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?

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

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…

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…