Archive for October, 2012

Big Data, Bad Math: Gartner Consults Its Crystal Ball

Wednesday, October 31st, 2012

Big Data is a marketing campaign. Uttered from the lips of technology companies, including analyst organizations such as Gartner, the term Big Data remains ill-defined. This is intentional. It allows them to claim just about anything they want because their claims can’t be fact-checked if you don’t actually know what Big Data is. Generally speaking, […]

Control vs. the Illusion of Control: Which Works for You?

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

People who don’t know how to manage performance or merely don’t care tend to prefer dashboards (monitoring displays) that say little and do so poorly. This way they’re never told anything they don’t understand; they’re never forced to get off their butts; they’re never faced with a decision they can’t or don’t wish to handle. […]

Big Data, Big Overload

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

Yesterday morning I had a Big Data experience when I visited the Louvre Museum in Paris. Within 15 minutes of arriving I was ready to run screaming from the glass pyramid. Why? Because I was overwhelmed. Room after room of artistic works totaling in the hundreds of thousands, each magnificent, was too much. I found […]

2012 Perceptual Edge Dashboard Design Competition: We Have a Winner!

Monday, October 15th, 2012

I was pleased and frankly surprised to receive 91 submissions to my dashboard design competition. Surprised because designing a student performance dashboard from scratch based on the data that I provided was not a trivial task. I was especially pleased to find a dramatic improvement over the general quality of entries since the last competition […]