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:

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.

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?

Getting in Your Face… …book

I’ve recently been working to market some workshops. As I’m no kind of marketing or advertising professional I’ve been trying anything I can think off to get butts in the seats. This has included direct mail, email marketing and even some telemarketing. The latest experiment has been with Facebook advertising. Wonder of wonders they provided some pretty neat analytical tools to see how your ads doing. Check it out:

For $7.31 I was able to give 6,159 folks the opportunity to see the advertisement and of that number 14 clicked on it. I don’t know if these are great numbers but at $0.62 for each person that was interested enough to go to our website I’m happy.

For this ad, the potential number of candidates was limited to those over age 18 living in Grand Rapids. If memory serves, this was a pool of about 12,000. At $0.62 rate about half of the pool of candidates actually had the ad placed on their Facebook page. I’ll do some additional tests with other advertisements to see how the numbers work out.

One last note, I prefer this over the LinkedIn model of impressions. They don’t provide a ‘pay per click’ option. LinkedIn’s tools aren’t as nice in terms of selecting a specific audience either. In particular, picking a city or region wasn’t very intuitive for me. I haven’t tested their advertising effectiveness by placing an ad yet though. When (if) I do I’ll post these results too.

More later!

From Capability to Competency

I left all y’all (for those not in the know that’s the proper plural from of y’all used in Southern Illinois in my youth) hanging for longer then intended!  Seems like I need to pay closer attention to my own rants about sustainability!!!  So the sustainability cycle – projects, enabling, execution and process are things near and dear to my heart.  Here’s how I think about it:

 

What’s it?  It’s a new capability that you want to turn into a competancy that is maintained and grown.  It is something valuable that you don’t do today, but want/need to in order to stay ahead of the competition or turn the crank on earnings.

What I said in last post (with too many words) is that my experience is that most folks operate in the bottom two quadrants – “build it” and “deliver it’.  These translate to a project the enables a new capability.  The top two are where the value lies.  It is where some folk somewhere do something with the new thing and good things happen.  Its an important thing thing.  Until the thing is put to use it isn’t anything.  In the software world they call the thing that no one uses shelfware.  I think of it as I’ve-built-it-and-they-do-not-come syndrome.  In the new-to-me-but-really-is-not-so-new-news language of innovation there is an emphasis on understanding relevance, ownership and vision so the next it has a home and delivers results.

So how does this relate to business intelligence?  In an environment where information is used to support competative advantage this is the continuous cycle that goes on in order to mature the practice of data assisted decision making.  (Uh-oh, I’m going all wordy again!)  The elements of the BI equation which are data, analysis and action all need to be continually experiencing this cycle of developing new capabilities while using and growing exisitng capabilities simultaneously.  So what’s that mean?  Well hopefully next week I’ll explain!

Four Questions To Ask When Building Your First Strategy Map

Here they are:

1. What’s the advantage that differentiates us from our competitors?
2. What are the three most important things we need to measure to drive that advantage?
3. What are the three most significant gaps or barriers that keep us from leveraging this advantage?
4. What are the three things we can pursue to close the gaps, overcome the barriers and positively influence our three most important measures?

Answering those four questions with the right leaders will result in an artifact that visually articulates your strategy in a way that is easy to communicate across the organization.  It represents a performance dashboard that (with the appropriate process) supports feedback loops which can allow the vision to change and evolve with the competitive landscape.  It becomes a tool that helps establish goals and metrics (both leading and lagging indicators) while providing a framework to approve and prioritize projects that ultimately drive the strategy.  Sounds great doesn’t it?  (Uh-oh here comes the but) but in I’ve only ever worked with one organization that really has done this!  I’ve known many organizations that exercise the process of establishing a strategy map (or other strategic planning methodology) and then never referred to it again.  It’s a strange circumstance almost as if they are putting a check on a list to say, “Yes we’ve done this!”, smile happily and go back to doing things as they always have.  Norton and Kaplan certainly don’t need my help in promoting or explaining their well respected strategic planning methodology, but (there’s that word again) those familiar with strategy maps may have noticed that there doesn’t appear to be any positing of a hypothesis that’s intended to drive performance.  Where’s the product innovation, customer understanding or operational effectiveness!  It’s madness…or possibly there’s another point.

Before any organization can discuss what’s then next (or maybe one of many) strategies they will pursue they need to know who they are.  Its helpful (in a Good to Great Jim Collins sort of way) in achieving success to have single coherent vision to share, foster and grow throughout an organization.  In those rare situations where there may be a disconnected understanding of strategy or direction the discussion driven by the four questions above can result in establishing, re-establishing or clarifying your organization’s vision.  Sounds simple, almost as if you could sprinkle pixie-dust on the problem to fix it.  It’s not.  In a company where the leadership is invested and passionate these discussion can be the intellectual equivalent of a rowdy brawl.  It’s worth the bloody knuckles and black eyes to get it right.  How can you talk about what’s next if you don’t know what’s first?

So what’s a strategy map?  Here’s the ubiquitous Southwest Airlines example:

Look at that!  You have the strategy, “Improve Ground Time Turn Around”, a visual representation of time bound objectives tied to goals providing lagging and leading indicators that are then used to create a scorecard.  From there you develop the specific tasks/projects that need to happen to meet their goals. How can you not love this?  I’m not going to try and explain this fully.  There’s a large body of work out there on this subject by folks with bigger squishier brains then mine.  I will suggest that learning this methodology and applying it will be the most valuable thing you do this year.

Now if someone would just talk about how you apply this to business intelligence!  Until next week…