When you design a dashboard, your users are naturally going to be excited about all the things they can do with the new information. However, as soon as they answer the questions that motivated the creation of the system, they will think of new questions that they want to answer, often by going even deeper in the data. It's like they're … [Read more...]
Innovating With Your Data Consumers
It's always the same story. Beginning of the week/month/quarter, and time for a new round of reporting. It always feels like this time it's going to be easy. Finally time to cash in on the hard work you've put in to building up reporting systems. But stakeholders have a way of looking at your hard work, thanking you for (if you're lucky) and then asking for exactly the new view … [Read more...]
You, Yes YOU, Probably Don’t Need Big Data
You’ve probably already heard plenty of people complain about the amorphous definition of big data. In this article, I’m going to define it as databases that are large enough to require MapReduce or some other special algorithm to query. Medium data is anything that requires enterprise level SQL to query. You probably already have medium data if you are enough of a functional … [Read more...]