Steve Miller is co-founder of a Chicago-based business intelligence (BI) services firm OpenBI, LLC, that specializes in delivering analytic solutions with both open source and commercial technologies. Miller has more than 30 years of experience in intelligence and analytics, having migrated from health care program evaluation, to database consulting with Oracle Corporation, to running a fast-growing BI services business at Braun Consulting. Advances in technology over that time have fundamentally enabled the use of quantitative methods for business differentiation. OpenBI, LLC, is all about helping customers attain that differentiation. Steve blogs frequently on Stats Man's Corner at miller.openbi.com. You can reach him at steve.miller@openbi.com.

Omniscope and R
February 7, 2012 Data science platform from U.K. provider Visokio combines powerful exploration and agile BI

Out With the Old RAM ...
January 31, 2012 I decided to test the limits of R on my machine by creating and working with some pretty large data

Applications of R in Business
January 24, 2012 As a contest judge, I saw the direction of data management

Analytics in the End Zone
January 17, 2012 College and pro football championship games hint at larger data problems

Data Science Maturity
January 10, 2012 This year, BI and DS may start to get on the same page

Data Science Skepticism
January 3, 2012 In the third entry in a series, I find a position at a crossroads

Data Science or BI? – Part 2
December 19, 2011 Regardless of where you sit on the specific roles of BI and data science, there are elements of business, technology and...

Data Science or BI? – Part 1
December 13, 2011 An analytics exercise with U.S. Census data reveals distinctions between BI and data science

An M.S. in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern University
December 6, 2011 The degree may challenge the traditional business educational sequence of technical undergrad to MBA. But it makes sense for...

Vectorwise – Worth a Look?
November 28, 2011 I was certain Vectorwise was the latest offering from Ingres, the ageless relational database vendor, so who the heck is...

Counterfactuals, Difference-in-Differences, Propensities and Treatment Evaluation
November 15, 2011 On measuring performance management with a practical microeconometrics approach

Statistical Learning Part III
November 7, 2011 An interview with Stanford's Trevor Hastie, who provides a look back at data mining and statistical modeling, and a look ahead...

Econometrics vs. Statistics
November 1, 2011 Econometrics, with its charter to support mainstream economic research, is adapting with the discipline to a data-driven,...

HBR is Sunny on the Cloud
October 25, 2011 Focus of Harvard article on cloud is three-fold for execs: 1) What does the cloud mean for my IT department?; 2) What are the...

The Secrets to Managing Business Analytics Projects
October 18, 2011 MIT Sloan article suggests all parties must recognize that analytics initiatives are similar to other internal business...

Business Value with Analytics
October 11, 2011 Annual MIT review points to growth and depth in analytics, with notable competitive advantage from mature adoption

Statistical Learning for BI Redux
October 4, 2011 There's little question that predictive analytics' time is now. And as a foundation for PA, statistical learning fits nicely...

Performance Measurement 2011
September 27, 2011 From academia to professional baseball, statistical methods are in vogue. But what is their value?

Stochastic Simulation Part 2 – Resampling
September 20, 2011 In addition to being invaluable as methods for day-to-day statistical practice, resampling SS techniques can also be a boon to...

Stochastic Simulation – Part 1
September 13, 2011 The "approximate analytics" of stochastic simulation has increasingly become a critical tool in the modern statistical toolchest

Programming Collective Intelligence
September 6, 2011 An errant Amazon buy leads to a different take on analytics and machine learning

LinkedIn Advanced Business Analytics – SAS Vs. R
August 30, 2011 In the short run, with its huge lead, SAS will continue to rule the business predictive analytics landscape. But look for that...

Frustrations With R?
August 23, 2011 Do your research on what's already available before you invest a lot of time developing from scratch

Bayes and the Beach
August 16, 2011 Look for increasing use of Bayesian approaches to the science of business in the coming years, its paradigm a better fit than...

Thinking Statistical Bias
August 9, 2011 Confusing real change with an aberration that later returns to the the long-term average is a common cognition mistake that...

Learning from Failure and Success
August 2, 2011 BI can play an important role in supporting the unbiased attribution of success and failure in business that leads to a...

Statistics and Financial Engineering
July 26, 2011 I look at FE statistics in much the same way I look at psychometrics, econometrics, psychometrics, biometrics and mathematical...

Performance Measurement, Alpha, Matching, Propensity and Simulation
July 19, 2011 The use of computer simulation methods to generate a distribution of alpha estimates can add a lot to the understanding of...

Interleague Play and Data Analysis
July 12, 2011 In our rush to find profitable early signals in our data, we must be wary of attributing patterns to sequences that are really...

Predictive Trend? Or Drunkard's Walk?
July 5, 2011 Patterns may manifest in data that on the surface appear very predictable, even when they're not

Enzee Universe 2011 + Revolution Analytics R
June 27, 2011 In today's BI world, though, it's critical for open source to play nice with proprietary. Fortunately, the zealotry seems to...

Enterprise Collective Intelligence with Crowdcast
June 20, 2011 Q&A with new social BI provider’s CEO Mat Fogarty

Big Data from McKinsey
June 14, 2011 Successful organizations will be those that act on the opportunities – and threats – presented by big data

Revolution Analytics One Year Later
June 7, 2011 A follow up interview with CEO Norman Nie

Business Analytics Innovation Summit
May 31, 2011 IE Group conference among a growing slate of predictive analytics meet-ups

Splines, Simulation and Forecasting
May 24, 2011 Many of the insights I'd gleaned on model performance from the previous data were undone with the new

Alpha, Beta, Being There and Performance Measurement
May 17, 2011 Portfolio management indicators before and after recession hold interesting lessons in BI and ROI

The New Intelligent Enterprise
May 10, 2011 MIT goes deep into analytics, BI and data science through its Sloan Management Review

Data Science – Part 2
May 3, 2011 Just as I think BI will benefit from a deeper focus on approximate answers and ubiquitous machine learning, data science...

Data Science – Part 1
April 26, 2011 The ability to improvise data integration solutions using operating systems, databases and programming languages clearly...

Approximate BI
April 19, 2011 Big data and the speed of information have more people looking for answers in fast, fuzzy business intelligence

Cross-Validation
April 12, 2011 Most new predictive modeling packages in R come equipped with cross-validation, but it's also easy to program cross-validation...

Tables to Graphs
April 5, 2011 Academic political science figures focus on visualizing the results of statistical analysis – a topic more and more...

Designs for Scorecasting
March 29, 2011 The authors of my spring break read go beyond statistical correlations to demonstrate cause and effect on the playing field

Stories vs. Statistics for BI
March 22, 2011 The real science of business often makes for less than riveting stories

A Propensity for Matching
March 15, 2011 A method for dispelling alternative explanations to BI findings that is gaining in popularity is the use of...

Business Experiments in HBR
March 8, 2011 In review of Harvard guide, my take is that though businesses can do either predictive modeling or experiments separately,...

Science of Business vs. Evidence-Based Management
March 1, 2011 A recent MIT article is making me question whether there might be a nuanced difference between the two that’s important...

By-Group Processing, the R data.table and the Power of Open Source
February 22, 2011 One of the major strengths of open source projects like R is the significant contributions of unpaid users and the...

Open Source BI and JasperWorld
February 14, 2011 I generally find vendor conferences a bit too rah-rah for my taste. There was plenty of that at JW, but substance on open...

Strata – Making Data Work, Take 1
February 7, 2011 The conference was all about the emerging discipline of data science, a short description of which is “telling stories...

OpenBI and OSBI – the Pentaho Global Partner Summit
February 1, 2011 In recent years, business is thriving for the main OSBI vendors and the KPIs are revenue and profit rather than software...

Seven Deadly Sins of Contemporary Quantitative Analysis – a Translation
January 25, 2011 Business is, after all, a social science, and BI analysts can learn a lot from the vanguard work of applied academia

The Science of Business Meets the Science of Therapy – in Key West
January 18, 2011 I found a lot of good advice for the science of business in my friend’s wisdom of patient therapy

M.S. in Applied Statistics
January 11, 2011 Let me offer a curriculum for a master’s degree that seems an ideal background for the practice of analytics in business

Validity and Life
January 4, 2011 BI analysts are well advised to challenge their organization's espoused strategic theories

Don't Stop With Your First Draft
December 28, 2010 The mantra serves me well in business intelligence, for both my writing and programming work

R Stocking Stuffers
December 21, 2010 A few BI and analytics reading recommendations, and a holiday wish for a book that demonstrates how to apply statistical...

Bayes and Risk Management – Part 3
December 14, 2010 BI analysts should expect to see increasing utilization of Bayesian methods as models for both individual decision-making and...

Bayes and Risk Management – Part 2
December 7, 2010 For BI, the Bayesian model is best viewed as systematic learning for intelligence and business decision-making

Bayes and Risk Management – Part 1
November 30, 2010 A few years ago, a friend of mine received a diagnosis of a pretty serious medical condition. When we used Bayes theorem to...

MIT and IBM on Analytics
November 23, 2010 A rising tide of analytics in business benefits an entire industry, as shown in a recent survey by IBM and MIT's Sloan School...

The Flaw of Averages – Part 2, Probability Management
November 16, 2010 Today's probability techniques are much more guarded, relying on algorithms that “shrink” significant coefficients...

The Flaw of Averages – Part 1, the Problem
November 9, 2010 New book takes on the flaws of basic statistical thinking in the conduct of business, many of which derive from misuse of...

Levels of Measurement for BI
November 2, 2010 Sometimes the analytics tail wags the dog, so interval variables might be “cut” into ordinal categories to...

The Science of Business Manifesto – Part 2
October 26, 2010 I will delve into a bit more detail than in Part 1, paying special attention to the transition from business to science –...

The Science of Business Manifesto – Part 1
October 19, 2010 The point of departure for the science of business is acknowledgment that perhaps the best approach for developing, testing...

Medical Statistics
October 12, 2010 The noise-to-signal ratio on the pre-med Internet chat threads is high, not surprisingly. It seems there're plenty of strong...

The BI Survey 9 by BARC
October 5, 2010 There's much to digest in this very comprehensive work. In contrast to other BI surveys I've recently read, BI Survey 9 is...

Academics and Analytics
September 28, 2010 I've recently had the good fortune of digesting some hot-off-the-press material on analytics in business from those two august...

Bias in BI
September 21, 2010 With self-selecting, voluntary response surveys now the norm in BI research, certain geographies, products, sectors, company...

Getting to Know MIKE2.0
September 14, 2010 I think there's a lot to like about MIKE2.0, an open source methodology for enterprise information management

Musings on the 2011 U.S. News Best Colleges
September 7, 2010 It's back to school time, so, like every year, I rush out to drop $10 on the latest U.S. News compendium of Best Colleges....

Outer Banks Vacation Reading – 'The Invisible Gorilla'
August 31, 2010 The title derives from experiments the psychology professors have conducted on limitations in visual human attention

Excel for Statistical Analysis?
August 24, 2010 The ABADMPM discussion that I've been following most closely of late is Which data mining/analytic tools have you used in the...

Outer Banks Vacation Intelligence – Part 1
August 17, 2010 Lessons and observations from Steve's summer vacation

2010 College Recruiting – Just What is Educational Psychology?
August 10, 2010 Was this candidate a psych major or a quants head? It turns out, both.

SAS, WPS and R
August 3, 2010 Its hard to imagine a CIO of a SAS-intensive company not at least investigating the cost-savings potential of WPS. What would...

The Vegetarian Enjoys Steak – Open Source R Meets Proprietary Spotfire
July 27, 2010 Twice a year my nephew and niece go off the vegetarian wagon, enjoying grilled pork chops or big hamburgers for special...

The Revolution Analytics Blog
July 20, 2010 What, in sum, must Revolution Analytics do to be successful?

Does the Internet Make You Smarter or Dumber?
July 13, 2010 I see merits to both sides of this debate. What do you think?

SAS, Business Analytics, Research and Fact-Based Decision-Making
July 6, 2010 It's no secret that I'm no longer a big fan of SAS software, but I found my investment in the latest SAS Business Report to be...

Predictive Analytics at DePaul University
June 29, 2010 Kudos to DePaul for again assuming a leadership role combining rigorous academics with a practical business focus

Plan A or Plan B or ...
June 22, 2010 Perhaps President Eisenhower was right when he said: “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable”

SAS, SPSS and R
June 15, 2010 In the increasingly “flat” statistical world, the ability to speak in several statistical tongues will be an...

Correlation vs Causality in BI
June 8, 2010 Maybe I'm naïve, but I see no reason why clever analysts can't have the best of both correlational and causal worlds

BI Surveys, Research and The Wisdom of Crowds Study
June 2, 2010 I give the "Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study" a high A- grade and hope it's quality encourages vendors,...

Misconceptions About Statistics – Part 2
May 26, 2010 One of my pet statistical peeves is that slaves to statistical significance confuse their “positive” findings with...

More Time Series Interruptus
May 19, 2010 There is much in common between social science methods and business intelligence supporting the “science of business”

Time Series Interruptus for BI
May 13, 2010 Much of performance-measuring business intelligence has to make do with less than full experimental control

Revolutionary R, An Interview with Revolution Analytics CEO Norman Nie – Part 2
May 6, 2010 I asked Norman Nie what strategies Revolution will introduce to the market to build a profitable commercial open source business

Revolutionary R, An Interview with REvolution Computing CEO Norman Nie – Part 1
April 27, 2010 Rather than taking it easy, Norman Nie is embarking on yet another big-bet business venture

R/Finance 2010: Applied Finance with R
April 22, 2010 An indication of current R-community obsession is no less than six presentations addressing R's ability to size up...

BI, Analytics and Statistical Science
April 19, 2010 This list provides a foundation of what it takes to succeed in BI, and hopefully communicates that effectively to candidates

Business Theory, Strategy and Targets for BI
April 12, 2010 I finally got around to reading Analytics at Work, the new book from Competing on Analytics authors Tom Davenport and Jeanne...

MIT, IT and the Science of Business – Part 2
April 5, 2010 The latest edition of MIT Sloan Management Review contains a special report entitled “IT-Driven Innovation, The New...

MIT, IT and the Science of Business – Part 1
March 29, 2010 Though MIT's MIT Sloan Management Review might not have quite the cachet of the Harvard Business Review . I'd certainly put...

Predictive Models, Mars to Earth – Part 1
March 19, 2010 I'm not sure exactly why, but predictive analytics seems to be front and center for OpenBI as winter turns to spring

The Economic Approach and BI
March 15, 2010 Economy is the art of making the most of life

Data, Data Everywhere
March 8, 2010 Steve Miller touches on a smattering of topics covered in the Economist's "Data, Data Everywhere" - a must read for those...

Misconceptions About Statistics
March 1, 2010 Predictive modelers must now be data jocks and computational experts, touch many quantitative disciplines and be committed to...

Predictive Analytics World – Take 2
February 23, 2010 At Predictive Analytics World I heard about an interesting analytics solution to a knotty business problem and an innovative...

Predictive Analytics World – Take 1
February 19, 2010 Much to my chagrin, I had to return to wintry Chicago late Wednesday night from a delightful visit to sunny and 60ish San...

Performance Measurement – Common Causes, Skill and Luck, Part 2
February 15, 2010 Attribution of luck versus skill is central to portfolio performance measurement

Performance Measurement – Common Causes/Risk, Skill and Luck, Part 1
February 8, 2010 Wouldn't it be nice if business intelligence could generally distinguish common cause/market risk from skill components when...

Performance Measurement
February 1, 2010 Performance measurement is a key driver of business intelligence. I'd guess that most BI deployments today are at least in...

Ruby Monday – Part 3
January 22, 2010 After writing two blogs on the delights of the agile language Ruby, I decided to eat my own dog food and challenge myself to...

Ruby Monday – Part 2
January 19, 2010 Today's blog embellishes on Ruby's suitability for basic data management tasks that precede business intelligence and analytics

Ruby Monday – Part 1
January 11, 2010 Dusting off a favorite open source tool, the programming language Ruby

Searching and Planning for the New Year
January 4, 2010 This searching-planning compromise lens now colors my assessment of business strategy and intelligence

Written Review
December 28, 2009 My writing retreat is completed for 2009. I'm not sure whether I'm comforted or humbled

Monte Carlo, Resampling and BI – Part 2
December 21, 2009 I recently downloaded the latest stock portfolio returns from the website of Dartmouth professor Ken French

Monte Carlo, Resampling and BI – Part 1
December 14, 2009 About five years ago, a Newsweek review of the then new iPod raised a concern that the shuffle feature might not be random

A Volleyball Championship and BI
December 7, 2009 Because a truly randomized tournament is both impractical and unattractive, officials must grapple with quasi-experimental...

More on the Statistical Revolution – a SAS Story (continued)
November 23, 2009 It's probably happenstance that statistical juggernaut SAS has been in the news several times over the last week following my...

Discovery-Driven Planning – A Planning-Searching Compromise?
November 23, 2009 I like the concept of discovery-driven planning a lot. It seems a reasonable compromise between pure planning and searching

Highly Irritating Management Gurus
November 16, 2009 Business intelligence practitioners can analyze, critique and debunk the works of popular management gurus till the cows come...

Statistical Revolution
November 9, 2009 Statistical and predictive analytics software is fast becoming a next big competitive landscape in the business intelligence...

A SAS Story
November 2, 2009 I downloaded a 30 day trial of the World Programming System and started constructing simple scripts. It was like seeing an ex...

OpenCourseWare and BI – An Update
October 26, 2009 I revisited MITOpenCourseWare a few months ago in search of a gentle computer programming course I could recommend to those...

The Demise of the 2009 Boston Red Sox: Super-Crunching Takes a Drunkard's Walk
October 19, 2009 Since 2004, when the Red Sox rallied from three games down to beat the Yankees for the American League championship and swept...

Fall 2009 OpenBI College Recruiting: Where Have All the Programmers Gone?
October 13, 2009 The demand for new college grads is still soft. This cycle reminds me a lot of 2000, when the high-flying technology...

The October 2009 HBR and BI – Risk Management and Performance Measurement
October 5, 2009 The October 2009 Harvard Business Review spotlights Risk Management and Performance Measurement, both significant consumers of...

The Netflix Prize
September 28, 2009 The other day, I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal noting that movie rental company Netflix had announced a...

Smart Analytics – The Rising IBM Tide
September 21, 2009 Having IBM seriously promote an analytics product line will help all statistics/mining vendors and provide a much-desired...

Dear Steve, Dear Eric, Dear Steve – Musings on Predictive Analytics World
September 14, 2009 I received a very nice note from Eric Siegel, PhD., Conference Chair, Predictive Analytics World last week in response to my...

Intelligence Interruptus
September 8, 2009 I've assembled my BI-Searchers toolkit

Random Business Performance
August 31, 2009 There's a randomness to company performance that, as deftly chronicled by Leonard Mlodinow in The Drunkard's Walk, is a much...

Searching and Experimenting for Business Innovation
August 24, 2009 The rapid development of technology and expansion of the Web provide the infrastructure for promoting ever-more-rapid...

The Drunkard's BI – Part II
August 17, 2009 The scary part for decision-making is that the errors are both deductive - from population to sample - and inductive, from...

The Drunkard's BI – Part I
August 11, 2009 I read what is certain to be my favorite BI book of 2009: 'The Drunkard's Walk, How Randomness Rules Our Lives'

Field Experiments and BI – Part I
August 3, 2009 Much as I love the behavioral economics gospel espoused in Dan Ariely, I'm uncomfortable with the driving methodology of...

Potpourri Redux
July 27, 2009 A discussion about the direction of business intelligence in several fields, including economics, statistical learning and the...

Planners, Searchers and BI
July 19, 2009 I think the planner/searcher dichotomy is quite pertinent for business intelligence

Economics and BI, Part 2
July 13, 2009 Just what is behavioral economics?

Economics and BI – Part 1
July 6, 2009 What good are economists anyway?

Bogle for BI
June 26, 2009 I periodically revisit Bogle's wisdom not only to affirm my investment approach but also as a guide for BI

Intelligent Education
June 22, 2009 BI can learn a lot from education and other not-for-profit programs for its mission to assess the performance of business

The Hawthorne Effect – or Not
June 15, 2009 I was pretty distraught over a column I recently read in the Economist. The article, Light Work, challenges the legacy of the...

Analytical Designs for BI – Part 2
June 8, 2009 Quasi-experimental studies attempt to control potential confounding variables by clever design techniques and statistical...

Analytical Designs for BI – Part 1
June 1, 2009 I must admit I'm obsessed with BI designs for business performance measurement

Social Science Statistics Blog and BI – Nonrandomized Experiments
May 26, 2009 I came across an intriguing blog entry that raised issues pertinent to business and business intelligence

Quantitative Social Science and BI
May 18, 2009 I find the intersection of the social and quantitative sciences of particular interest – and pertinence for BI

Bayes and BI
May 11, 2009 The current ascendance of Bayesian analysis in the statistical world is, I believe, a boon for BI

OpenBI Travels II: R/Finance 2009, Chicago
May 4, 2009 I received an email from Mike Driscoll, co-chair of the Bay Area R Users Group, announcing the formation of three new groups...

OpenBI Travels I: MySQL Conference and the Oracle Acquisition of Sun
April 27, 2009 There was no shortage of strong reaction at the MySQL conference to the acquisition of Sun. Open source purists were incensed

More Statistical Learning
April 20, 2009 The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference and Prediction, Second Edition, by Trevor Hastie, Robert...

The R Statistical Learning Lasso
April 13, 2009 The R user community had just been provided access to a latest learning algorithm hot off the development presses from three...

Data Vu All Over Again
April 6, 2009 No sweat I thought. We’ve honed our expertise on open source BI in the cloud. We’ve performed this drill several...

The Divine R
March 30, 2009 A colleague recently asked me for a good introductory text on the R statistical computing platform. Though there are a...

Hypothesize/Experiment/Learn/Nudge
March 23, 2009 Nudge is a concept derived from behavioral economics. It denotes a gentle “push” or incentive to coax...

Hypothesize/Experiment/Learn
March 16, 2009 I’ve subscribed to the Harvard Business Review for years. It seems there are either several articles pertinent for BI or...

Planning for Predictive Models – Wisdom From Regression Modeling Strategies
March 9, 2009 The following are nuggets of wisdom from RMS for planning/executing modeling studies, along with a statistical blogger’s...

Rattle Redux and Predictive Analytics World Potpourri
March 2, 2009 As I mentioned in last week’s blogs, I was pleasantly surprised by version one of Predictive Analytics World, finding it...

Biostatistics, Open Source and BI – an Interview with Frank Harrell
February 25, 2009 This interview with Frank Harrell illustrates how biostatistical wisdom is quite suitable for BI

Predictive Analytics World – Methodology and Business Learning
February 23, 2009 Steve Miller's thoughts his trip to Predictive Analytics World

Predictive Analytics World – Keynotes +
February 23, 2009 Steve Miller's thoughts from his two days at Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco

Learning from the Black Swan
February 19, 2009 Nassim Nicholas Taleb was right. The world financial system was devastated by unpredicted catastrophes of grand proportion...

Statistical Learning for BI, Part 3: Rattling Down Under
January 22, 2009 Data mining or machine learning, like just about everything in R, suffers from an embarrassment of riches

Statistical Learning for BI, Part 2
December 24, 2008 This column reviews the recent statistical learning seminar taught by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman.

Statistical Learning for BI, Part 1
November 26, 2008 This is the first in a series on of articles on statistical learning for business intelligence

Prediction Markets
October 22, 2008 If prevalence in reputable business writing is any indicator, prediction markets are starting to make inroads as a serious...

Business Intelligence That Makes a Competitive Difference
September 23, 2008 The combination of time series measurement with experiments assures a strong design to measure the effectiveness of the...

Epidemiology and BI: Help for Designing Effective Intelligence
July 23, 2008 Sitting at the summit of the evidence hierarchy, companies who routinely use randomized experiments to develop and test their...

Relative Versus Absolute Predictions
June 25, 2008 The successful consumers of predictive models in business are those who appreciate the limitations of their models as much as...

The BI Ensemble, Part 2: Bagging, Boosting and the Wisdom of Crowds
May 21, 2008 Though the bootstrapping techniques of the statistical world can be complicated, the basic concepts are simple.

Weak Ties and Diversification
May 8, 2008 Part I: Weak ties facilitate the exchange of information across disparate networks of dense and strong relationships

The BI Ensemble, Part 1: Weak Ties, Diversification and the Wisdom of Crowds
April 25, 2008 Weak ties thus facilitate the exchange of information across disparate networks of dense and strong relationships.

Open Source BI: The Venture Capital Perspective - Intel Capital Does the Math
April 10, 2008 This column includes the thoughts of Patrick Walsh,investment manager for Intel Capital, on open source and super-crunching.

A Propensity for BI
March 27, 2008 At a minimum, BI practitioners should understand the strengths and weaknesses of the designs they deploy to gather intelligence.

HBR on BI for Management
February 28, 2008 A review of Harvard Business Review's on Making Smarter Decisions

The Harvard Business Review on BI for Management
February 21, 2008 I recently purchased Harvard Business Review on Making Smarter Decisions and read several articles in sequence that struck...

Musings on the ROI of BI
January 24, 2008 Surveys of BI users fully demonstrate the difficulties of quantifying the hard benefits of BI.

A Statistical Stocking Stuffer for the Holidays
December 19, 2007 All of you last minute shoppers stumped for presents to geeky BI practitioner loved ones have an answer to your gift-finding...

Whence WEKA - Open Source Data Mining, Part 1
November 22, 2007 This is the first of a two part interview series with Mark Hall, Ph.D., core member of the WEKA development team and now...

OpenBI Forum: Experiments in BI
October 25, 2007 Experimentation in business is proposed as next generation BI.

Super Crunchers - Lessons for BI Learned and Confirmed
September 28, 2007

Frank Harrell, Iowa State and useR!2007
September 21, 2007

Smart (Enough) Systems - BI Engage
August 23, 2007 Book review of Smart (Enough) Systems by James Taylor and Neil Raden.

Tuna Intelligence - Teenager BI in the Outer Banks
August 9, 2007 Innovative applications of business intelligence.

Chance and BI - Fooled by a Random Black Swan
July 26, 2007

MIT for Free - A Boon for BI
June 28, 2007

Product Review: S-PLUS 8 from Insightful
June 5, 2007 Steve Miller offfers an in-depth look at S-PLUS 8 from Insightful.

Validity, Design and BI, Part 3
May 24, 2007

Open Source BI as Disruptive Technology
May 1, 2007 With unmet marketplace needs, underserved user communities and a more cost-effective approach to foster innovation, chances...

Validity, Design and BI, Part 2
April 26, 2007

Validity, Design and BI, Part 1
March 22, 2007

The Harvard Business Review and BI
February 22, 2007

Strategy and BI
January 25, 2007

Yuletide Lite Plus a Few Graphs
December 21, 2006 A look at the past year and a glimpse into the future of open source BI.

OpenBI Forum Goes to Harvard, Part 2
November 23, 2006

Open BI Forum Goes to Harvard
October 26, 2006

R You Ready for Open Source Statistics?
September 28, 2006

Dimensional Graphics - A Slightly More Sexy Approach to Examining Multivariate Data
August 24, 2006

Live ... From the World Technology Community ... It's Open Source BI!
July 27, 2006

Performance Measurement + Program Evaluation = Performance Evaluation
June 22, 2006

Poor Man's BI: Getting Started with Open Source Tools for Analytic Intelligence
June 1, 2006 Open source for BI promises comprehensive platform solutions in the near future. Here is a minimal architecture that will...

Paying Homage to EDA
May 25, 2006

Unsexy Graphics for Business Intelligence
April 27, 2006