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…

Sustainable Improvement

I took a break from my three to four day a week work out to give my body a break.  I blinked and the next thing I know a month has gone by.  I’m not blogging weekly.  I’m not working out.  One thing is leading to another and its got me thinking about sustainability (’cause I’m not).  So what is the one thing that if you stopped doing it would take your business intelligence program from a competitive advantage to a legacy process affectionately known as the pig?  You’re probably expecting something sage which I find strange. If you’ve been reading my blog all along you should know by now that I’m going to talk about some things and then leave you hanging until at least next week.  So, where was I at?  Oh, one thing leading to another and the executives who used to cheer your business intelligence efforts are throwing rocks.  Yep…it can happen.

Noodling threw it lead me to consider the process of building BI capabilities.  Typically building these capabilities looks something like this, a) initiate project, b) deliver project, and c) go on to next project.  I’ve echoed this process once or twice before and I probably sound like a broken record squeaking about creating a cycle of understanding, developing and sustaining and growing BI capabilities.  That’s the mantra you have to repeat when driving any change.  It boils down to projects enabling new capabilities that in turn results in business execution which drives top and bottom line performance so effectively that it becomes part of the business process.  Four things – projects, enabling, execution and process that are necessary to make any capability sustainable.  So how good are you at these four things?

If you’re anything like me for years you’ve lived in the projects and enabling space.  After the appropriate check marks have been put on all the boxes in your gantt chart comes the victory dance.  But why the party?  At the end of the day its not delivering something that drives the results, but instead what happens next.  In a marriage the big party comes after standing at the altar.  These days half of marriages end up in divorce.  Interestingly enough that’s the same stat for BI initiatives, half don’t make it.  Makes you think, huh?  Seems like what happens after the party could be significant for you, the company you work for and the folks who depend on it for their lively-hood, especially if you’re like me working in the space where data is used for competitive advantage.

So if you were to grade yourself (and your team) in the four areas of 1) project execution, 2) enabling business use of new capabilities, 3) business execution derived from the new capability and 4) building this into the fabric of the business so that it is a permanent part your corporate culture (cheez I’m a wordy cuss tonight) what would they be?  Pretty simple question.  Pretty important if you want to stay married, or gainfully employed.  How good are you at the work that happens before and after the big party?

Til next week!  (Told you I’d keep you hanging…)

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…

The Like Cycle II (Be the farmer…)

I left off last week asking you to drink some Kool-aid.  Its the best most refreshing sugar packed fluid ever(!) and I called it the like-cycle.  Establishing and sustaining the like cycle is hard work.  It’s about succeeding locally so you can succeed strategically.  It requires that a team be delivered a set of reports (or analytical interfaces if you’re sensitive about being a report gopher) that has immediate value.  It requires that the reports leverage tools that allow the recipients to extend the reports.  It requires that there be a process that allows the skills necessary for this work be available to the team.  It requires that there is a means for the team to have support to immediately add some object or data to the mix that gets them to the next thing.  It requires that a system exist to share new information and analytical capabilities.  It requires that you do each of these things over and over.  Its a lot like farming.  Till, plant, nurture, harvest and repeat.  To develop, sustain and grow a world class BI practice – be the farmer.

OK you’ve got the John-Deere hat, flannel shirt, cover-alls and a team who is embracing the decision support tech you delivered.  The process becomes repeatable, but NOT perfectly.  (Think of this the way you imagine farmers talk about the weather.)  Teams will have gaps – analytical, technical and business.  There’s the time constraint.  Have you ever talked to anyone who has enough time in the day?  Yet, you’ll get the second team (possibly after one or two hairs exit your scalp and several others turn silver).  You’ll establish the process of the like cycle – reports, tools, training, support, sustainability and growth.  People will talk about how the tools are making them successful.  Then comes more work to make two teams a community which is more work.  At the same time you need to be bringing more teams into the cult…I mean community.  At this point you’ve never been closer to the chewy center.  You’re on the road to having the local application of business intelligence start to support competitive advantage.

I breezed through creating the community pretty quickly.  Its not quick nor easy, but I think in the few minutes I have left its important to focus on what having an established business intelligence community does for an organization.  Its harvest time.  This community is naturally cross functional which creates a James Surowiecki-an “Wisdom of the Crowds” environment where ideas are shared, improved and come together in unexpected and beneficial ways.  (If this sounds like more Kool-aid educate yourself on collective intelligence!)  It creates a framework that provides a structured means to improve your communities analytical maturity.  Think of this in terms of introducing concepts and tools around dashboards, visualization, simulation, modeling and mining to folks who are already being successful with the foundational reporting and statistics delivered by a decision support system.  These things together create a fact-based culture that can be aligned and focused to support strategic objectives (which is an entirely separate blog).  Good things!

Now at this point there may be few cynical technology folks out there thinking, “plague of locusts” or possibly “rain of toads”, as they imagine hundreds of businesses users hitting their systems with an ad-hoc query tool.  This isn’t a biblical disaster.  It does create new support issues and requires appropriate process and staffing.  At the same time, it isn’t Nirvana.  There will still be a bottleneck.  However, the amount of analytical work that can be done (the capacity of the system) will improve.  More will be possible with less direct information technology support.  Its a pretty neat outcome if you can just get business users to like it!

Once more I’m out of time.  More on something next week!

The Like Cycle

In the absence of input I decided to ramble about something I call the “like-cycle”.  No that’s not a typo I said ‘like’ not ‘life’.  It sounds very much like something you’d use at the gym doesn’t it?  Maybe something that’s part of a spin class!  In terms of full disclosure I must admit I’m not sure what a spin class is except for what I’ve seen on that cruise line commercial.  (I said I was going to ramble and I guess I’m doing a pretty good job of it!)  The ‘like cycle’ is what I call the work that needs to be done to make BI successful locally – by a small team or department.  This may seem to contradict my earlier statement that BI practice is about using information strategically to drive competitive advantage.  It really doesn’t.  The reason is that you must succeed locally to succeed strategically.  Metaphorically the strategic BI is the chewy center and local BI is the hard candy shell.  So how many licks does it take to get the chewy center?  Well, you’ll never know unless they like the hard candy shell (or if you ask the owl).

A useful way to talk about it is in terms of a decision support system (DSS) like Business Objects, ProClarity or Cognos (knowing that it applies to any BI application).  If you’re not familiar with these applications they are used to give business folks (‘suits’) or more properly quantitative analysts (‘quants’) direct access to an information asset.  Sometimes they’re also referred to as ad-hoc query tools.  They represent a foundational component of a BI program that provide a lot of benefits.  They can be broadly distributed.  Once they have been you have quants looking at the data. They begin to act as a data quality engine (“Hey, why doesn’t this information match that information!”, they exclaim and the really good ones will run off and pick away at until they have the answer). They start doing things that are good for the business like discerning sales opportunities, finding ways to reduce costs, automating manual tasks and providing alerts to front line folks so they can act more quickly.  It can allow business departments to fill some of there own report requirements which takes some pressure of the IT team.  Delivering a DSS to the business isn’t a black box solution though.  It requires trustworthy data that the business understands.  That data needs to be accessible fast and served up so that it can be sliced and diced in dozens of different ways in seconds.  All of this is hard work and you can’t just do it once and walk away.  You have to make the commitment to not just understand and develop the resource, but sustain and grow it.  It becomes a cycle.

I’m sure you’ve been there for a typical business request for information.  It’s organized as a project.  From the perspective of the person fulfilling this request it becomes “deliver this set of DSS based reports to Pete who works for Manager Rob”.  Being diligent the technician delivers the reports to Pete.  Pete uses them to execute a set of actions as directed by Manager Rob.  Manager Rob likes the process and asks Pete to make it ‘better’.  Pete uses the DSS tool to get more information for the better process, but something is missing.   Pete comes and asks for help and the person who originally fulfilled the request says, “I’d like to but I’m on a new project.”  Pete’s disappointed.  Pete tells Rose that DSS was helpful, but has fleas.  Rose tells Joe that and three friends that the DSS is just a lot of talk.  They each tell three friends and so on.  Soon it comes back round to Manager Rob and he’s angry.  The next thing you know there’s toilet paper hanging from your trees and the trash isn’t being picked up!  So, maybe I’m exaggerating a little.  The reality is that this project based delivery of information requests is the status quo for most organizations.  The DSS tool  acts as a means for IT to deliver a reporting capability more rapidly than if it were written using a third or fourth generation programming language generation.  In a world of lean and agile organizations this isn’t surprising.  The quick delivery of a solution and on to what’s next!  I’ve heard it referred to as a SWAT team approach which seems appropriate to me.  SWAT only shows up when there’s a crisis.  In the project based approach invariably IT becomes a bottleneck.  The resulting competition for these resources results into a queue of projects.  The queue is prioritized and in for those requests without the necessary support it becomes their final resting place.  Have you ever had your idea pushed into this queue?  Have you ever felt the sense of despair and hopelessness that this engenders?  Imagine as day after day and week after week pass as it sits in line waiting to be picked for the team, all the while watching hopelessly as other requests make the cut and yours doesn’t.

Whether this is the case or not for your organization, doing the work to build this beneficial pattern is valuable.  Its also difficult.  Its changing expectations and behaviors across the organization from the technical resource administering the data, the analyst using it to the manager directing its application.  If you’re a fan of Goldratt (like me) its about moving the constraint to a new area, or at the very least increasing the capacity of the bottleneck so that more is done with the same resources.  Its more than that too.  Its about focusing not just on the deliverable but enabling a fact-based culture in a way that allows it to spread organically.  Reading back through that last sentence makes me feel like I’m asking you to drink a ‘special’ Kool-aid.  I’m not.  What I am is out of time.  I’ll pick this thread up in next weeks blog!

Have a great week…

The Business Intelligence Team

So what’s the BI Team?  It seems like I’ve talked all around the subject.  There were clever anecdotes about consultants, mini-rants in my comments and back-peddling into a definition of BI.  A cynical person might suggest I’m avoiding the topic and they’d be right!  I think its my technical background raging against the next phrase that I’m actually going to say in the light of day (or more appropriately the light of my monitor).  The BI team are the folks that make the BI cycle work.  You know the thing where the data gets turned into knowledge that drives profitable business action.  The ones that determine the focus from the vision and make it a strategy.  They’re the crayon stick figures (the ones in my silly diagram fashioned solely because every really critical idea must be white-board friendly) that make the top and bottom line look much much better.  I still haven’t said it have I?  They’re suits.  Business people.   They don’t know meta data from their metacarpal (even though both tend to be critical to the practice of BI), but at the end of the day they are the folks who make world class BI work.  There I said it!  Are you happy now?

Much of the buzz (when it comes to BI) is about technology and that’s disappointing.  I’ve set up my Google alerts to give me the latest BI news.  What I get is ‘SAP to purchase Business Objects’ and ‘Microsoft announces Performance Point’.  If you do get a white paper that talks about some business related success its tied back to the purchase of an analytical application.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love tech.  Its just that the successful practice of BI has very little to do with it.  Any reasonably competent IT team can establish and support the business the tools that BI requires.  I’d even argue that in the right circumstance there’s a case to be made for outsourcing the infrastructure and support work.  What needs to be discussed, understood and embraced is the organizational behaviors that need to be fostered for a company to make smarter decisions locally and strategically.  It boils down to making this cycle work:

I’ve read the books (well tried to…there’s a couple out there that just suck the life right out of you) and to me, working in admittedly mid-sized environment, it boils down to making it work for the analysts and enabling the broadest possible audience of actors.  There’s discipline and process around getting your data organized and usable, providing this to the right folks with the rights skills, and translating this into action.  Its interesting because all the vendors know this.  I’ve talked to a bunch of them and there’s always the person they bring in who has done it really well somewhere else.  If you get this person talking in the appropriate environment you’ll get some really good info.  I’ve heard of a couple of different takes on making the BI cycle work but generally it comes down to defining the BI Team as the leaders between the sponsors and the BI community.  Its the group of individuals who can provide sustainability, foster mutual accountability across channels and support the ‘like-cycle’.  Yep, I said ‘like’ NOT ‘life’.  Interested in the like-cycle?  Or the composition of the BI Team?  Let me know and I’ll make it the subject of next week’s post!

Gotta run…

More on BI Staffing

OK then, when last we left off we were wondering why some people believe IT shouldn’t be allowed ‘in the clubhouse’ when it comes to a BI Team.  Why would you want to do this?  It’s so sad to see them out there – all pocket-protectory with shirts buttoned to the top button and big glasses trying to peak in the windows.  It becomes clear why its necessary to take this position once you understand why BI is such a hot topic and what the objectives business has for the strategic application of business intelligence.

US based companies are on track to spend over 28 billion dollars on BI this year.  Today monster.com (or the job engine of your choice) has over 5,000 North American jobs posted in this field.  Why the demand?  BI programs grow out of a desire for better information.  Do you trust the numbers you see in your report?  Have you ever been in a meeting where different teams arrived with different results for the same metric?  Have you ever wanted information you knew was in your system, but couldn’t get at it?  BI can be driven by a desire for better organizational alignment.  Does it feel like everyone is on the same page?  Does leadership have a uniform understanding of corporate goals?  Do all teams have the correct priorities to drive the enterprise strategy?  Scorecards and strategy maps are pretty common tools for driving a common enterprise vision to address this need.  They provide fact-based tools that help leaders articulate, communicate, prioritize and adjust corporate strategy to everyone within an organization.  Whether business intelligence is tactical (ground up) or strategic (top down) the focus has shifted from data management and information delivery to supporting competitive advantage.  As early as 2002 Price-Waterhouse-Coopers recognized that businesses which use information effectively establish themselves as leaders in their industry.  Companies face tough competition and are driven to make better use of existing assets, to be lean.  Making better use of your data asset can drive competitive advantage with measurable and fast return-on-investment and is at the heart of the spending and hiring in the BI space.

If you were to speak to Gartner, TDWI (The Data Warehouse Institute) or any recognized BI expert they would give you a definition for BI that goes something like this, “The process and technology required to turn data into information and information into knowledge that drives profitable business action.”  This will immediately be followed by something about about data warehousing and decision support tools.  They may give you exciting examples of applied BI which might include predictive analytics being used to determine the best price, corporate behavior, future sales or the best person to hire.  You might learn about data visualization as a powerful tool that provides an engine to fuel fast feedback loops creating more agile execution and leadership.  Data mining that will increase revenue per marketing dollar spent.  Performance management tools that transform your annual planning process from thousands of hours to hundreds of hours and provide much faster re-forecasting.  Vendors are now slapping BI on any data related product for obvious reasons.  At the end of the day these examples and vendor pronouncements represent applications – tools.  Business intelligence is a pattern of organizational behavior that needs to be understood, nurtured, sustained and grown.  It is not technology.  This pattern of behavior boils down to providing trusted and usable data to the right business people with the right experience equipped with the right analytical tools that allow them to either drive sales or reduce costs.  It is business driven, business focused and business lead.  Fostering a fact-based decision making culture across an organization and aligning it to support and drive competitive advantage defines the practice of BI.

Practice is an important word.  It means to pursue professionally.  The inference being that business intelligence isn’t technology.  Successful BI programs are about taking effective action based on the better use of information.  Technology helps BI just as it helps in many areas like accounting, replenishment and HR.  Put differently, technology is the race car.  It’s  very cool, but without a driver or a race what good is it?   (The obvious exception being that the race car helps you feel better about turning 40!)  If you want to win you need the car, the driver, the race and a team.  Think about this in terms of what it takes to use information more effectively than your competition.  In this context the off-hand comment that IT isn’t part of your BI team makes sense.  I don’t a agree with it, but there’s a good reason to put it in those terms.  A lot (I mean a LOT) of BI implementations fail.  A part of that can be attributed to taking a project based approach, particularly if it is driven by IT.  The success of a project is determined by delivering some new capability like a data warehouse, a decision support tool or a dashboard.  BI is about what comes next.  The information is in the data warehouse and executives have it in their dashboards.  So what?  The million (in some cases billion) dollar question is what then?

This is why the well-respected-really-smart-guy-who-carries-a-briefcase-and-lives-more-than-50-miles-away guy said IT isn’t part of your BI Team.  They can’t answer the “what’s next” question.  They can’t motivate action across the organization that drives profits.  The reality is that you can build it, but they won’t come.  They’re the horse not drinking at the water.  Who are they?  The folks you need to execute.  The gal in front of the customer and the folks building your product.  Educating, enabling and motivating them to take action is the mandate of the BI team.  The really interesting part is getting ‘that’ team put together.  The group who can make this happen and that group is where your practice of BI lives.  So who is that?

Whoaa, I’ll put the breaks on here.  This blog is like me getting up on two soapboxes!  I can post more about this if anyone’s interested.  If no one comments I’ll move onto something else (maybe a discussion of the diversionary tactics used by toddlers to avoid bedtime.  “I’m thirsty.”  “I have to go potty.”  “I don’t like the dark.”)

BI Organization & Staffing

Last week I had the opportunity to spend some time with a leading management consultant discussing staffing and organization for a business intelligence practice. We covered a lot of ground around process, roles, maturity and organizational evolution. At one point in the conversation this well-respected individual started to talk crazy. “OK, now I’m going to say something that’s going to make you roll your eyes back in your head — your IT department isn’t part of your BI team.” To which I responded (since we were on a con call), “OK, I’m rolling my eyes!” Folks started to laugh and then another member of our team sounded off, “Barry probably feels like that about the data warehouse team A LOT!” There was more laughter and the clock on the conversation ran out. We hung up, but that last comment stayed with me festering. Now at this point I have to say that we have an awesome technical team including the data folks. They are dedicated, talented, and hardworking. So why doesn’t this guy consider them a part of the BI Team?Now I’m one of those people that can’t let this kind of thing just go. I found myself digging into the BOK (body of knowledge) on the subject, doodling notes at odd times and generally obsessing. I’m sure you’ve met someone like me. The guy who concentrates so hard that he doesn’t notice you’re there for a few minutes and then when he (I) finally looks over you can tell they haven’t quite made it back to planet Earth yet. That’s me. (I really do care, but give me a minute.) What I found is that a lot of the material is focused on the concept of the BICC and BICOE, BI Competency Centers and BI Centers of Excellence. A common diagram you’ll see is a Venn diagram where the BICC is at the center of an intersection of strategy, community and technology. Another is the many variations of the ‘stack’. In this case you have the BI capabilities and processes represented as a series of bricks on either side of biz process – foundational things like data, decision support and analytical applications on the bottom and process management and business activity monitoring on the top. To one side of the brick you’ll see the BICC represented as a combination of IT and business resources supporting the integrated heap. I believe one of the reasons I think about things so intensely is that it takes a while for me to get it. It turns out that both of these are useful and merit attention, but they didn’t get me closer to understanding why my technically proficient friends didn’t get picked for the team. What finally got me there was creating a map of our BI capabilities to the technical roles it required to support. It looked something like this for two pieces of our BI stack:

• Data Warehouse
  – Data Architect
  – Database Administrator
  – Server Administrator
  – ETL Developer
• Ad Hoc Query Analysis and Dashboard
  – System Administrator
  – Report/Dashboard Developer
  – Help Desk Technician

At this point things became clearer and if you go through that exercise at some point you’ll find yourself digging out your copy of Bossidy and paging through “Competing on Analytics”. In the slowly turning wheels in my head I recognized that the roles above represent the work related to the care and feeding of BI infrastructure which is necessary and important, but it isn’t where the money is at. My hunch was that the organizational relationships represented by the pretty diagrams consultants use would be related back to the the analysis and action that must be driven by the suits and ties. What happened next was a lot of fun. I mapped out what I believe are the organizational and process best practices on the information-to-knowledge and knowledge-to-profitable-action side of the BI equation. I took this to our team that would participate in the next con call and shared it with them THEN we finished the conversation. The well- respected expert (who really is very good) answered pretty much as expected, but pointed out one pretty significant opportunity for us. When the dust settled and we reviewed the notes there was still a gap and its interesting. It was in the space of technical innovation and evolution. My notes called for the integration of the traditional BI roles with our application development and production support teams and a distinct technical team to support the growth of a fact-based business culture.With a little work you can get to what I did so before boring the world (OK the two other people who read this blog) please let me know if you want to post that information. Otherwise, I’ll move on to something else for next week’s post.