differences between the presales and postsales environments. Those differences exist on both the vendor and buyer sides of the sales equation:

1. People: less experienced buyers don't realise that the people they deal with during the sales process are a different group to those who will be involved in implementation efforts.
2. Incentives: vendors' presales incentives are all designed to make sales transactions occur. Their postsales incentives, on the other hand, are generally tied to professional services and project management targets. These two sets of success criteria are often directly at odds with each other.
3. Politics: buyers and sellers both abstract out organisational-political considerations when they are in presales mode. In the postsales mode they become all too real.
4. Data: similarly, most substantive data attributes (existence, coverage, history, quality, etc.) are also abstracted out during presales interactions. Postsales applications of Business Analytics are uniquely data-centric. Their success is necessarily contingent on the fitness for purpose of available data. During presales, however, software functionality is usually showcased in idealised data scenarios.

The philosopher king of data visualisation

The Washington Monthly profiles Edward Tufte. Highlights:

In the public realm, data has never been more ubiquitous—or more valuable to those who know how to use it. “If you display information the right way, anybody can be an analyst,” Tufte once told me. “Anybody can be an investigator.”

"[T]he first grand principle of analytical design”: above all else, always show comparisons.

“There is no such thing as information overload,” Tufte says at the start of his courses. “Only bad design.”

Tufte has shifted how designers approach the job of turning information into understanding. “It’s not about making the complex simple,” Grefe told me. “It’s about making the complex clear.”

[A]cquainting Tufte with the slow, procedural pace of bureaucracy has been the greatest challenge, [Earl] Devaney [head of the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board, the body created by the Obama administration to keep track of the $780 billion in federal stimulus money that has spread out across the country] told me. “Tufte drives race cars,” Devaney said, “and most people in Washington drive tanks.”

The rule of law is an information management system

Hernando de Soto on the destruction of economic facts:

The rule of law is much more than a dull body of norms: It is a huge, thriving information and management system that filters and processes local data until it is transformed into facts organized in a way that allows us to infer if they hang together and make sense.

Read the whole thing.