Thinking Analytically

While poking around TED yesterday, I was surprised to notice that the standard five star video rating system had disappeared. (I’ve been watching TED videos on my iPod Touch instead of the web-site all year so the stars may have left awhile back.) After finishing the video, I clicked rate and the following popped up:

On this screen you have three clicks to use any way that you’d like.  You can spread them across three different items, load them all up on one item or use less that all three.  When finished, a heat map is displayed which I found more valuable than the typical star graph. In fact, I noticed that those same terms were used in the description of the video.  Very clever!

This is a bit of an experimental post. I have been mind mapping How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business while reading the book. I use FreeMind because it is free and easy to use. While trying to find a way to publish my mind maps to the web (eventually to http://wikibooknotes.org) I found MindMeister.com which allows editing maps online by multiple people. I signed up for a free account, uploaded the FreeMind file, and clicked share. Now I can embed this map into my blog. Try repositioning the map by dragging within it’s window. Expand and contract nodes by clicking.

If you’d like to try editing the map, leave a comment for this blog post with your email address and I’ll send you an invitation. (Your address will not appear in the post.)

Here goes…

See How to Measure Anything for a direct link to the map or click the map above.

In the latest round of tech acquisitions and mergers, IBM snatches Cognos. According this BusinessWeek article, this is a combination that might actually work. I think all of these big player acquisitions are creating havoc in large companies that have tried to standardize on enterprise solution providers. For instance, my company is clearly an IBM shop. No Oracle spoken there, but we’re a big user of Siebel and PeopleSoft. Oops, those are now Oracle products. Does that mean that there will be advantages in the future for Oracle users? I’m certainly no expert in the arena of enterprise software but it appears to me that the end of best-of-breed certainly has some downsides.

Technorati Tags: business intelligence, acquisition, ibm, cognos, PeopleSoft, Siebel

I bumped into Ian Ayres’ personal web-site last night. He is author of  Super Crunchers. The prediction tools page includes a few free, fun tools some of which are mentioned in the book. One that I especially liked is the tool to predict how long you’ll live. Two tools are included one of which is from my employer, Northwestern Mutual. Give it a shot. The results may surprise you! Click here to “Play the Longevity Game”.

A recent article in CIO  suggested that spreadsheets will go by the wayside in favor of BI applications.  As a self-professed spreadsheet junkie — (I once created an Excel Solver model to optimize the cutting of wood molding for the baseboards in my house) — I’m not sure what to think of this claim.  On the one hand, there is a lot of analysis that business users force into Excel that would be better suited for other tools.  On the other hand, Excel is familiar and accessible to most.  So is it better to use the right tool or the familiar one?  I say Excel (or something similar) will be around for quite some time.