We do BI…faster
December 4, 2009
When asked, I say that I’ve been working on BI projects both accidentally and on purpose since 1993. The first Business Intelligence books were published in 1991 (Inmon) and 1996 (Kimball). TDWI, The Data Warehouse Institute, wasn’t started until 1995. So really, the Business Intelligence / Data Warehousing practices didn’t really start to become players until the mid-90’s. I consider all work that I did prior to 1998 to be “accidental BI”. Looking back, if I had understood dimensional modeling in 1994 I would have actually finished my Activity Based Costing project…but I digress.
There is a “new player” in the field of DW and his name is Dan Lindstedt. Dan’s view of DW is called The Data Vault. Endorsed by Bill Inmon (which speaks volumes), his method is a hybrid approach to the ODS and is “a hybrid approach encompassing the best of breed between 3rd normal form (3NF) and star schema. The design is flexible, scalable, consistent and adaptable to the needs of the enterprise. It is a data model that is architected specifically to meet the needs of today’s enterprise data warehouses.” Today I sat down with my good friend Jon Shirey. Jon and I first worked together in 1993. He is the true Computer Science scholar that takes a disciplined and well thought out approach to data warehousing. He is by no means a cowboy and is always the #1 guy that I go to when I run into a tough question that needs an answer. Jon turned me on to The Data Vault a few years ago when he first attended training.
I was truly impressed with the architecture of The Data Vault. To me, it seems to allow for Real Time Warehousing and improves the auditability of data. When coupled with tools like Balanced Insight Consensus® rapid BI really becomes a reality. My wheels are spinning…I need to keep processing…I’m so excited… stay tuned for updates….
Social Media Analytics
December 4, 2009
A few weeks back I had the pleasure of emceeing & presenting at SummitUp – a social media conference in Dayton, Ohio. I presented to a breakout session on the topic of social media and data analytics. The presentation focused primarily on establishing the paradigm that social media transcends individual conversations and represents rich data with can be both aggregated and analyzed to uncover deeper truths relative to areas of thought ranging from computation, innovation, emotion, and process. Much of the discussion of social media to date is centered in trust and transparency at the individual conversational level. These important discussions are rooted in understanding the mechanics of this new conversational landscape. Make no mistake, these are critical concepts to understand and embrace. Recently it seems new conversations are emerging around the concept of using data analytics to better understand the meaning of these conversations and those having them. While still in its infancy, I expect to see this discussion mature rapidly, taking center stage in the minds of many businesses in 2010.
One of the leading voices in this conversation is Avinash Kaushik, who among many other things, is the author of the newly released book Web Analytics 2.0. The book is great. It is easy to understand, even for a non-technical marketing nerd like me, and offers up some very useful information on how to better understand and measure the activity on the web to get real results. Accompanying the book, is Avinash’s blog, entitled Occam’s Razor. One of his recent posts examined the concept of social media analytics, specifically with regard to Twitter, the popular online microblogging platform.
In the post Avinash highlights four useful tools for gathering quantitative and qualitative information out of Twitter – Klout, GraphEdge, TweetPsych, and Twitter Stream Graphs. Each of these tools has different useful attributes, and hint at the emerging potential of social media analytics. I particularly like Klout, as it offers up some pretty amazing insights.
Moving forward I am interested in seeing how social data analytics will grow more robust. I imagine each of these tools having the ability to calculate multiple users simultaneously. Another interesting idea would be the ability to run these tools on followers of your brand and then sub-segment the results on numerous variables. Further, as online identities continue to aggregate with tools like Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect, it will be easier to track the conversations of individuals and groups of people across multiple platforms – providing businesses with rich internal and external insights on both a micro and macro level.
Where it really gets interesting to me (i.e. makes my head start to spin a little) is the idea of then combining this external data with internal company data. For example integrating facebook, linkedin, twitter, blogs, and other sources of external with individual customer records in a crm system. Then taking that data and running it against something like gps data, or transactional and financial data to create entirely new sources of information. The potential is amazing, and as things like mobile technology, social platforms, online transactions continue to grow, the possibilities expand with them.
My thanks to Avinash for writing both a great blog post and a great book. Both are helping me to think in new and exciting ways. I hope you will take the time to check them out as well.
What about you? What do you think about social media and data analytics? What ideas excite you? Where do you see the opportunities of the future?
When Should You?
October 16, 2009
At LÛCRUM we help our clients by using data to provide simple answers to complex business questions. We convert information into knowledge so that businesses can understand the answers to Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? How Many? and other such questions. The idea is that we create a factual basis for better decisions, as defined by those resulting in consistently superior outcomes for our Clients. Put simply, knowledge offers the power to make better choices.
As I was driving home last night listening to All Things Considered on WVXU, I was captivated by a story about a fun book that uses data to answer some interesting questions about when it is the best time to do things. The book by Mark Di Vincenzo is entitled Buy Ketchup in May and Fly at Noon, and it sets out to inform readers of the optimal time to engage in a wide range of activities – based on data. The story is a very entertaining way of looking at what we do for our business clients, although we don’t get a lot of ketchup purchasing questions.
Whether you are a data junkie or just someone interested in knowing when is the best time to defrost your freezer or study for an exam, the story is worth a look / listen. It is fascinating to see life analyzed in new and exciting ways. While we can’t make more time for ourselves, increasingly we are becoming able to make more out of the time we are given. (What we actually do with this time is fodder for another post.) Information technology is becoming more ubiquitous, more powerful, and more useful for everyday people every day. As data becomes more plentiful and more palatable, the ability to tweak our behavior and capitalize on opportunities that may otherwise not be apparent grows in both abundance and importance. What an exciting time to be alive, watching data connect and transform our world.
New Book Explores Best Times For Almost Everything : NPR
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.
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.
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.
Democratizing Data
June 25, 2009
Wired magazine has a great interview this month with America’s first ever CIO, Vivek Kundra, who has been tasked with making the vast amounts of data collected by the Federal Government available for public use. Kundra talks candidly about the need to open up this information to the people, and the power that can come from analyzing and understanding data. The project is now coming to life on the site data.gov. Sources for data include the EPA, Library of Congress, FBI, National Science Foundation…. and on and on and on, with reports ranging from peanut recall data to most wanted lists to on time reports for airlines.
Here is an excerpt from the article explaining the goal of the site:
"The goal of Kundra’s new Web site, Data.gov, is create a place where all the information is easy to find, sort, download, and manipulate. He wants to put as much data out there as possible, then sit back and let the private sector come up with great ways to use it. He envisions a future in which well-designed spreadsheets, charts, and graphs are embedded in applications for phones, Facebook, and blogs."
This quote speaks to the power of data in our world. Certainly our government has more of this raw material than anyone, and opening it up to be refined and tapped into by citizens and businesses will help to create new breakthroughs in our world. Data gives us the ability to better understand our world. Of course it often must be refined, shaped, and combined with other pieces of data to become useful information. Once information is created, we have the opportunity to see our world in new and exciting ways. it becomes the basis for informed debate, enlightened creativity, and compelling innovation.
By opening this data up to the public, the collective wisdom of the nation and even the world is being enhanced. People everywhere will have greater insight, deeper understanding, and ultimately a better definition of the truth. What to do then is a whole different debate, yet one that can also be guided by data.
The data.gov site is by no means perfect. It is definitely still a work in progress. There are broken links, some reports and files have limited formats, it is clunky and cumbersome, there are limited feeds, and there is not yet much data from individual states. Still, it appears that the site will continue to add enhancements, data sources, and useful functionality to address these issues. Even in its current imperfect state, data.gov has the potential to deliver great information.
Something else I learned from the article is that Kundra is embracing concepts like cloud computing, software as a service and open source development – placing the government further up the innovation curve than I would have guessed. It is plesantly surprising to see such things.
Mr. Kundra closes the article with a quote that I really like – "By democratizing data, the American people will be able to hold their government accountable, based on evidence rather than talk." Politics has no shortage of talk on both sides of the aisle. It is great to see that perhaps data will play a bigger role in governing our country, informing our citizens, and advancing our economy. While I would never wish for data to replace talking, I am hopeful that it provide us with more intelligent things to say.
And Data for All: Why Obama’s Geeky New CIO Wants to Put All Gov’t Info Online
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.
Shocking Statistics on Spreadsheets
June 3, 2009
A number of recent studies have shown that, among other things, up to 94% of spreadsheets used today contain errors. Read more
The Difference
February 26, 2009
How happy are your customers with your service? How profitable is your business? How many new customers did your latest promotion attract? What is most important to the 20% of your customers that drive 80% of your revenue? What if you could know all this and more right now, in real time?
Information such as this might likely drive decisions as to how you would manage the future of your business. Information such as this would help you identify the most important problems facing your business, and then to solve them accordingly.
The source of information like this probably exists within your company right now, most like in the raw state known as data. Like to a vein of gold lurking underneath the grassy surface of the earth, you could be siting on top of a mountain of wealth and not even know it. That wealth is not always readily apparent, and often, like ore, requires some refinement before value can be realized. Sometimes it must be cleansed. Sometimes external elements must be added. At the end of the process, you have something whose value to the world is obvious.
Why doesn’t everyone have great information? First you just need to know what to look for. Next you need to know where to look for it. Finally you need to know what to do once you find it. Once all of this is accomplished you can ply this asset for tremendous and previously unrealized value.
Data can live in file folders, spread sheets, data bases, email messages, web sites, etc… It surrounds us. This abundant natural resource, if mined properly, refined thoughtfully, and shaped intentionally can yield information and knowledge whose value is literally as good as gold.
This information could be the difference from having an effective service recovery problem that addresses customer concerns in real time or having countless unhappy customers telling 3,000 of their closest friends on the web how you failed to deliver. Information and action could make the difference.
This information could be the difference between pulling the plug on that seemingly unpopular product line, or realizing that the unprofitable product actually helps to sell the profitable one because it is bought in tandem. Information and action could make the difference.
This information could be the difference between guessing as to the financial health of your business or knowing with certainty if some cancer exists within your business – if not caught early will result in the death of your firm. Information and action could make the difference.
Good information, and what you choose to do with it, can make all the difference in the world.
Pandora – brought to you by LUCRUM
January 20, 2009
One of the hardest tickets in town to get is to the Social Media Breakfast. Every couple months, this event brings together some of the best and brightest people from all across the community – all of whom have an interest in social media. I managed to score tickets to the the 2nd event they held, which was back in August. Since then I have not been able to get my schedule to jive with events or have just not been quick enough on the draw to score one of the very limited seats. However, the next Social Media Breakfast is one that I just can not miss. In fact, we are so interested in being there that LUCRUM is sponsoring it.
The speaker for the next SMB is none other than Tim Westergren – founder of one of the most amazing sites I have ever visited on the internet, Pandora.com. For those who are not familiar with Pandora, it is a site that is dedicated to playing music you’ll love – and nothing else. You visit Pandora, enter in some of your favorite songs or artists, and it begins to reward you with a continuous stream of music you love. When something exceptional plays, you have the option of giving it the “thumbs up.” This lets Pandora know more about your preferences and tastes. Occasionally, it will play something you do not love so much, at which time you apply the “thumbs down.” By doing so, the site begins to learn what it is you enjoy about music at its very core, and continuously improves its ability to find music you love – old, new, popular, and obscure. Every time I have ever told someone about the site, they have been quickly enthralled by its ability to instantly mesh with their musical inclinations.
How do they accomplish this mission? Data. The good people at Pandora devised something known as the music genome project – a sort of DNA for musical compositions. The project looks at the essential building blocks of music. Each and every song contains these building block, and there are some you probably enjoy more than others. Pandora maps these building blocks to your preferences. It is frighteningly intuitive. Even better you can share your “radio stations” with other Pandora users – allowing them to check out your musical tastes. Additionally, you can buy music through the site, explore biographical information pertaining to your favorite artists, and connect with other music fans from around the world.
So why would LUCRUM be interested in sponsoring a meeting about a site that delivers great music to users? Simple, because what Pandora does is precisely what we hope to do for our Clients every day – use technology to solve a problem they have. Pandora solves my problem of not having enough time to search for new music to listen to. It listens to the information I provide, understands what I am looking for, and then seemlessly delivers great results. Pandora is an amazing example of the power represented by data.
At LUCRUM we specialize in helping our Clients make better business decisions by transforming their data into useful business information and aligning the capabilities of technology with their vision of future success. What Pandora does for individual lovers of music, we do for businesses. I am delighted that LUCRUM can be involved with bringing Mr. Westergren to town to share his story, and I hope you will join us at the Social Media Breakfast.
The event will be held on Monday, February 2nd from 7:30 am until 9:30 am at LPK’s Brand Innovation Center at 22 Garfield Place. Visit the Social Media Breakfast website for more information.