Peter Thomas - Award-winning Business Intelligence and Cultural Transformation Expert » site update

peterjamesthomas.com syndicated on BeyeNetwork

Peter Thomas — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:52:18 +0000

I have been a member of the Business Intelligence Mecca that is BeyeNetwork.com for quite some time, but as of this week I am delighted to announce that they will be syndicating this blog at: http://www.beyeblogs.com/pthomas/.

Thank you to all at at BeyeNetwork for setting this up.

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Filed under: blogging, business intelligence, site update, social media Tagged: beyeblogs, beyenetwork

Most popular articles over the last eight months

Peter Thomas — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:40:19 +0000

I last published a list of the most popular articles on this site at the beginning of July 2009. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I had a hiatus in blogging which started at the beginning of August 2009. This means that readership figures since then have not been skewed by when articles were posted (they were all posted before the pertinent period).

The following is a list of the top twenty articles in descending order of hits per day over the last eight months.

Most viewed pages

Rank	Article
1.	Measuring the benefits of Business Intelligence
2.	Mountain Biking and Systems Integration
3.	Data – Information – Knowledge – Wisdom
4.	Business Analytics vs Business Intelligence
5.	A bad workman blames his [Business Intelligence] tools
6.	“Why Business Intelligence projects fail”
7.	A single version of the truth?
8.	Is the time ripe for appointing a Chief Business Intelligence Officer?
9.	Is outsourcing business intelligence a good idea?
10.	New Adventures in Wi-Fi – Track 1: Blogging
11.	Why IT is not like Civil Engineering
12.	The importance of feasibility studies in business intelligence
13.	BI implementations are like icebergs
14.	A more appropriate metaphor for business intelligence projects
15.	“Gartner sees a big discrepancy between BI expectations and realities” – Intelligent Enterprise
16.	Trends in Business Intelligence
17.	A review of “The History of Business Intelligence” by Nic Smith
18.	A blast from the past…
19.	Some reasons why IT projects fail
20.	The Top Business Issues facing CIOs / IT Directors – Results

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Filed under: site update

Moving home

Peter Thomas — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:16:10 +0000

Well virtual home anyway.

The primary address for this blog is now:

http://www.peterjamesthomas.com

However, the blog is still hosted on WordPress.com and the previous address of:

http://peterthomas.wordpress.com

should still work perfectly well.

If anyone experiences any problems with this change, then please tell me about it, either by posting a comment, or via the Contact Page.

Peter

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Posted in site update

New Social Media Section

Peter Thomas — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:37:33 +0000

My Keynote Articles page gathers together links to my more substantial blog posts in one place and groups them into broad areas of interest. When I first created this, the four areas were as follows:

1.	Business Intelligence
2.	Cultural Transformation
3.	IT / Business Alignment and IT Strategy
4.	General Articles

Back in April 2009, at the height of the Oracle / Sun fervour, I added a new section to reflect the number of articles I was writing about general technology issues such as these and also BI industry news. This was as follows:

5.	Industry Commentary

In a similar vein, I have recently been writing more about issues in Social Media (very self-referential for a blog of course). I have also had my artciles syndicated on SmartDataCollective.com for many months.

The thing that finally decided me to have a section dedicated to Social Media was joining SmartDataCollective’s parent site, SocialMediaToday.com, who were recently kind enough to syndicate the first of my series of articles on Social Media: New Adventures in Wi-Fi – Track 1: Blogging (the original article may be viewed here).

My thinking was, if I am having my articles posted on a site devoted to Social Media, then the time has come to recognise this by creating a new section. This is what I have done with:

6.	Social Media

As with the other sections, I will keep this list up-to-date as I add new content. In particular my forthcoming pieces on micro-blogging with Twitter.com and professional networking on LinkedIn.com will have a shiny new home.

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Posted in blogging, business, site update, social media, technology, twitter Tagged: LinkedIn, SmartDataCollective, SocialMediaToday

Rate This

Peter Thomas — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:06:53 +0000

As an experiment, I am enabling WordPress.com’s rating widget on my blog posts. A graphic like the one below now appears under the title of each article (indeed you should spy one directly above as well).

I will be interested to see whether this feature is used and what the actual feedback proves to be.

Peter

PS Please note that the stars only appear when you select an article by clicking on its title, not when many articles appear on the main page, or as the result of a search.

Posted in site update

After a brief hiatus…

Peter Thomas — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:28:28 +0000

The last few weeks have been a pretty quiet for me on-line with little activity in either the twitterverse or blogosphere. The flip-side of this is that I have been very busy in a number of other areas, both professional and personal (rumours that my low-profile coincides precisely with the current Ashes series are of course greatly exaggerated).

While my “free” time seems unlikely to increase dramatically in the near future, it is my hope that I will be able to return to penning a few blog articles. Speaking of which, that is precisely what I am about to turn my attention to now.

Peter

I am not 100% sure how this photo managed to creep into the post.

Posted in site update

An update of the most read articles on this site

Peter Thomas — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:22:08 +0000

Back in April, I posted My “all-time” most-read 5 articles and mentioned that I would update the list from time to time. At the half-year point of 2009, it seemed appropriate to revisit this area.

I have done two things with the new statistics. First, given the number of articles that I have published, I have expanded the list to 20 articles. Second, to give a different perspective, I have added a run-down of those articles that have received the most views per day.

Of course the first list is more likely to contain older articles (which have had more time to accumulate views), whereas the second list is more likely to include new articles (given that most articles have peak viewing figures soon after they are posted). Despite the vagaries of both approaches, it is probably safe to say that if an article appears on both lists it has been pretty popular. I have highlighted 12 such posts in yellow below.

In future, I may consider calculating how well an article has performed against the typical ageing profile. This would address the shortcomings of both of the current tables and therby offer a more definitive benchmark. However this will be dependent on WordPress.com making it a bit easier to download information about page views.

As before I have focussed just on articles, so views of pages about my career or other background information have been omitted from the following.

Most viewed pages

Article		Views
1	Measuring the benefits of Business Intelligence	2,054
2	Business is from Mars and IT is from Venus	1,497
3	Trends in Business Intelligence	1,324
4	Business Analytics vs Business Intelligence	1,320
5	A review of “The History of Business Intelligence” by Nic Smith	1,201
6	Mountain Biking and Systems Integration	1,129
7	“Why Business Intelligence projects fail	1,032
8	Mergers and value	929
9	Is outsourcing business intelligence a good idea?	909
10	The Top Business Issues facing CIOs / IT Directors – Results	865
11	“Gartner sees a big discrepancy between BI expectations and realities” – Intelligent Enterprise	787
12	Pigeonholing – A tragedy	775
13	“All that glisters is not gold” – some thoughts on dashboards	732
14	Two pictures paint a thousand words…	729
15	BI implementations are like icebergs	720
16	Vision vs Pragmatism	716
17	The specific benefits of business intelligence in insurance	689
18	Holistic vs Incremental approaches to BI	689
19	Perseverance	624
20	A single version of the truth?	596

Most views / day (qualification: 300 views)

Article		Views / day
1	A single version of the truth?	99.3
2	“Why Business Intelligence projects fail	38.2
3	“Involving users in business intelligence strategy key for success” – Christina Torode on SearchCio-Midmarket.com	33.0
4	Data – Information – Knowledge – Wisdom	29.5
5	Literary calculus?	24.3
6	Mountain Biking and Systems Integration	22.6
7	Measuring the benefits of Business Intelligence	16.4
8	Business Analytics vs Business Intelligence	13.9
9	A review of “The History of Business Intelligence” by Nic Smith	12.9
10	Mergers and value	12.9
11	Trends in Business Intelligence	11.6
12	Two pictures paint a thousand words…	11.6
13	Business Intelligence Competency Centres	10.5
14	Using multiple business intelligence tools in an implementation – Part I	10.2
15	Maureen Clarry stresses the need for change skills in business intelligence on BeyeNetwork	9.1
16	The importance of feasibility studies in business intelligence	9.0
17	Pigeonholing – A tragedy	8.5
18	Is outsourcing business intelligence a good idea?	8.3
19	The Top Business Issues facing CIOs / IT Directors – Results	8.2
20	The Dictatorship of the Analysts	7.1

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Posted in business, business intelligence, cultural transformation, site update, technology

If you enjoy reading this blog…

Peter Thomas — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:59:26 +0000

…then you might enjoy hearing me speak. Click here for details.

Posted in site update

Bank Holiday weekend, followed by a busy week

Peter Thomas — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:10:49 +0000

Monday 4th May was a public holiday in the UK and I seem to have been up-to-my-eyes so far this week. After a quiet week blogging last week, normal service should be resumed in the new few days.

Peter

Posted in site update

Integration of this blog with twitter.com

Peter Thomas — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:01:49 +0000

I have been using twitter.com to a greater degree over the last few months and thought that it would make sense to better integrate my blog with this site.

Accordingly all posts (save a few that are simply site updates) now have a link at the bottom, between the main text and the bookmarks, enabling readers to directly “tweet” the piece. This appears next to the blue twitter.com bird as follows:

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If you click on this link, you will be taken to your twitter.com page with a new tweet already filled out for you, complete with a shortened link to the relevant article. Of course you can edit this before you post it if you like.

If you are one of the 0.5% of people who are not already on twitter.com, then you will be asked whether you would like to sign up before you can post the article.

I have got some great ideas from twitter.com and met some interesting people. Hopefully this small improvement will help readers to also have similarly positive experiences.

I am proud to announce that this blog is now 100% tweetable!

Peter

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Posted in business, site update, technology