Archive for February 2009
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.
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:
Barry's Business Intelligence Blog 