Browse > Home /

Business Intelligence Symposium Save the date!

April 2, 2010

LUCRUM Inc. is proud to announce The Business Intelligence Symposium being held on May 6th 2010 at the Northern Kentucky University METS Center http://www.themetscenter.com/center/default.aspx located near the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport.  Check back for more details over the coming weeks.

Written by PatrickRyan · Filed Under Business Intelligence, LUCRUM News | 7 Comments 

Farewell 312 Plum Street

January 22, 2010

Today the folks at LÛCRUM are closing the doors to 312 Plum Street forever.  *sniff*  It’s hard to believe that this day is here.  LÛCRUM moved in in January 1997.  I joined LÛCRUM in July 1998.  There are a lot of memories here.  I can almost recall every coffee stain, oops marker stains on our white board and worn spots on the chairs.  EWWWWW!

Look at that “Admin” cube!  I remember when I joined LÛCRUM we actually had someone answer the phones for us.  Does any company do that anymore?  (On an alternate tangent…I hate those phone systems that require you to say your option…just let me press a darn number!).

Anyway, we’re packing up 13 years of memories, dirt, proposals, old shirts, coffee pots, books (anyone need a slightly used Crystal Reports v5 book?), cables, monitors, obsolete servers, chairs, tables and…

PEOPLE!!!!

So, where are we taking all of these things?  We’re heading north to Kenwood.  Next week, you can find us at 7755 Montgomery Road Suite 160.  I have to say, I am soooooooooooo very excited.  In addition to heading to Kenwood, we are also sending a lot of people to become virtual employees.  That brings a new host of challenges.  GoToMeeting, conference calls, home office organization…wow!

Things will be different for sure on Monday.  But one thing is certain, we’re still focused on data and we still believe in making data visual and easy-to-understand for all!

See you in Kenwood!

Written by Jodie Heflin · Filed Under Featured, LUCRUM News | 8 Comments 

10 Signs of Business Intelligence Partnerships in Your Organization

January 14, 2010

In today’s corporate and institutional IT world, much has been done to create “partnerships” between IT and the User Community more often known as the Business.  The users are the people that are responsible for keeping revenue coming in, expenses predictable, and ultimately, bringing in a profit to fuel the company onwards.  There’s many articles published in business and IT journals as to the positive benefits the organization receives when there’s alignment within a Business Intelligence initiative.  So, you’d think that we’ve already dissected and solved this problem and it’s now in the history books.

Not so.   Dilbert is alive, healthy, and very much well fortified in the “partnership” between IT and Business.

Here’s 10 Telltales from a person that has both a IT and Business professional’s perspective that you really do have a Business Intelligence partnership.

  1. Lunch. OK, I’m writing this waiting for one of my manager’s to bring me a “sack lunch” turkey sandwich.   But I’m serious.   Lunch.   When’s the last time you have been to lunch with your business user?   When has he or she picked up the tab for that lunch?  Communications is the key to any Business Intelligence initiative since the information requirements are dependent on the external business environment most of the time and, in today’s marketplace, the environment is constantly changing.   Frequency and intimacy of conversation not only about last weekend’s loss of your favorite playoff team but more so what’s going on in business last week that is going to affect the kind of questions you are looking to “ask your data?”
  2. Mea Culpa. Saying that you made a mistake…Rework, reloads, unsuccessful night refreshes…operating a business intelligence environment is not easy work.   There’s a lot of moving parts to a mature BI platform along with updates, patches, network traffic and internet dependencies and the like.   There’s got to be daily production huddle sessions, weekly project enhancement meetings, quarterly capital, budget and funding meetings, and annual business strategy alignment sessions.   All of these meetings have to be tightly integrated between IT and the Business in order for the Business Intelligence platform to prosper.
  3. Monitoring & measuring. “What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed” as the modified saying goes.   A mutually-agreed measurement and operational reporting system needs to be applied to any Business Intelligence initiative.  At least, the successful ones.   The partnership has proactively agreed to “what constitutes acceptable” in advance so that both parties can provide a seamless report card.
  4. Social measurements, too. Not only do we want to measure “system performance” and other traditional IT operational metrics, one also wants to consider the social aspects of the platform.  Is everyone timely and present at the respective meetings?   Was everyone prepared with their part for the meeting?   Are the “partnership duties” getting deprioritized (this especially happens in the business side since the business operationally will pull the business people directly into business problems and not IT problems.
  5. Cradle-to-grave Documentation. Documentation doesn’t mean to just put the information into a project plan when building the BI platform and then shove it into a drawer.  Rather, documentation of the business questions that are asked every day, week, month, quarter depending on the business problems involved.  The business is changing, thus, driving heuristic questioning.   Having an active collaborative environment to document these is extremely important to sustain the platform.
  6. Executive sponsorship by both IT and the Business. Even though most of the activity is well beneath the executive offices, the business questions being analyzed and solved are most likely directly related to the profitability and the overall strategy and performance of the business.   So, do they go to lunch?   Do they understand that there’s a Business Intelligence Partnership?  Smile.
  7. Show me the money!   Funding. How budgets get spread between IT and the Business can actually be the fundamental reason why a Business Intelligence initiative succeeds or fails!!!   There’s a lot to be said about the CIO that can navigate through today’s budget world.  How a CIO leverages both capital appropriations and current expense for Business Intelligence requires the involvement of the Business.  You see, building the environment with hardware and software and consulting services can all follow GAAP principles for accounting.   Where the difficulty lies is how to separate the operational overhead of running the BI platform along with the constant stream of enhancements.   If one doesn’t budget for the enhancements, the platform ends up slowly (or quickly in today’s economy) becoming antiquated.
  8. A partnership of Innovation. Most of what IT does is not innovation itself.  They use innovative technology; although once deployed, it is an operational system that is supposed to run and run and run.  IT professionals are paid to execute, operate, and make budget….and most of the time at the lowest common denominator when it comes to operational availability and budget.    BI platforms are rich with innovation through new technology, of course, but more so through Heuristic Questioning about the business problems at hand that day.  Innovation comes through leveraging data and asking “Why?” and “What if?”   The BI partnership must have an innovation DNA in order to truly leverage the data to its greatest value.
  9. Survived a reorganization or three? When, not if, the company/organization reorganizes, the Business and IT organization can change slightly or dramatically.  I have seen many a healthy BI partnership get destroyed over new org charts.   When you reorganize, the IT and Business leadership must have a Partner Summit of sorts in order to protect the operational care, feeding and ongoing plans of the Business Intelligence environment.
  10. Internal public relations. I was with the famous Peter Drucker at the 1996 Cognos Convention out in San Diego and had a chance to ask him some questions.   Why can’t we get everyone to want to have their data in one location so we can get rid of all of these disparate spreadsheets?   “In the old days, man fought with swords, daggers, clubs, and ultimately, guns.   We are carnivores and that will remain.  Today, we fight with information.  We hide it, disguise it, hoard it, and mislead with it.   It’s our contemporary personal weapon of force.”  Based on some of the latest stories coming off of Wall Street, the CDO crisis, the Mortgage lending crisis, and the insider trader diabolical, and certainly the many Ponzi schemes that have ruined many a retirement savings plan, I have to agree with what Dr. Drucker said.  At the same time, I truly believe in the good of mankind, if the IT and Business groups have strong leadership, an active business strategy, and a general knowledge that if the team is rowing all at once you can accomplish more than if you are not, then the general support of a Business Intelligence platform will be a positive enabler for the company’s well-being.

There are probably 10 more ideas supporting a Business Intelligence Partnership with IT and the Business.  I hope that these Telltales stimulate you to advance your partnership!  Good Luck!

Written by John Bostick · Filed Under Business & Leadership, Business Intelligence | 5 Comments 

The VLOOKUP Hookup

December 22, 2009

Companies invest large amounts of money, time, and other resources acquiring and implementing reporting and analysis software.  I’ve seen organizations invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in projects and fail to realize a decent return on their investments.  The point of this series of posts is to educate you about the reporting and analysis capabilities of a tool your organization probably already owns: Microsoft Excel.

In this series of posts, I will discuss a number of these capabilities and will give some concrete examples of how to utilize them.

I will be using Excel 2007 for these examples.  Much of this functionality is also available in Excel 2005, it’s just not as easy to use and does not have some of the more advanced features.

Getting the Data
The first step in any effort is to get some data into Excel.  We’ll start out using a simple static list.  You probably already use lists like this regularly.  If you don’t utilize Excel in this way today, think of the reports that you work with from the various systems that you run your organization with.  In most cases, you could probably either copy andhttp://thefuturevalueofbusiness.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=745&message=6 paste or import these reports into Excel to get some data to work with.

In future posts, we’ll cover a much more powerful method of acquiring data by connecting to external databases from within Excel.  For now though, we’ll stick with this simple example.

I’ll be working with the sample database that comes with Microsoft’s SQL Server database software.  This sample database contains information about a fictitious company called Adventure Works.  Below, you can see that I have an extract of order information that I’ve pasted into Excel.

This is the most common manner in which people utilize Excel for reporting purposes: simple lists of data pasted or imported from other sources.  In most situations, this data comes from existing reports or queries.  My example above is a very simple query…you can see that we don’t even have names or descriptions for most of the data.  For example, Column F is showing us the Product ID instead of the Product Name.

The best way to solve this problem is to have the author of the report or query modify it to include the Product Name in addition to the Product ID.  Let’s imagine that this is not a realistic option though; there is a way that we can solve this problem using an extremely powerful Excel formula called VLOOKUP.

Using VLOOKUP

To expand on our situation above, let’s imagine that I have a second worksheet in my Excel workbook.  I have an image of this second sheet below.

The Product ID in column A corresponds to the Product ID in column F on the Orders List.  We are going to use VLOOKUP to take the Product ID in the orders list and lookup the Product Name in the product list.

To make the formulas a little more understandable, I am going to rename the Sheet with the order list “Orders” and I am going to rename the Sheet with the products list “Products”.

On the “Orders” sheet, let’s insert a column immediately to the right of the Product ID.  We’ll label it “Product Desc” in Row 1.  In Row 2, we’ll enter the VLOOKUP formula:

=VLOOKUP(F2,Products!A:B,2,FALSE)

The parameters (the information between the parentheses) tell Excel how to lookup the value we want:

  • The first parameter, “F2”, tells Excel what value we are performing the lookup for.  In this case, we are looking up the Product ID.
  • The second parameter, “Products!A:B”, tells Excel where to go to do the lookup.  Here I selected the first 2 entire columns on the “Products” sheet.
  • The third parameter, “2”, tells Excel to bring back the data in column 2 from the lookup list when it finds a match for the value from cell F2.  I know that’s a confusing sentence at best, but it will make sense in a moment.
  • The last parameter, “FALSE”, tells Excel that we want it to return only an exact match for the value we are looking for.  If Excel cannot find an exact match for the Product ID, it will return an error indicator.

The Results
Now, let’s take a look at the results of our formula.  The screenshot below shows what I have now.

This screenshot shows a few rows from the “Products” sheet:

Hopefully you can see how VLOOKUP works now.  Excel took the value in F2 in the “Orders” sheet, 776.  It went to the first column of the range we gave it; that range was Columns A and B of the “Products” sheet.  It scanned through that range until it found a match for 776.  It then took the value in the 2nd column of the range, column B, in the same row and returned the value in that cell (“Mountain-100 Black, 42”).

One thing I didn’t make clear before that I want to point out now.  VLOOKUP is always going to look in the first column of the lookup range for the matching value.  In our example, the lookup range was columns A and B of the “Products” sheet, so Excel looked in column A for the matching value.  There is no way to tell the formula to look anywhere other than the first column; so you either need to cut and paste the columns to get the right one first, or just change the reference so the lookup column is first.

To complete our list, we can just fill down the VLOOKUP formula in column G to the bottom of our orders list.  Now we can analyze our order data with actual Product Names instead of just Product IDs.

Summary
VLOOKUP is useful in many other situations…you can probably imagine a few other uses for it yourself.  It is very handy to use it as we did in this example though.  Even though we could have accomplished the same goal by having someone in IT modify the query or report, now you can be a little more self sufficient with your reporting needs.

In my next post, I’ll cover a few more features like filtering and date manipulation.  Ultimately, we’ll move on to Pivot Tables and External Queries which provide very powerful mechanisms for analyzing data and can compete with some features offered in expensive reporting software.

Written by TedWimmel · Filed Under Business Intelligence, Technology | 3 Comments 

I Should Have Called LÛCRUM – Episode 2

December 16, 2009

Well episode 1 was so much fun that I decided to create another episode of “I Should Have Called LÛCRUM”  In this episode we explore the problems that manually created spread sheets can create for organizations through the magic of animation.  Of course if you want to read more about the topic, you can read this post by LÛCRUM managing partner Jody Detzel.  I hope you enjoy the video, and that it tells you a little more about what we do at LÛCRUM.

If your organization is using manually created spreadsheets to manage important company data or if you are having trouble getting accurate, actionable, complete and timely information, you should contact LÛCRUM.  We specialize in helping our Clients to maximize the value of their data, and we would be delighted to help you.

Written by davidebowman · Filed Under Business & Leadership | 5 Comments 

I Should Have Called LÛCRUM

December 16, 2009

Last night my brother in law introduced me to a really cool site called xtranormal.com where you can very easily make animated videos – for free.  I wanted to test it out, and thought “why not have fun with some of the problems we solve at LÛCRUM?”  So I stayed up past my bedtime and played.  The end result – Episode 1 of “I should have called LÛCRUM.”   Not sure if there will be an episode 2.

Does this seem like a familiar scenario?  Do you ever have difficulty getting the important information you need in time to meet your needs?  Do you find yourself having to request and schedule reports, which take days or even weeks to actually arrive? Do you wish that you could immediately generate the information you need from your data without the “help” of others?  If so, you should think about contacting LÛCRUM.   In the time it takes to get those reports the current way, we could build you a data mart with dashboards, alerts, reports, and more – enabling you to make fact based decisions about the future of your business.  At LÛCRUM, we help customers to maximize the value of their data – and sometimes we even make silly cartoons to show people how we do it.

Written by davidebowman · Filed Under Business & Leadership | 14 Comments 

Just Say No!

September 14, 2009

With the difficult economy comes difficult choices.  LÛCRUM is focused on helping our customers to realize the value of their data.  This enables us to focus on what we do best, and continue to strengthen our skills in this area.  This additionally increases our success in our work, as we only offer our expertise in the areas in which we truly are world class – data oriented solutions.  This does however mean that on occasion we have to say no to our customers.  This would typically be due to the fact that we are being asked to do work that is not truly within our focus.  We have recently turned down infrastructure, pure design oriented development, and custom development requests.  This is not easy to do in a difficult economy, but frankly is a critical aspect of our business – Focusing where we EXCEL.  This has also given us the opportunity to partner with some great local firms.  KiZAN, US Digital Partners, and recently DLP Solutions.  These firms practice this focus, and it’s a pleasure working with them.  I look forward to our long term partnerships, and to continuous improvement in our focus area – helping our customers to Realize the Value of their Data.

Written by JodyDetzel · Filed Under Business & Leadership | 1 Comment 

How Many Versions of The Truth Does Your Company Have?

September 11, 2009

Years ago, while at one of my previous employers, I was part of a cross functional team of people from across the organization given the seemingly simple task of identifying our best customers.  Seems like this should have been pretty easy right?  Define what best means, run a report or two, discuss the findings and cross it off the “to-do” list.  Oh how naive I was to believe it would be so smooth.truth

In reality it took months to determine that there were in fact numerous clusters of our best customers, yet no master list that everyone could agree upon.  Marketing had its list, and so did sales, and accounting, and finance, and operations. Everyone was pulling different points of data from different systems, and thus getting radically different results.  We had multiple versions of the truth.  Sadly, we never did figure it out.  A month into the project, the company was bought out and we were pretty much all downsized out within a couple months – this actually ended up being a great thing for me.  Still, that experience has stuck with me, and taught me a valuable lesson – to be useful, data needs to present one version of the truth.

Had we been able to create this list quickly and accurately, we could have spent time trying to determine the best ways to serve our best customers.  We could have examined ways to get new customers that were similar to our best customers, convert good customers into great ones, and improved the results of the organization.  Instead we spent time and money simply trying to figure out whose list was the right list.  What a waste!

As the “marketing guy” I am not the utmost authority at LUCRUM on business intelligence and data architecture.  Still, having gone through that experience makes me genuinely appreciate the services we provide our customers.  I have been in their shoes – seeking the truth, seemingly finding it, wanting to move forward, only to have everything come to a screeching halt because of inconsistent, incomplete information.  It is a frustrating situation to be in, and I smile every time we solve such a problem for a Client.

If you are spending more time debating the truth as described by your data than you are determining what to actually do about it, you should talk to us.  We can deliver one accurate, actionable, complete, and timely version of the truth for you – saving you time, money, and a whole lot of aggravation.

Written by davidebowman · Filed Under Business Intelligence | Leave a Comment 

What is the ROI on Social Media?

June 5, 2009

I am often asked by people “What is the ROI on social media?”  To that I typically respond that the question is they are asking is flawed, and thus impossible to intelligently answer.  The paradigm is wrong.   How can you measure the return prior to making the investment?  The ROI is not on social media itself.  The return comes from what you do with social media, or more specifically what problem are you trying to use it to solve.   Did it help you solve a problem more quickly, more cost effectively, or in a new and better way?

“Social Media” is not the ends it is a means.  The question is like asking what is the ROI on a telephone system?  Well, it depends who you talk to, what you talk about, what you learn from the call and what you do about the things your conversations uncover?   Sure you can concoct ways to measure this generally, but to be useful you have to measure ROI based on the specifics of what you  do with social media, not on social media itself.

Well, what about web stats.  Can’t I simply measure increases in traffic or number of friends and use that as a gauge?  Maybe.  If the problem you are trying to solve is getting people to visit your web site, then absolutely that matters.  Yes, web stats are important.  Hits and views and pagerank and friends and followers matter.  They matter a lot.  Popularity has its advantages.  Still social media has power far beyond sheer volume.

Social media is not just about traffic and awareness, it is about closeness.  It is about tightening the relationship you have with the people that are most important to you.  Even if you choose to participate passively you can garner valuable insight just by listening.  You don’t need 5,000 friends or 10,000 followers to be able to listen and learn from myriad conversations that are taking place all across the web.  Conversations about you, your business, your competition, your industry, your suppliers, your city, your state, your elected officials, your biggest customers, your potential customers, strategic partners, etc… If you decide you want to communicate directly with people through social media, listening provides you with the ability to speak to them about what they are interested in as opposed to shouting at them about how awesome you are.  This is the nature of good conversation and ultimately conversations are full of rich data and insight.  Your ability to convert that data into clear and actionable information and to then make meaningful improvments to your product or service is paramount to your success and is the true measure of return on investment.

Suppose you are trying to drive innovation at your firm.  Social media can play a huge role in doing this, but to measure the return, you need to have tangible information on your business.  You could start by establishing a baseline for the number of truly successful & innovative ideas that your firm brought to market over the last 18 months.  Track the number of ideas,  where they came from, the time and resources it took to develop them, the time and resources it took to implement them, the speed and size of the adoption curve in the market, and the amount and type feedback your received from Clients.  You now have a baseline, from which you can construct a hypothesis.

Next, develop a strategy based on what you know to predict how social media will help you drive innovation.  Based on our data we believe that if we do x it will impact y by z.  This strategy  might include using social media to talk to your customers or your employees about what you need to do next.  Using social media tools to ask people about the problems they encounter and how you might solve them.  Listening to the discussions they have with and without you.  Using social media to identify thought leaders on the web, listening to their opinions, and engaging them in discussions.  Using social media to find out what your competition is planning to do.  Using social media to talk to prospective customers about what they might want.  Using social media to build trust, listen, and establish an ongoing channel for information.  Then take what you learn and do something with it.  As Goethe says ” to know and not to do is not to know.”   So if people tell you your product is awful, use their feedback to improve your product – then measure the ROI.  If people tell you that your employees are rude, train them to be more hospitable – then measure the ROI.

So how do you measure ROI on social media?  ROI on most good investments is something that builds in value over time.  Social media is no different.  Implemented strategically, managed properly, and utilized fully social media can deliver great value to any organization. Commit to it.  Give it time.  Then look at how social media and the knowledge it yields has helped you create meaningful change.  Measure the impact of that change.  Measure the increases or decreases in your key performance indicators.  Has social media helped you address key business problems?  How?  What was the change that resulted?  What does the data teach us?  If you listen, learn, and innovate based on the information you gather over time, the return on your investment is very likely to be lucrative.

Written by davidebowman · Filed Under Business & Leadership | 9 Comments 

Moderation

May 14, 2009

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to have been chosen to moderate a panel discussion put on Technology First in Dayton, Ohio.  The event was entitled “My Web 2.0 Story,” and featured a diverse and talented panel made up of the following professionals:

  • Alan See – Berry Network
  • Doug Ross – Western Southern
  • Tony Blankemeyer – PicsMatch
  • Joshua Smith – NCR
  • Neil Arthur – Dayton Business Journal

The panel was great – Alan is a Marketer, Doug is an IT Guru, Tony a young entrepreneur, Joshua is an HR professional, and Neil a newspaper publisher.  They provided an excellent mix of viewpoints, backgrounds, and skills.   Each panel member contributed unique ideas to the conversation, and they worked surprisingly well with one another to articulate their views.  I dropped in my two cents from time to time as well.

Common themes included transparency, service, and innovation.  There was considerable discussion around the idea of using web 2.0 as a business tool for listening – both internally to the needs of employees and externally to customers, competitors, and influencers.  Finally, just about everyone recommended that the best way to understand web 2.0 was, as Alan See put it “to get in the water and swim.”

Interestingly there was considerable discussion around the measurement of social media.  I am fascinated by this concept, and view this as an emerging area of opportunity in the technology space.  The ability to measure not just activity on the social web, but to then link it to internal metrics and measures is fascinating.   I am currently exploring this space as part of my job here at LUCRUM, so it was good to hear so many questions about it.  (I will be discussing this more in upcoming posts, but suffice it to say I am excited about it.)

Andy Hickey, with the Technology First, had the great idea of having the tables construct questions during the lunch portion of the meeting at the begining.  I then called on the tables throughout the meeting to ask questions – sort of analog web 2.0 style.  We bounced back and forth between my questions and those of the crowd – all of which were exceptional.

I made a number of new connections at the meeting and picked up some great ideas as well.  My thanks to Andy, Ann, the panel, the crowd, and everyone who made the event so much fun.

If you were there, I would love to hear your thoughts on the event.  What did you like?  What didn’t you like?  What was the best question / answer you heard?  Who was your favorite panelist?  Chicken or beef?  Please share your comments…

Written by davidebowman · Filed Under LUCRUM News, Technology | 3 Comments 

Next Page »