I think there’s an efficiency Vs. effectiveness tradeoff on the digital course evaluation method. It is far more efficient for students as well as the university to enter and collect course evaluations digitally. […]

http://visual.ly/french-wine

1. The chart should tell a story: This chart tells you where French wines are produced and the aroma qualities of the wine. It is easy to compare aroma qualities and the quantity […]

Subscription models will work into the future as long as the content remains compelling enough for customers to pay ongoing. That’s the exact challenge video on demand companies, like Netflix, face when it comes […]

Challenges are twofold:

1. Technology – Fitting new external data sources into legacy data stores.
2. Human – New technologies challenge the traditional and long held beliefs of how data should be modeled […]

Fact: Order, traffic & freight
Measure: order detail, freight detail, traffic detail
Dimension: store, time, sales, traffic, freight

This data mart will answer for a set period of time how much was […]

I would hold hack-a-thon’s to get the development community excited about the potential of the data available at data.gov. I would offer a prize along with some form of public acknowledgement. I would hold the […]

Put simply, good process should come out of good data. Intermountain used data to drive outcome improvement through their decision support system. Anyone who is looking for a process change to improve whatever […]

My organization uses a metric called “connects” to measure the physical connection of a subscriber’s services. We are particularly interested in the connects driven by our business. This is a SMART […]

In an eCommerce context there are many systems in play whose data paints a picture of the flow-through from order placement to receipt at door. One example where different tables need to be joined is to find the […]

I think of ERD the same way that I think about a BRD. To get accurate business requirements and to get an accurate ERD you need to get into the weeds of the business problem the project or database is looking to […]

I work in eCommerce so there is never a lack of access and most of the data is accurate as well. The problem we run into is making sense of the vast amount of data in such a way that it can accurately inform […]

In my organization there is a great deal of undocumented tribal knowledge. Systems are intended to work in a specific way but over the years, as users, we’ve uncovered workarounds to manipulate systems in ways […]

I work in the eCommerce space so we rely heavily on web analytics data from Omniture as well as what we consider offline transactional data (data recorded in a transactional database based on a user interaction on […]

Interesting article but some scary stuff! It feels quite overwhelming to think about the volumes of information that will be collected and how to make sense of all the variations to prevent something bad from […]

Expand your view and take the blinders off. A lot of what we talked about is about taking a wider view of the world in which you exist and how doing that makes you more effective in your little piece of it. This […]

I think that agile and waterfall are equally likely to fail. The reasons for failure in the articles, poor communication, unrealistic requirements, not enough budget / time, incapable resources, unclear or […]

Netflix did not approach their business change with the customer in mind to adequately satisfy the Rider, Elephant or Path. Netflix did not educate customers properly to address the Rider needs for change […]

On the last web store release project I was on we needed to determine the critical path to launching the store. It was established in a bit of a different way than what we used in class. The project team used a […]

In my organization I would say the split in my decision making between qualitative and quantitative is 60/40. A good amount of my decisions are based on gut/logic from my experience and subject matter expertise […]