posts

If you have been working in analytics, you’ve seen projects blow up. A small change, pushed by you, a partner, or a client can have huge unintended consequences. Users can be left without critical data and you will be stressed trying to figure out what went wrong.

With all the flashy marketing around analytics, companies convince you that their latest product can do the work itself. The implication is that you can create powerful analytics without having to become a software developer. I disagree. As analytics projects grow complex, Business Intelligence(BI) consultants need to adopt practices from software development. An analytics project incorporating SQL, Analysis Services, and PowerBI, has more in common with a project at Facebook or Google than with the old Excel/Access way of doing BI.

There is a lot of flashy marketing around analytics. Companies promise easy to use tools that do all the work for you. The implication is that you can create powerful analytics without having to become a software developer. I disagree. As analytics projects have gotten more complex, Business Intelligence(BI) consultants need to become software developers. An analytics project that might incorporate SQL, Analysis Services, and PowerBI, has more in common with a project at Facebook or Google than with the old Excel/Access way of doing BI.

Last Year, I gave a talk at TDWI Nashville where I spoke about how to use Azure Cognitive Services to build text analytics dashboards on PowerBI. I’ve decided to write this blog post to allow other people to do it themselves. What Are Cognitive Services?

At work, we are paid to make decisions and accomplish complex tasks. However, there is a limit to the complexity that one woman or man can handle. Each of the decisions takes mental energy and after a certain point your choices become worse (Tierney, 2011).

At work, I am building a set of dashboards for a client. In preparation, I’ve decided to take a look back at the fundamentals of good design.

Here are notes on what I learned about embodied cognition at the London School of Economics.

We live and work in social systems. But how do they work? Here is a chunk of my dissertation that explored them.

Only by understanding how social and biological processes work together we can understand human cognition

Advances in social media have created insular online groups with homogenous beliefs- creating ready-made groups of ‘pure people’ ripe for exploitation by a populist politician.