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.
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New blog post: The Value of Slowing Down: Go Slow to Go Fast!! http://bit.ly/9Rgogq
What "Boz" says: New blog post: The Value of Slowing Down: Go Slow to Go Fast!! http://bit.ly/9Rgogq #JohnBostick