The Value of Slowing Down: Go Slow to Go Fast!!
February 10, 2010
I once read about a Chinese mathematician who calculated complex scientific formulas by hand using a slide rule. He lamented the rising cadre of scientists who punched formulas into calculators and computers. Although they worked more quickly, the new generation of scientists often lost sight of the concepts behind the calculations. Without this fundamental understanding, the younger scientists often failed to grasp the significance of what they were doing or apply concepts in new ways to make new discoveries or effective designs.
This story parallels an area in Information Technology called “Business Intelligence.” Business Intelligence is also known as “Data Warehousing” and “Executive Information Systems” with dash boards or digital cockpits. The IT organization provides a rich repository of data for the business knowledge workers. Providing data has become so important; in addition, the tools leveraged have become more and more rich in functionality. And yet, the number of business users truly leveraging this kind of technology-oriented business information environment lags the productivity that the organization could receive. Simple questions like: who are my best customers and why? What’s my best product and what is its margin contribution? Why is my market share in a particular geography increasing where in another market it’s declining? How can I get my business results information faster so I can be more informed on the ever-changing aspects of the market? A user says, I can make a lot of informed decisions….how can I make even more of them instead of hire more decision-makers? The business and market questions go on and on and on.
As IT professionals, we are used to being held accountable to deadlines with ever changing resources and requirements. In the world of Decision-Making, as data warehousing managers, we often are rushing to meet these same deadlines. Often the deadlines and deliverables overshadow the underlying purpose for building the data warehouse. The good thing about bad times is that they force us to slow down and painstakingly evaluate what we are doing. So, although there are dark clouds ahead, there is a silver lining in the reality of our environment in having to do “more” with “less” resources.
Here are 3 tips to consider making your Data Warehousing environment even more “ready” for business decision-makers.
- Meet with the Business Decision-Makers frequently. I am suggesting that a weekly meeting at a minimum would be beneficial in order to review their data, listen carefully to understand what data they are really using, and what data they may be leaving behind. Is the data they are leaving behind the result of not understanding how to use the data, is the data no longer relevant to their decisions, or perhaps the data is too summarized or too detailed?
- Document the business flow of the data graphically using business terms, not technology metadata definitions. Distribute the business document to all business and IT users so that everyone really knows how the data is being used in the context of business. Too often, we revert to memorizing the technical definitions and only use them. We lose the business context and as new people join the data analysis, the true business definitions are lost.
- Proactively have discussions sponsored by IT with the Business Users about the cleanliness of the data and how IT is transforming the data. Show them the techniques that you are using to cleanse the data and transform it so that there’s a common repository of data that they can use. The more the Business Users understand what you do in context of the IT problem, the more they will provide their insight into how the data is most meaningful to use.
Chinese “Business Intelligence” Proverb: If you plan for one year, plant rice. If you plan for 10 years, plant trees. If you plan for 100 years, educate mankind.
Smart Grid Reporting
February 10, 2010
I’ve been working in and around the Utility industry for the last 9 years or so. In order to have meaningful conversations with my customers and in order to create solutions that are meaningful to them I subscribe to some industry publications. One such publication is IntelligentUtility. This morning an article caught my eye. In it, Bart Thielbar discusses his mother’s reaction to receiving Smart Grid technology in her home.
For those that haven’t heard, the Smart Grid is the biggest technology investment being made by Utility IT managers. The concept is that your local energy provider will be bringing Business Intelligence into your home. You’ll have a device in say your kitchen that tells you how much electricity you are using when you run your dishwasher. It may even suggest alternate times to run your dishwasher. Ultimately it is believed that you will make better decisions on where to set your thermostat, when to run your washer and dryer and also illuminate you to how much energy is truly being consumed by that hallway chandelier. Additionally, the utility company can also start to do meter reads from their headquarters, thus eliminating meter readers…and also can increase the speed by which new service can be turned on and service can be disconnected for late payments, which will eliminate some service personnel. The idea is that it provides for tremendous cost savings for the utility and potential cost savings to the consumer if behavior is changed. (There are other benefits and pitfalls as well…too numerous to mention.)
Bart’s mother’s response when her son explained all of this to her was very simple, “Can’t we just look around the house and turn off lights that aren’t being used, adjust the thermostat or replace appliances that are less efficient?” Ah yes…having BI for the sake of BI. How many times have you seen an implementation of a dashboard or a new report that was projected to save $$ that just became a rather large paperweight or unused app? If you aren’t planning on using the information to change any behavior then why measure it in the first place?
I’ve seen countless business intelligence efforts fail simply because the users weren’t engaged to create a solution that “fit” the problem. The best BI initiatives are simple, focused, and highly customer centric. Sure the Smart Grid has a lot of benefit and cost savings for the utility, but how many customers are truly going to take those data points and make different decisions in their home? My guess…not as many as you think. As with any technology, it will be a novelty at first and used a lot the month after a high bill. Companies are recognizing this and starting to make adjustments to their new products. So rather than have a consumer look at some guages and dials and decide what to do next, your next dishwasher may be able to tap into the Smart Grid and know when to run the next load of dishes. Perhaps we’ll have a setting that says “Energy Efficient” that will read the rate structure and turn itself on at 3AM rather than run right now.
Is your BI initiative just a bunch of guages and dials? Or is it truly changing the behavior of your users and customers?
– Jodie
If you are interested in other Smart Grid discussions, this blog summarizes some new ideas out there and links to several other sites. http://knowledgeproblem.com/2009/06/30/smart-grid-device-update/
IT’s Worst Enemies
February 8, 2010
I saw an article on CIO Online this morning. Gave me a good chuckle. Thought you might appreciate it too. I know that I have met each of the “6 people” on their list and I’m sure you have too. Well worth a read if you have a few minutes today. If you don’t, here’s their top 6:
1. The Ostrich (think Exec)
2. The Penny Pincher (think CFO)
3. The Power User (think…power user)
4. The Politico (think CIO)
5. The Freeloader (think Uncle Stew)
6. You/Me/Us (duh!)
There’s even an opportunity to discover your own IT personality (there’s 8 of those…not to be confused with the 6 enemies above). My results?
“Holy split personality! The Empty Suit, The Human Roadblock, The Promiser — make up your mind already!”
Happy reading!
- Jodie
CEO Tweets Resignation
February 4, 2010
@OpenJonathan Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more
That’s the last Tweet from Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s former CEO. It was preceeded by his final blog just 1 week earlier. http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/where_life_takes_me_next
In the time of Social Media, how we get the news is not nearly as riveting as how FAST we get news. Via Facebook you get birth announcements, wedding invitations, divorce annoucements…via LinkedIn yo usee job changes and now via Twitter – resignations. All real time. Faster than you can spill the announcement to your immediate family, you can notify hundreds/thousands (or in Jonathan Schwartz’s 9107 people).
If you are a company, how do you manage this flow of communication? More importantly how do you exploit this communication and how do you track the effectiveness? I think that the next generation of BI will track social media impact to financial results and/or to customer satisfaction. Imagine if you could track the ROI of your marketing efforts! If a Marketer’s MBO could include # of tweets per day and % increase of profit and truly be tied together!! Ah…dreamy
CEO Dashboard of the future
Good luck Jonathan!
- Jodie
- Writers note: when I started writing this at 4:51PM, @openJonathan had 9107 followers. 22 minutes later (5:13PM, he now has 9,151). A quirky, unexpected message gets a following…quickly!
If I Had A Hammer…
January 14, 2010
If I had a hammer…
No not the song… There is a story that the IT people like to tell, not sure if it is true but I love it so well…sorry Jimmy B. It goes something like this.
A manufacturing company with a complex assembly line had a machine break down on them. The machine was critical in the production of their products, yet try as they might to fix it themselves, they just could not keep it running 24×7. Pridefully, the plant manager didn’t want to admit that his team couldn’t solve the problem, but he knew that soon enough the company’s product yield would be impacted and someone way above his pay grade would notice. Time to call an expert.
The following week, the expert arrives at the plant. The plant manager escorted him to the offending machine. The expert set down his briefcase and began to ask a few questions of the plant manager and the line supervisor. He then walked around the machine, climbed up the maintenance ladder looking around. Climbing back down the ladder, he asked the line supervisor if he had a hammer. The supervisor looked at him sideways and said, “well, uh, yea, I got one.” So the supervisor went to his toolbox, retrieved a well worn ball-peen hammer and handed it to the expert. The expert climbed back up the maintenance ladder and leaned over the side of the ladder to reach the broken machine. He swing the hammer down sharply with a loud “bang”. Instantly, the machine began to whir, the indicator panel on the side of the machine lit up with all green lights and production was running again!
The plant manager and line supervisor thanked the expert for his help to which the expert replied that he’d send his invoice for services later that week.
The invoice arrived on the plant manager’s desk and when he opened it the invoice contained a single line item for services.
- Repair of Machine…………………………………………………………………………………………………….$10,000.00
The plant manager was not happy. He thought to himself, “How in the world can that guy charge me ten grand for swinging a hammer?” He immediately called the expert and asked him for a detailed invoice. The expert told him he’d send out another invoice immediately. Two days later the invoice arrived. The plant manager tore open the envelope. The invoice read:
- Use of Hammer………………………………………………………………………………………………………..……….$1.00
- Knowing where to strike hammer………………………………………………………………………………$9,999.00
Isn’t this story much like business today when it comes to knowledge? Many companies are now measuring their enterprise data storage in petabytes. Yet with all that data, they still struggle to answer questions such as—Who’s my most profitable customer? Or, Who’s my most in-need customer? Or, which customer is likely to leave for my competition? How can I increase my business? Where should I focus my efforts? The answers are very likely embedded deep in the data stores of the company but the decision makers can’t get the answers they need, when they need them, how they need them, and how to apply the answers. And therefore they aren’t getting the knowledge they need. They have the “hammers” but they aren’t helping. Enter Business Intelligence. Sure, BI has been around for a long time, but it’s evolving just as today’s businesses are. In today’s world, you need more than data. You need more than information. What you need is knowledge. The fluid, meaningful, applicable evolution of data that allows you to “fix your broken machine”. BI is your answer to unlocking the knowledge you need.
If you’re asking yourself important questions to which you have no answers, might be time to call the expert.
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.
- 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?”
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
Building the BI Solution for Small IT Shops
January 8, 2010
Next Wednesday, I get an opportunity to speak with several CIOs of companies with small to mid-size IT shops (less than 20 people in IT). These CIOs have the unique challenge of maintaining day-to-day operations for their companies while balancing the demands of bringing new technologies to their organizations that will help them to gain competitive advantage. WHAT A CHALLENGE THESE FOLKS HAVE!! The same guy that keeps Exchange running is also finding ways to minimize IT spend and figuring out how to integrate a hand-held device into the shop floor, or into a salespersons hand.
My topic for next Wednesday is BI…Business Intelligence. More specifically, how do you bring data to users who may not be asking using staff that is already stretched to the limit? As I’ve discussed in prior posts, most find BI to be a big challenge that is expensive to implement and often times fails to deliver what was promised. This week I saw a small IT shop that tried to solve the data problem “quick and dirty”. They had the right concepts and brought the right tools to the party, but they were missing the final piece…making the data make sense to the user community. Essentially once the data had been aggregated it was “dumped” on the end users. They had data but it still wasn’t providing any insight.
So how do you bring BI in a cost effective, meaningful way to an organization? I look at it this way:
- Identify the end need. What do the users want to see when this is finished?
- Identify the available data. What’s available today that will help solve #1 above?
- Identify the gaps. Can the gap data “wait”? Or do we need it before we can make meaning out of #1?
- Deliver…deliver…deliver (repeat). If the users have a weekly meeting where they will review this data, they should have one new element (minimum) each week until all are presented. This gains buy in and confirms that everyone understands the end game.
This method works for both small and large organizations. It takes discipline and time, an on-going dialog between the developer and user, and most importantly a developer that understands the business challenges and can bring ideas to help solve those challenges.
- Happy Building!
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.
Sprechen sie…IT?
December 17, 2009
Tonight I was at a local grocer (that’s headquartered in Michigan). I was at the “No Limit Self-checkout” at around 9:45 PM. (I have a BUNCH of kids so I shop after bedtime…) Anyway…while I was there, they began to shut down ALL of the checkout lines except for the 12 items or less lanes. They explained to those in line that it was time for “change over” and that the lanes would be open just as soon as they were finished. Um…huh?? It’s 9:45PM. I want to go home. I don’t care why my line just got shut down…what are my other options? “Change Over” means nothing to me. I just want to check out.
The whole experience reminded me of what it’s like to be in the operational side of the business requesting services from IT. Think about the SNL sketch with Nick Burns the Help Desk guy. He speaks a language that his customers don’t understand and then treats them like they are stupid for not getting it. The customers eyes glaze over thinking, “so…um…ok… how will you fix my problem?”
Is your IT department speaking your language? If not, then how will they ever help you to solve your business problems? Chances are they don’t understand you either. Bridging the gap takes a skilled interpreter who can understand both. Your best BI architects do this and don’t try to explain ETL, Dimensional Models or ODS to you…cuz really…do you care how it works if it answers your questions and helps to make sense of your data.
Planning… blech
December 15, 2009
It’s December. If your Company hasn’t finished it’s planning process for 2010, surely you are nearly finished. What blows me away is the number of people that try to start planning before understanding what happened in the past.
“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
If you have been asked to participate in the planning process, were you provided with the stats from last year? How many new customers did you get? How did the change to your business process impact your financial performance? How did your customer demographics change in 2009 and what was the resulting impact on sales? Did lower priced products perform as well as expected in this down economy?
How well is your Business Intelligence system allowing you to answer these types of questions? Does it provide these types of answers quickly, easily and can you do-it-yourself? (Or do you have to call someone in IT?) If your 2010 planning was complicated by the lack of 2009 performance data, perhaps you need to add BI to your 2010 plan.