Three Questions to Ask When Starting a Tech Project

• What’s the business reason you’re doing this?
• What does success look like (from a business perspective) after the project is completed?
• How do you measure this? 

The Fly Wheel Adoption Pattern. Now that’s a funny name!

I’m still thinking about design patterns for business intelligence.

A pattern has a funny name.  It has a description, a solution and consequences.  OK, if you check Wikipedia you’ll see that there’s more characteristics to patterns, but do I look like Martin Fowler?  The Gang of Four?  No…no I do not.

The name (which has mainly been in my head) for developing a BI competancy that drives business performance is the Fly Wheel Adoption Pattern.  Obviously, I have the funny name thing down!  It is also a nod to Good to Great, by Jim Collins.  The consistent persistant pursuit of improvement based on the numbers (which he describes in this book) really resonates with my ideas on why BI rocks.  (By rocks I mean delivers measurable top and bottom line benefits.  By rocks I mean that just yesterday 350 new business intelligence jobs were posted on Monster.com.)

Anyway, that’s the name of the pattern I use to describe best practices for the adoption of BI as a competancy.  Next I’ll try and outline the problem that this pattern addresses.

Funny, Funny Hackers

I was amused by these hackers…

See the Yahoo news  for the full details.

The Goal – Still a Good Read after All These Years

This book came up in a conversation with a friend and got me thinking about just how good of a read this was.

 

One element of this dicussion that is still resonating with me is the observation that individuals in organizations are so focused on their process area that they stop thinking about top and bottom line impact to the business.  I really like the Goal because it helps me think about project and change management in these terms.  One example is a project I had in ’98.  No one else on the project team was excited about it because it was (in their mind) a boring inventory/replenishment project  for a retail chain.  When we talked about the business impact of reducing carry costs for inventory, and how small reductions across hundreds of stores resulted in big improvements in cash flow everyone was a little more interested.  They became downright excited when we started talking about driving sales by improving service levels.  A ½% improvement in ‘in stock’ levels can drive a lot of sales.  This is a long winded way of saying that understanding your processes purpose in supporting top and bottom line results is important.  Goldratt’s books bring that home for me.  I’ve thought about having, “The GOAL is to make MONEY!” tattooed on my chest.  He’s written further on this in terms of supply chain, project management and software development.  All good reads.

Where is the Big Book of Patterns for Business Intelligence?

“Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over and over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”

— Christopher Alexander

This quote really describes the last ten years of my life.  Its funny though since I moved from Java development to business intelligence I haven’t seen a pattern.  I miss the value they add in solution development and wonder why this form of encapsulating best practices hasn’t been adopted by the business intelligence community?  Am I missing something?

RFID Vulneribility

Here’s a great webcast demonstrating the vulneribility of RFID tags in passports and enhanced drivers licenses:

Architect Center, a Professional Community for IT Architects

I’ve been priveledged to be involved in a small way in the creation of a new on line community (which is still only an alpha release) known as the Architect Center.  Check it out and the article that started it all.

My favorite quote (from the aforementioned article) made it on the landing page:

“Defining and designing complex structures is a common activity performed by almost every discipline, profession, and artisanship throughout the centuries. All the disciplines of old discovered that skills and knowledge required for the composition of large complex systems don’t match the skills that are required for small bottom-up assembly activities. In IT, the same problem became noticeable about 10 years ago, and the gap between core engineering and high-level system design has grown ever since. Grady Booch’s aphorism, you can’t build a sky-rise the way you build a doghouse, encapsulates the common dilemma facing high complexity, high interdependency, and low transparency projects: The sheer amount of detail required in complex compositions is so overwhelming that a function of analysis, decomposition, and abstraction becomes vital for the success of such endeavors.” — Miha Kralj

Outliers – a very cool read for BI folks, and everyone else too…

 

I had to do a a quick post about the book Outliers (left).  My friend Sherri from AcceleratedK passed it along and I haven’t been able to put it down.

It’s changing the way I think.  Check it out.

VHS, Blu-Ray and Wii – Inferior Technology that Wins

I’ve been following the remarkable success of the Wii.  It’s the oldest game system out there.  It has less storage, memory, and CPU power than its competitors.  It has poorer graphics too.  In November 2008 it sold 2,000,000 units while its next closest competitor, the XBOX 360, sold 836,000 copies (see 1Up.com’s article for more details).  It’s so successful that I’ve even heard folks discussing Sony pulling out of the market.  (I think this is crazy talk, but who knows…)  Why?  Let’s look at the other examples.

Blu-Ray’s success led to Toshibo pulling its HD-DVD offering when Warner Brothers announced they would only release their films in the Blu-Ray format (see this article on Home Theater View). Strange since if you look at viewer comments you’ll see most people felt sound and image quality were better for HD-DVD.

It’s the same story for VHS and Betamax (see WikiAnswers this time).  In all of these cases the format that won (or is winning) was the one that has the broadest adoption.

This leads to my very simple belief that the product that gets used by the most folks is the best, regardless of the specifications.

So how does this happen?  I think Scott Weisbrod does a good job in his blog  relating how Nintendo used Blue Ocean strategy to identify the key areas of performance that are making it the best game system in the world.  If you’re not familiar with Blue Ocean it’s worth the investment.  It provides a framework for identifying how to diverge from your competition that’s termed value innovation.  For me it’s a great tool that helps answer my favorite BI question, “Are you measuring the right things?”  If you’re not including adoption in your key metrics you may want to think about where Betamax and HD-DVD are today…

Stephen Few’s Blog on Xcelsius, “Ouch!”

If you’re a BI geek like me then you know who Stephen Few is and probably have his pretty pretty books on dashboards and scorecards.  He’s the reason I own a ‘Dummies’ book on Excel 2007 and have just raised my eye-brow at the latest version of Business Objects Xcelsius.  Here’s the last couple of paragraphs of his blog on the subject:

“How Should We Respond?

Business Objects is a leading business intelligence vendor (based on sales), but its products consistently demonstrate that they don’t understand analytics and haven’t a clue about data visualization. A vendor that claims to be the best, which Business Objects unabashedly claims (just like every other major BI vendor), should be ashamed of selling such moronic products. Don’t reward them for irresponsible work—products that assume their customers are halfwits—by wasting your money on them. I’m not suggesting that if you use their products, you should necessarily abandon them. I’m suggesting that you stand up and let them know that you deserve better and don’t sit down until they start listening. They dress products up with a thin veneer of flash and no substance and rely on misdirection to sell them to you.

Why? In part because, when it comes to analytics, they must not know what they’re doing, but also because they believe this is what you want. “It’s not our fault, we’re just giving them what they asked for”, they reason. It’s time to let them know that they (and many of their competitors as well) are dead wrong. “

For my part I’ve used the Business Objects Web Intelligence platform to deliver solutions with real business value.  I’ve struggled with providing useful disconnected interactive interfaces through these tools and had hoped that Xcelsius would provide a vehicle for this kind of off-line analysis.  Seems like SAP/BO may have missed the mark!

What do you think?