Today's example: IT administrator Terry Childs has managed to lock everybody else out of San Francisco's wide-area network, containing the city's "emails, law enforcement records and payroll documents, and god knows what else".
I wonder how that will impact the IT organization's KPIs (and the city budget)?
]]>I've been competing with Cognos for over 15 years, and I consider them a very ethical organization. The big problem seems to be simply that state was very keen to implement performance management, and so missed a few steps in the process.
State senator Salvatore F. DiMasi is apparently a fan of performance management, and the Massachusetts Department of Education was required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act to generate reports about student, staff, and program performance.
This led local districts to start purchasing their own software, so the state decided on a larger, centralized data warehouse with data about students, teachers, and finances across the state.
The RFP process doesn't seem to have gone smoothly, since Cognos was selected despite coming fifth on a scoring system that considered cost and other factors. I believe many (most?) RFPs are a waste of time and money, but they're essential for transparency in the public sector, and if you're going to do them, you have to at least pay lip service to the results.
Interestingly, the state was "sharply criticized" for doing something that I consider is almost a success factor for BI: taking a leap of faith that better access to data will bring improvements, without knowing exactly how the software will be used:
"the inspector general is urging that the administration first determine whether it needs to make such an expensive purchase. Before rebidding the contract, he said, the state should talk to employees "to see how or if they would use such a type of software."
(For more on why I believe this, see point three of this post, or review this presentation).
Overall, there was apparently no great dissatisfaction with the Cognos software, so the biggest result is to delay 20,000 people from improving the Massachusetts education system through better performance management.
]]> 
Also of interest was the ranking of BI technologies in order of importance -- Query and Reporting 1st, OLAP Data Cubes last.
I believe there's an opportunity there, between Business Objects Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports products, and SAP's NetWeaver BI data warehousing environment...
]]>
Business intelligence standardization (which I define as "pragmatically reducing the number of overlapping tools in order to reduce costs and maximize the benefits of business intelligence") seems to be on the rise, at least in my neck of the woods. Several large customers are looking for external validation of how many BI users they "should" have, and of what profiles (simple reporting, interactive reporting, ad-hoc reporting, OLAP analysis, etc.), in order to have a basis for negotiating an enterprise-wide BI platform deal.
Despite the best efforts of a bunch of very smart people, I haven't yet found anything like this. Obviously it's hard to have a definitive "answer" when organizations differ widely in their information use, BI penetration is a moving target, technology is improving, etc., but it is something that many organizations are increasingly interested in....
Does anybody out there know of something relevant? If so, please let me know, (telliott@timoelliott.com) and many thanks in advance!
]]>"Learn how to avoid the mistakes that other companies have made implementing business intelligence solutions and ensure success for your own projects. Discover the major assumptions and pitfalls that can lead to project failure and learn what other companies have done to avoid these problems and ensure long-term success."
One participant came up to me afterwards and told me enthusiastically that "you've just described the last six months of my life"! -- I hope things have gone better since...
]]>
]]>
Since the theme of the SAP / Business Objects combination is fixing the gap between strategy and execution, a quick Berlin-appropriate cartoon:
During a company takeover, why is there always a central resource center to store goals and plans? Because it's vital to share information effectively among different cross-functional teams.
So why doesn't all this apply to normal organizational strategy?!
If it's important to centralize sales information, why not strategy information? If it's important to centralize initiatives and goals during an acquisition, why not the rest of the time?
Why do we tolerate strategy, initiatives, and goals to be scattered around the organization, in dozens of incompatible formats?
If organizations are struggling to execute corporate strategy, wouldn't it help to have all the company initiatives, at every level, for every team, stored in one place, so that you could actually see what was happening? Wouldn't that help communications? Ensure alignment between different teams? Reduce overlaps between teams? Help spot gaps?
Just as installing SFA doesn't mean that you tell a sales person how to run their deal, centralizing initiatives and plans doesn't necessarily mean telling any group how to run their strategy. But just as with sales, making the whole thing transparent helps reinforce the right behaviors and detect dysfunctional strategy -- and makes it easier to spot and correct issues before they become huge problems.
]]>
It was widely reported this week that more than one out of every 100 Americans is a criminal. That's nothing... There's a country that I can't name (but they play rugby and have lots of sheep). The national police force wanted a "single view of the criminal", and so created a central data warehouse from a variety of operational and legacy systems. The ended up with a database of 4.5 million names.
This was a problem, since the population of the country is only four million. So, either everybody in the country is a criminal AND they have half a million bandit sheep...
...or they have a data quality problem.
]]>
The Camtasia Studio video content presented here requires JavaScript to be enabled and the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player. If you are you using a browser with JavaScript disabled please enable it now. Otherwise, please update your version of the free Flash Player by downloading here.
If you are in charge of a business intelligence project, your job is not to implement software. It is not to "keep the business happy". It is to use your expertise to help the company transform the way it does business. BI is useless unless something changes as a result of the data that you're providing. It's not about "working with the business". You should assume that the business people are there to help you in your transformation mission.
That's probably not what you've been asked to do. The business people, justifiably, think it's their job to transform the business.
But having the mind-set that you are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of the system will help the project stay on track. It will encourage you to understand the business needs, ask the right questions, and make the right tradeoffs.
I believe that leading a BI project has the potential to bring more value than any other job in the organization today, and requires a breathtakingly wide range of skills, from deep technical knowledge, to extreme project management, to advanced diplomacy.
Helping organizations transform their business is a heroic undertaking, and I wish everybody out there trying to do it the very best of luck.
]]>There have been several companies that have touched on different aspects of BI 2.0 solutions, but what I've seen so far from Antivia takes it to a whole new level.
The company, headed by ex-Business Objects employees, has introduced Antivia Desktop, a product that can be easily (even virally) deployed on top of existing Business Objects installations to add easy-to-use Web 2.0 functionality.
The desktop interface is designed to be modular, allowing extra add-on functionality to deployed to users, independently of the underlying Business Objects architecture. The system works with any environment from version 6.5 up, and supports multiple Business Objects document formats, including WebIntelligence, Crystal Reports, Desktop Intelligence, and Xcelsius.
Once downloaded and installed, the Antivia Desktop is "self-learning": users don't have to tell it anything -- whenever they open standard Business Objects documents, those documents will start appearing in the desktop interface, ready for rating and other added community features.
All information collected by the system is stored either within the firewall, or securely on Antivia's servers, making viral and partial deployments easy with minimal need for IT support.
Screen shot: The Antivia desktop "learns" by watching user interaction with the system, and gives users easy access to a full range of Web 2.0 functionality applied to BI deployments, such as report rating, "users who liked this report also liked...", discussion threads, etc.
The easiest way to explain the power of the product is to take a tour of the interface:
Events. Users can create and sent invitations to communities, to take part in an insight discussion or a poll
Contacts. My BI / work / social contacts, just like the types of lists in instant messaging, facebook, etc., but focused on business intelligence. The list can be supplied using standards like LDAP.
My Favorites. The system automatically maintains a list of my favorites based on my viewing patterns.
What's hot: A list of "hot" reports, based on the report's rating, and the number of times it has been viewed. By default, people can see the names of reports even if they do not have access to it. This is an invaluable way of avoiding the traditional BI "catch 22" situation where people can't ask for access to reports they don't know exist. If necessary, reports can be hidden from all users.
Scenarios. The scenarios feature is part of the "let users adapt things themselves" aspect of BI 2.0. Antivia lets users change how information is categorized in existing reports by creating their own hierarchies. For examples, if I'm a manager for a region of several countries, I can easily group those countries for reporting, on the fly, without changing the database, and without having to ask for IT help. The hierarchies are saved so I can easily apply them to all my other reports, and a full audit trail is maintained for compliance purposes.
Content rating. Users are automatically prompted to rate reports when they use them, by applicability to their role, quality of content, and usability.
Users who like this report also liked... Using the content rating information, users are shown--Amazon-like--a list of other reports that they may be interested in.
Similar resources. The system automatically indexes documents, and finds other document that, for example, have an 80% or higher match on contents. This helps users find and share reports that already exist, without any need for central IT intervention, rather than creating reports from scratch. Given the propensity for similar users to create lots of overlapping redundant documents, this alone could be worth the investment in the product.
Applicable scenario. The scenario currently being used in the document (see Scenarios section above)
New community. Users can create new communities, by dragging and dropping people from their contact lists -- for example to discuss a particular issue such as "analyzing the results of our marketing campaigns". The person creates a welcome message, and invitations are sent out. The system automatically keeps track of members' contribution to the community, such as number of reports rated, discussions started / contributed to, polls started, etc.
Insight discussions. Any member can drag and drop a report into the community and create a discussion about the contents, for example a discussion about what is causing the observed results, and plans for the future. Other members can reply, and post other resources giving more information.
Polls. A BI competency center, for example, can poll users to determine whether a new report is ready for production, or any other aspect of how they are using the system.
The system in action
Click below for a tour of the product narrated by Mark Hudson.
Antivia provides a web 2.0 BI solution today that goes further than most vendors' future-vision slideware -- and the team are only just getting started, with lots of other great features in the pipeline.
The product is so innovative that organizations may find it hard to get it to the top of their BI priorities, but informal discussions with IT departments have convinced me that it meets a real need for both users and administrators. By using people's everyday activities to continually improve the system, I believe that it will improve BI deployments while lowering IT and administration overhead. In particular, any organization that has a BI competency center today should take a long, hard look at Antivia's solution.
So far, this posting reads like an infomercial, so some caveats: Antivia is a young company, I haven't yet used the solution myself or talked to customers, and I can't speak to the robustness of the system and technology used.
But I'm convinced that the type of functionality that Antivia provides is an essential part of effective BI deployments in the future, and I wish the team the best of luck.
]]>I've come away convinced not only that profitability analysis is not only an asset for all these organizations, but also that it may even be a "magic bullet" that helps promote enduring BI success.
Is selling more and maximizing revenue a good idea? Is your best customer the one who brings in the most money? That's certainly how most companies are organized -- the sales people and regions that bring in the most money typically get the biggest bonuses.
But imagine that you're losing money on each product -- maximizing sales suddenly means maximizing your losses. To make the right decisions in your business, you have to measure the right things -- and that means profits, not revenue.
Everybody has heard of the 80/20 rule. But profitability is different -- call it the "80/140 rule": 80% of your customers or products make up more than 100% of the profits, and the remaining customers reduce the profit back down to 100%. Charting cumulative profit by customer or product typically results in what's called a "whale curve".
If you can generate a whale curve by customer, by product, by channel, etc, you're well on your way to being able to make intelligent decisions about your business.
Measuring real profitability can be difficult, but new activity-based costing tools are making it much easier to build models that efficiently allocate revenue and costs according to cost drivers. For example, the cost of IT resources can be ascribed to different departments by measuring how many support calls they generate, percentage of server load, etc. Once those costs have been passed on to customer-facing departments, they can in turn be allocated according to number of transactions, deliveries, etc.
Note that things can quickly get complicated -- for example, you have to allocate IT costs to the personnel department, who in turn provide services to the IT department. The best products on the market make this relatively easy, resolving this type of problem automatically through iteration.
Perhaps the biggest difficulty of implementing such systems is knowing what depth of detail and complexity is required to provide "robust" numbers. In general, companies using these solutions reported that they had initially implemented models that were too complex. But by first going "deep" they were able to reassure themselves that the simpler, more useable models they ended up using provided similar results.
Profitability analysis is really about determining what drives your business. For example, Heineken can now generate detailed profit and loss statements by brand, SKU, channel, customer, segment -- or any combination of these. This information is used widely throughout the company, for example to determine at what point it becomes profitable to install a more complex "cellar beer" installation instead of a normal draught installation.
After implementing these solutions, company managers typically find that at least some of the the rules of thumb that they have using to run their businesses were incorrect. In many cases, their "best customers" turned out not to be the most profitable, because they demanded more time and attention and generated higher costs.
By determining profitability by customer segment, organizations can adapt their services accordingly. For example, banks can target marketing campaigns at the types of customers which provide them with the highest profitability, and try to encourage higher-cost customers to move to cheaper telephone or online ebanking services.
In extreme cases, companies like Sprint and UK's online bank, Egg, have even attempted to "fire" their least-profitable customers -- a good example of why human beings remain essential to all performance management systems, since a good accounting decision can be a very bad PR decision.
As the BI industry has matured over the last two decades, it has become increasingly important to organizations.
But my experience has been that BI and performance management projects designed for the executive team tend to be "brittle" -- even when they have clearly provided great value, they often fall victim to the next big corporate reorganization and management reshuffle.
Partly this has been because of technology issues -- there are still improvements to be made in how easy it is to update BI systems as goals change -- but I believe it mainly comes down to more human factors.
It's taken as gospel within our industry that strong executive leadership is essential for strategic BI. But the danger is that the project becomes strongly associated with a particular leader. And when that person leaves (and executive turnover has been increasing), their successor instinctively reaches for a different system and different metrics to mark the departure from the "old way of doing things".
This is where profitability shines as a "magic bullet". Simply put: nobody messes with profitability. A new executive is coming in and wants to see a different set of metrics? No problem: since nobody can argue with the importance of profitability, people don't even try.
It appears that profitability can provide a strong foundation on which to build an enduring BI system. The hope is that the new executives will have an incentive to make their mark by acting on the different drivers of profitability, and extending and improving the existing performance systems, rather than dismantling them and starting again.
In conclusion, if organizations really care about implementing strategic BI and performance management projects, they should consider starting with a core foundation of profitability analysis.
]]>
But, just like the "make your own umbrella" kit above, it will seem increasingly ridiculous to do so.
]]>