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About PWYP

Preach What You Practice is the business blog of Martijn ten Napel.

Portrait image of Martijn ten Napel

My field of expertise is business intelligence (BI) and data. I started with BI in 1998 and have delivered many projects to a diverse set of organisations. I have been educated in modelling economic behaviour of organisations and got to work in BI by chance.

I’ve always wondered about the quintessence of the field. What is the role of BI? Why do so many BI projects fail? Our field of work has expanded with Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, but this hasn’t changed the essence of every day challenges.

Crunching data is not a technological challenge, it is an organisational issue. People, as a collective, try to make sense of the information handed to them. This isn’t a walk in the park for most organisations.

The quest of the one solution that transfers the muddy depths of data into transparent and intelligible information is ongoing. Technology firms are the new alchemists. They promise turn-key solutions that turns mud into a feast of ever flowing clear information streams. Time and time again, reality turns out to be less rose coloured. Turning data into valuable information requires perseverance and a lot of work.

With Preach What You Practice, I try to generate insights into this challenge and why it seems to evade simple solutions. These insights can help you to understand how to get a grip and how to balance people, technological and organisational processes and information within your organisation.

These insights are based on my daily work. I’m not doing this alone. With my colleagues, I like to discuss a lot about what is quintessential in working with information. We have to try to make sense of it all with the information that is handed to us through our daily jobs and the intelligence we build ourselves.