BI + TWITTER = BITTER?

Writing by Jorgen on Thursday, 16 of April , 2009 at 9:09 pm

I have a love-hate relationship with technology and more specific gadgets. For years I kept using a paper notebook for writing down my appointments. If people showed up with their flashy looking pda’s I asked them if theirs could this and dropped my notebook on the floor. Off course this proves nothing about the general usability of pda’s but I had a good laugh anyway. It is a stange kind of anamosity between me and technology. Because in my professional life I cannot wait until all kind of cool gadgets are introduced in BI tools. The newest craze in town seems to be twitter. Even our Dutch secretary of foreign affairs is into twitter. But there are many others out there that share his enthusiasm. And in all honestly I ask you, why? What is the point of twittering about walking home, reading e-mails or hanging around in bars? What do I care. It is way too much information for me without any relvancy. It reminds me of sitting next to a person in a crowded streetcar (or tram as we call them in Amsterdam) listening in on a phone call often involving a break up or the greatest party ever (that is seem to have missed sadly). A couple of weeks I wrote a blog about data quality. I argued that often too much time, effort and money is spent on trying to get the data quality 100% perfect. I compared it to a jigsaw puzzle. If you can see the big picture there is nothing wrong with a couple of pieces missing or of the wrong color or shape. Apparently this opinion caused ‘quite a stir’ within the data quality twitter community (sic!). I never imagined that there could be something like a DQTC. What do those people do all day long? “I have found a interesting data integrity issue in datafile xyz”, one twitterer writes. “Wow, tell me more about this fascinating discovery”, another responds. Off course, I am making fun of this but mainly to make a point. Most of the time twitter has no added value. It may be fun (which I do not understand) but nothing more than that. However sharing observations about a certain field of expertise including comments, solutions or explanations can have great benefits. If one regional sales manager makes sense of certain trends in the latest figures and shares this using twitter with the other salesmanagers, suddenly something of value can appear. Instead of meaningless babble the twitter helps people improve the quality of their work or even their performance. Perhaps there is a point to be made about introducing twitter in your company. I wonder in which twitter community this blog ends up? Keep me informed! 

Category: BI Thoughts

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