Sales Manager: “I have an urgent request! We have a sales training next week, and want to show the reps which products our retail customers have been purchasing from that company we just bought.”
Strategy Person: “OK, I’m sure we’ll have that somewhere [copy to BI people in US, Europe], but note that the raw numbers will need interpretation: some products have low revenue but are big competitive differentiators, and since our customers look nothing like theirs, what was sold in the past and what will sell in the future are likely to be very different. The retail expert [copy Retail person] is probably the best person to turn to for real insight into which products are the most important going forward.”
Retail Person: “I’ve attempted to get this information specifically for retail many times — it’s not available”.
Sales Manager: “The idea is to show the reps which products sold most in the past, since those are probably the ones that will sell most in the future”.
Strategy Person: “That’s exactly the problem! It’s not at all clear that’s true… In any case I can tell you now what the top products are are — it’s the required base platform followed by the top three options X, Y, Z…”
Retail Person: “Maybe customer assurance has something?”
BI Person US: “Did you want number of customers, or revenue?”
Sales Manager: “… Both?”
BI Person US: “Here’s the number of customers per product, attached. For revenue, how far back do you want? I’m assuming you only want people still on maintenance, who have probably installed the software? Note that the data will be incomplete, since it won’t include software sold through the channel, nor where they sold an enterprise deal for the whole product set “
Sales Manager: “Can I have it for the last twelve months, for North America, by tonight?”
BI Person: “Junior BI person, please get this out of the data warehouse”
Junior BI Person US (next day): “Sorry for the delay — the systems were slow… I’ve prepared an Excel file, but it has over 50,000 lines, and at 12Mb, it’s too big to send via email — can somebody get it to the sales manager?”
Strategy Person: “Sales manager, once I zip the file, it’s only 4Mb, attached — but maybe you should specify the chart you want, and the BI person could give it to you directly?”
Retail Person: “And do we have this data just for retail?”
BI Person Europe: “Sorry I didn’t reply earlier.. here’s a chart using our other BI tool — is this what you want?”
Sales Manager: “Yes!! Thank you!!”
Strategy Person (to himself): “Oh look… the base platform followed by X, Y, and Z…”
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Summary
- People don’t know what tools are available to access data
- People don’t know who is available to help them
- People don’t really know exactly what information they want
- People don’t really know how to describe clearly what they want
- People don’t really know exactly what they will do with the information
- People are happy to use incomplete data that may not be relevant
- People prefer to have other people get data for them
- People responsible for getting the data don’t try to understand the need and may be junior (or simply incompetent)
Note that none of these issues are (at least directly) about technology, and so are resistant to technology fixes (despite all the white papers out there that claim that “magic wands” can fix everything, such as software-as-a-service, memory-resident analysis, BI appliances, column databases, or intuitive new visualizations…)
Ultimately, BI success is about a long and typically hard struggle to create an information culture where people are trained how to access information and rewarded for using it to create business advantage. Typical BI projects spent too much time on technology and platforms, and not nearly enough on people and culture. Why? Basically because of reward systems and role definitions — but that’s another post…