A Call To Action
July 15, 2008
One of the calls that nobody wants to get – “the ground beef you just purchased may be tainted with e. Coli”. But, isn’t it better to get that call — than find out the hard way that you shouldn’t have eaten the product? In this day of frequent product recalls, a local firm is doing a fantastic job of connecting with their customers and communicating with them.
During the recent recall during the recent 4th of July holiday, no less, a local grocer notified their customers in a variety of ways. They placed signs in stores in meat departments (but if you are in the store buying meat – chances are you may have already consumed the meat you previously purchased).
Thanks to their frequent shopper program, they were able to track purchases by customers who use the company’s loyalty card. This is normally used to track purchases to accrue fuel discounts, or receive coupons and discounts on future purchases. During the recent recall, they printed a message at the bottom of the receipt to customers whose history showed they may have purchased the recalled product (and instructed the checkout clerk to point out the notice to consumers). In other cases, they actually called customers who used the loyalty card to purchase the tainted product (what a great motivating factor for encouraging consumers to keep their card information updated!).
Obviously a phone call would be best - since there is a time dependent factor for many shoppers – who purchase and immediately use the meat they purchase – but register tape alerts are great for those who stock up and placed the meat in their freezer for later consumption. Better late than never.
Loyalty programs sometimes come under fire – “what is being done with the data?”
“Are they selling personal information?” “Why do I have to give up that information to get lower prices?”
Generally, however most retailers promise that any proprietary information is not shared and only aggregated item data is shared with their vendors. In today’s competitive environment, businesses continually strive to “focus on the customer” and make the customer “# 1” – and develop the strategies that put the customer at the center of their business. Doing so makes customer data increasingly important, with loyalty programs serving as a very effective way of capturing customer data.
Another benefit of customer loyalty programs is the ability to foster two-way communications with customers – this can be done by implementing an active customer feedback system and listening to customers. It not only provides a way to capture customers’ concerns, questions and complaints, but as described above, it can offer a great way to reach out to customers.
For now, I’m fostering two-way communications with my customers by meeting with them, and having conversations with them about how they are communicating with their customers – both internal and external. I’m learning a lot, and hopefully gaining insight into how we can best work with them to facilitate this process. Clearly “one size fits all” won’t be the right answer. By listening, and asking questions, we can make a lot of progress in jointly defining the solution. How are you communicating with your customers?
Taxonomy: It sits in the critical path of …
June 9, 2008
Where is the excitement around this issue?
It seems that “Taxonomy” was my word for the week. This is my third post about it within 7 days. It’s not that I am in love with the word, rather, it’s just pretty darn important! With any big initiative, the first thing we look to is a solid foundation for communication. Think about it, we usually address taxonomy anywhere from casual discussions to formal governance groups for many initiatives – dare I say any initiative that strives to bring real change to an organization begins with taxonomy (either consciously or subconsciously). Thinking it through, here are some of my top-of-mind game changers that require a solid taxonomy:
• Master data management. By definition this is really an enterprise taxonomy that is the official reference data for an organization.
• Metadata management. Tagging data with information is best performed only after a taxonomy is well-established. Else, with-what-shall-I-tag-it plagues the process.
• Business Intelligence. Without a proper taxonomy, how do we bring together people from diverse business perspectives together to understand data from a central and enterprise viewpoint?
• Data Management. Well, of course we can’t properly manage data without knowing where things are in a hierarchy or what context the data should exist in.
• Data Quality. Here we are really measuring data against the taxonomy; whether implicit or explicit.
• Governance. Strategic decisions are made for specific purposes and they need to rely and depend upon a socialized and accepted taxonomy.
• Data Stewardship. This is the process of holding someone accountable for making tactical decisions to implement strategic direction.
• BPM. When we look to manage business processes, they depend upon real information. So, having a taxonomy to base these data points is crucial.
• SOA. Reusing software components and exposing them at the enterprise level demands a highly accepted understanding of the organizations data. Sure, this view is exposed as a group of web services that are published in a repository that is self aware – but without a canonical data model as your underlying foundation, consistency is not reached. A canonical data model is highly correlated to a mature taxonomy.
• Strategy, Solutions and Architecture. It’s near impossible to calibrate these three without a friction free flow of communication. Let’s not talk about what should’a, could’a and would’a – but let’s focus on the business problem at hand. Having a living taxonomy that is socialized, accepted and part of our DNA is key to gaining quick momentum as we put distance between us and our competition.
These are just some quickies that I bubbled up. What other initiatives need a solid taxonomy? Thinking about taxonomy, when you look to bring real change to an organization, what happens? From my experience, there are two choices:
1. Address taxonomy early and often. Realize that there are some things that are so important that we need to establish, socialize and enforce them.
-OR-
2. Jump to build a solution. Then realizing there are terms misaligned, misused and duplicated, go back and either fix the data models (and all subsequent diagrams and code – this rarely gets done) or create a lot of code to hide these issues. When we do this, we establish a short term brittle foundation that breaks when the next change comes or we end up with a bunch of custom spaghetti that tries to tie things together but really ends with just a lot of confusion.
Bottom line
• Embrace taxonomy within your natural collaboration style. When something is unclear, pause, ask, record, check for understanding, agree on the outcome and move forward. It’s not a development phase, don’t sell it to senior management. No one cares about it. It’s an expected minimum of doing business. Add it to your culture’s DNA.
• Don’t underestimate the issues when terms are not aligned. It wrecks havoc to your foundational infrastructure and the costs (both hard and soft) can be big. Know it is there and plan for it.
• Scope your risk. If you are working within a group or team, the risk is small. Plan for it and cross it off your list as you develop it. However, if you are aligning silos or working across divisions or bringing others into alignment, or working cross-culturally, or introducing new teams, these issues can be big. Again, plan for it – put someone in charge of its care and feeding.
• Use it as a way to create excitement and ownership. Once you work together, it is always good to look for accomplishments to celebrate. Depending upon your scope, it can also be a way to generate a new level of buy-in. Manage the group right and they walk away with the justified feeling that they had part in it – that they created it and it reflects their slice of the business. Trust me here – then they will socialize it and ensure that its followed in their domain!
Now that is exciting stuff!
~ Scott Felten
Taxonomy: How can I get one of them?
June 3, 2008
“I’ll have one Taxonomy, a Diet Coke and some fries please!” Today things are fast-paced, sometimes too fast. Ready, Fire, Aim! is all too common. However, when building a taxonomy, it needs to simmer for a bit and let all the flavors come together. We are building something of substance here. So, where do we begin? Here is a little prep work to consider before you begin.
As in anything of substance, look towards your ancestors! Before beginning new journeys, look at the travels and teachings of the ancients. Once upon a time, in a land far far away, things were very expensive and the littlest of changes translated into huge dollars. The ancients lived in those lands and had to navigate through the treacherous waters of high hardware costs, outrageous communication costs, high people costs, massive lines of expensive code and hidden dependencies. In this land, things were new and every notion of business had to be created. In this time, the people who inhabited that land had to use their brains, all the time. There was no drop and drag. There were no visual approaches and pre-established templates. Things had to be thought through in great detail and time was spent on foundational issues…because if we don’t do it right from the beginning, it will be bad, very bad.
So, pull out that old book in your company and turn to that portion that equates to Leviticus – read about your Moses, who came down from the mountain with the law…what was good, what was not. Listen to those stories of old and take stock. It is said that history repeats itself. Why not leverage what’s been done and what’s been done with a rigor that I would say is not the norm of today.
Turn around right now and look at the shelf behind you. There, in the corner, you see it? There’s a book (or two) right there – yes, it’s the 3” black binder that has dust all over it. Take it down, offer a quick thanksgiving and open it slowly. Spend some time with the ancients and understand where you came from – you may just stumble upon truths so great that they make your hair white. At the very least you will walk where the great ones walked and who knows maybe you can point the way to the Promised Land!
You never know where you will find gold – roll up your sleeves and start digging around!
~ Scott Felten
Taxonomy: When you take the ‘text’ out of ‘Context’, you are left with a ‘Con’!
June 3, 2008
I have a friend who is a true genius. He has a PhD from Harvard University in Organic/Inorganic Chemistry. He also taught there for awhile. He met and married a very intelligent scientist from Mexico and they had three children. They thought that they were going to have developmental problems with their oldest - or at least that is what the doctors told them. You see, their oldest son did not speak right away. As a matter of fact, when their son was 1, then 2 then 3 years old and not speaking - they would take him to the doctors and the prognosis was the same, he was developmentally behind.
Then while he was 3 years old he spoke his first words. His mother told me this way. So, it was lunch time and ‘my son’ turned to me and said…now remember, this was his first words… “Mommy, may I have some lunch please”? She was shocked and of course very relieved. At the next doctor’s visit, she told the specialist the story. After looking at all the facts, the doctor described things as… Well, you son is very bright and a perfectionist. He was living in a multi-cultural home where both English and Spanish was spoken. Before he chose to communicate (with words), he had to fully understand the framework of grammar and its nuances. Then, he had to work through the process of selecting his base language (will it be English or Spanish).
Fast forwarding the story a few years finds ‘their son’ in first grade. Upon completion of further testing, they found that he was in the top 99.999 percentile in math - among college aged men and women.
This story is not much different than some of the issues we face each day with our clients. More times than not, each team, group, department speaks a different language. I’ll never forget the time where I was asked to develop a strategy for a recognized revenue solution - where they wanted to better align revenue, cost and time to properly manage cash flow and reporting. I was working directly for the CFO and one of the requirements was a report that grouped data as follows, she called it ‘The Region Report’:
- New Business
- East Division
- West Division
- Canada
- P&G
The solution was an education on taxonomy. As mature as this company was, they did not operate with a known taxonomy. Much like my friend’s son choosing not to speak until he fully understood what the framework was and how a taxonomy carried made the context known to both sides, I worked to help define the common taxonomy. Once we did this, we were rocking. This application became on of the strongest points in the organization, because we built a foundational canonical model around a true taxonomy that we socialized. This really became the hub of all data points and drove both master data efforts as well as metadata disciplines.
Looking back, it seems obvious and if you did your job well, this should be the case. Can you guess as to the structure in my oversimplified snippet of a real issue?
The above was decomposed to:
- Country (is a parent of region)
- Region (belongs to Country and is a parent of SVP)
- Senior Vice President (works within a Region and is the parent of a VP)
- Vice President (works for a SVP and owns one or more clients)
- Client (is owned by one or more (many to many) VPs and has a status of Type)
- Type (describes the client and consists of either ‘New’ or ‘Established’)
Also, we have the notion of a date for transactions as well as a time-based dimension for SVP, VP, Client and Type - so people, clients and type can reflect ownership movements.
It might seem painful to go through the rigor and discipline of establishing and socializing a true taxonomy, but its worth it. It’s not much different than building a house on solid rock…why rush and build things on sand. Don’t fall for a ‘Con’ - make sure your text resides within the proper context!
Happy Building,
~ Scott
Business Intelligence/Data Management Capabilities
March 31, 2008
The Beauty of the Wheel!
Or is it the ‘Magic’ of the wheel….
Communicating an idea efficiently is challenging, especially when that idea covers many IT functions that can each by themselves stand alone. In an effort to communicate our Business Intelligence and Data Management capabilities in a way that takes less than a 7 day training, we put together this graphic. Of course, the colors were selected by IT guys and not by our marketing department, but we feel that we have captured the essence of our complete capabilities within the BI/DM space - the stages and relationships of our capabilities as well as the breadth of our talent.
Internally, we call this model the FABI Wheel. Why FABI? It stands for the (Henry) Ford Approach to Business Intelligence, and was inspired by our smart guys (and gals) here at LUCRUM. This unique approach is important because it is an approach to thinking about business intelligence and data management in a way that is not driven by technology or bad habits. It is driven by the pursuit of delivering value quickly by unhiding data in a method that puts ownership in the hands of the business people. We know that BI is a journey, we have been there before and this is how we think. Let me explain…
First, the outer wheel has three sections; Strategic, Tactical and Operational. This communicates that LUCRUM has offerings in each of those areas. We have a mature strategy and can engage at these levels.
Strategic. This is the level that can set us apart from others. It is here that we help our customers set direction. If we engage here correctly, we will win a client for the long term. At this level, we are architects (helping to ‘plan the city’, where the city represents systems) - we build relationships and architect solutions here.
Tactical. This is where we are the builders. We deploy as warehouse architects and engage to carry out the plan. We are builders and implementers. Our unique collaborative and iterative approach sets apart from the rest. We focus all our energies on delivering value and doing it quickly!
Operational. This is where the results are seen. This is the 10% of the ice berg that is visible. We are deploying here, always listening and always understanding. We are working to bring the parts of the customer’s organization together - we are working as facilitators of change.
Second, the outer wheel is self-sustaining and self-connecting. It’s easy to see the transitions; but notice the transition from Operational to Strategic. Within the operational phase we are always listening and always understanding…so that we can complete the feedback loop and build ‘the next strategy’. As we deploy reports, cubes, dashboards, we are touching the area of the business that is strategic, they need the unhidden information to make the best decisions. Well, there is always that next round of unhidden information and it is here that we make relationships and bridge for the next opportunity - which naturally begins with strategy; we are either building out the strategy to the next level or developing game changing strategy with the customer. It’s how we provide extra value to our clients and mature our relationships.
Third, the inner wheel does have connections to each of the arrows both before and after. These connections are fuzzy, but real. As we operate within one arrow, we have direct opportunity to grow our business in both the next one and the previous one. For example, if we are building a warehouse, we will have visibility in to the next effort, reporting. But don’t forget the previous arrow’s opportunities ‘data integration’. If we get tasked with the data integration portion, don’t forget the previous opportunity ‘MDM and Metadata’. It’s not possible to integrate without a strategy for MDM and Metadata - how far we go with this depends upon our relationship with the customer. The magic of the inner wheel is to help us understand both where we are and where the opportunities come from (looking forwards and backwards at the same time) all to deliver value to the client so that they are successful.
Fourth, finally, putting it altogether, we are focused on getting the right information to the right people delivered the right way at the right time…so that our customers can engage their business and succeed. This is the heart of the wheel.
~Scott Felten
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