BI and the NHL Playoffs
May 25, 2011 | Leave a Comment
I find that living in the DC area, one doesn’t find a whole lot of hockey fans in your everyday interactions. Most people are into baseball, football, and even soccer. But hockey – not so much — not nearly as much as in my hometown. Living here for almost 20 years now, I’ve become a Caps fan. This season was promising and the begining of the post-season even more hopeful of a run at the Stanley Cup. We know how that ended, but more on that in a moment.
When a Canadian friend of mine who happens to work for SAP Business Objects, forwarded this link to me that showcases their BI platform, I was ingtrigued. It takes full advantage of their analytics and data exploration technologies using hockey statistics. I mostly deal with higher education related data like student enrollment, retention, financial aid, and human resources. This was different and fun!
I took a look at how Washington stacked up against their second round rival Tampa Bay. Hmm…. Not such a good picture. Tampa Bay had higher average Goals For and lower Goals Against. Their offense and defense looked better by the numbers. I looked at the goalie save percentages. I compared some key individual players from each team. Everyone thought the Caps would keep winning and go to the finals. After exploring some of the data and visualizations, I wasn’t so sure of a spot in the finals. And, in fact, it didn’t happen. Sadly, the numbers seemed to support that outcome. Certainly there is more to hockey than just numbers. Passion for play, pure skill, wanting to win, and luck sometimes create amazing upsets. That’s what happened in last year’s post-season. (And seemingly in every year’s March Madness for all of you college basketball fans!)
Of course statistics don’t always tell the whole story. Lots of other variables can come into play. And often good analysis includes domain knowledge with the human element to enhance any interpretation. But I can’t help thinking that those stats didn’t lie, and the results certainly bear that out. Now with Vancouver in the Cup finals and Tampa Bay winning tonight to force a game 6, It’s time to go back and do a bit more research and exploration!
Take a look at the site. Play around. Even if you don’t know much about hockey, it’s a good way to become familiar with some of the great analysis and visualization tools available in Business Objects. Maybe you can improve your chances of winning the office Stanley Cup pool!
ASR and Howard Community College Present Keys to a Successful BI Project at SEDUG
November 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Last week ASR presented with Howard Community College to an audience of IT professionals and end-user/decision-makers at the Southeast Datatel User Group. We shared best practices and lessons learned for implementing business intelligence using the Business Objects platform and Datatel’s DataOrchestrator ODS. The presentation included a demonstration of several focused areas of analysis, including Course Success, Grade Distribution, and Student Retention. This invited questions from several in the audience who were under the impression that the Business Objects platform was intended solely for operational reporting. This could not be further from the truth. While I will go into more detail about how to make the operational data store from Datatel into a strategic data warehouse in a subsequent post, suffice to say, that it can be done. In fact, it may be necessary to obtain buy-in from end-users and give them a leg up on their reporting and analytic journey. More on this in the future. For now, please feel free to download the presentation and contact us if you have questions.
Keys to a Successful BI Implementation with Howard CC
Ready to Roll
October 16, 2010 | Leave a Comment
In the model train hobby I enjoy during my spare time, this means “take it out of the package, put it on the tracks and it is ready to go!” There’s no assembly, painting, adjusting, setup, muss or fuss. Unfortunately, getting a business intelligence solution ready for production isn’t quite so easy.
Lately, I’ve been working on a solution delivery scheduled for the end of this month. Here are a few key things we’ve been tracking with this client to ensure a smooth and successful rollout. Some may seem obvious, but it is easy to forget little details:
- Get the complete list of users who need access. Along with this list, it is important to have planned their access and security credentials. When considering groups and who should have access to what, make sure to assess both the data they should see, as well as the functionality they should be allowed to use in the BI platform.
- Test using actual user credentials setup as defined in the access plan. Everything can look like it is working great when logged in as the administrator or developer, but as we found out, simple things can be overlooked like the ability to change predefined queries or overwrite a standard report.
- Ensure there is adequate licensing. Understand the type and concurrency of the license scheme you have. Often the first couple of days will see a lot of activity from the curious users. If they have trouble logging in because of limited licensing, you may have a hard time coaxing them back to the BI system again.
- Prepare a quick start or users’s guide. As much as you might think “it’s all intuitive”, for many users new to BI, it’s not so obvious. List explicity the steps they need to take and use screen shots of the actual system with actual data so they know they are doing things correctly. There can be a lot of useful tips and tricks for navigating around reports and analyses they’ll appreciate too. It helps build confidence and buy-in to using the system.
- Validate the reports and analytics one last time. What worked a week ago or a month ago might not necessarily work today. Like the security and access plan, the report design can sometimes be affected by little things like a changover in a month or business cycle. A back end data source may not be updated as it should have been and no alert was in place to raise the flag. New data may not fit the original formatting if boundary values weren’t well understood. There are many possibilities to keep an eye on. While it is unlikley all issues will be caught, one last review is a good idea.
I am looking forward to the end of the month to see how well things go. Things should be ready to roll!
Dashboards in Minutes?
September 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Previously, I posted on a couple of higher education vendors touting their “out of the box” dashboards. Here’s another example of messaging that should make every BI project lead or CIO cringe. “Data to Dashboards in Minutes” is the byline for the Pentaho Agile BI Tour that started recently. It sounds appealing: a half day workshop to help you “deliver successful BI solutions to users more quickly and at significantly lower cost.”
But what part of the dashboard deployment process are they talking about? I doubt the half day seminar with hands on demo includes the challenging, up front, and most important part of the process. That is, to answer questions surrounding data governance, ownership, quality and integration. I also suspect it sidesteps the contentious debate that occurs during most dashboard design and deployment efforts on what metrics, goals and visual presentation should be made for the various user personas who will access the them. In my experience, every user wants their own view and metric definitions of what matters for their job responsibilities. Dashboards are notoriously difficult to create with the right level of detail and interactivity, except at the very highest levels of summary. And, those are often the least useful for real decision making.
So, I am curious as to how comprehensive the Agile BI Methodology is with respect to the people and process side of the BI equation. Ignoring this key aspect and touting ”dashboards in minutes” or “out of the box” really does a disservice to everyone involved–the end user, IT, professional services, and BI vendor communities because it sets a false expectation of what is possible. It doesn’t tell the whole story of what resources are required to get the organization where it wants to go. That leaves BI professional service companies like ASR having to do more education on the realities that go beyond just the BI technologies. The limiting factor is often the organization’s own ability to deal with the internal transformations needed to understand and manage with data.
That is the big nut to crack.
Leading for Success with your Business Intelligence Initiative: Part 4
September 3, 2010 | Leave a Comment
In my previous post Leading for Success with your Business Intelligence Initiative: Part 3, I discussed the value of increasing your understanding of the BI ecosystem and how it can enable the use of self-organizing teams. The next key to improving your BI success is maintaining the commitment of key constituents, improving your institutional communication around the BI initiative and setting the stage for your BI development teams’ success.
The C’s in Success
Communication
In my experience, there’s usually a poor communication strategy behind any really good idea that doesn’t quite get off the ground. Too often BI leaders tend to focus too long on the larger business case (ROI, institutional benefits, etc) and fizzle out on building the personal commitment, the “hearts and minds” part. What is required is continuous and focused communication with key constituents before, during and after the launch. In my experience, the success of an institutional wide BI initiative is as dependent on your political success as it is on your technical success.
To keep the institutional BI visibility high and retain the commitment of the key constituents take a cue from the masters: politicians. Political campaign platforms are based on the three C principles: (1) Crisp and Clear; (2) Context Centric; and (3) Consistent and Consistently. Every stump speech, every sound bite, every public conversation and every written message needs to be rigorously “on message,” All the BI sponsors and members of the BI development team need to follow the three C’s principles.
1. Crisp and Clear
How do you describe the BI initiative and what value will the BI initiative have for the person you are talking to? Let’s go back to that tried-and-true technique–the elevator pitch. Can you clearly describe the goal/value of the BI initiative in 30 seconds or less? When you talk to someone about the BI initiative does your description hold that person’s attention? Or do their eyes glaze over or wander across the room?
Being crisp is about informing people about the value, what you plan to accomplish for them, in as few words as possible, and using that same crisp message in written materials.
Take this Test
Find a friend who is the least likely to understand your BI initiative, and test your “message crispness” on them. Tell them what you are doing with BI in two or three sentences. Avoid industry jargon and technical terms that only people in the BI field will understand. Then ask them to repeat what they think you are doing back to you. If they don’t come back with the right answer, the message isn’t crisp and clear.
2. Context Centric for each Stakeholder type
You need to communicate the role they play and the value proposition to each Stakeholder type (executives, BI developers, end-users, etc). You need to inform stakeholders about what you are doing, why you are doing it, their role in the BI initiative and the value it has for them. People need convincing as to why they should spend their time and limited resources with you. Your story should focus on how they benefit from the BI initiative (communicated from a “what’s in it for them?” perspective).
3. Consistent and Consistently
Once you’ve nailed down your crisp message, and you’re telling your story from your stakeholder’s perspective, make sure you tell it consistently in your conversations, e-mails, in print materials, via etc.
Nothing is more disconcerting to stakeholders than hearing one story from one communications channel or individual and then hearing or reading a different version of the story from someone else or someplace else. They don’t know which version to believe. Reestablish who you are and what you are doing with every stakeholder interaction. Reinforce your story as often as possible.
In the next post we’ll explore some additional C’s to you BI development teams’ success.
Leading for Success with your Business Intelligence Initiative: Part 3
August 27, 2010 | 1 Comment
In my previous post Leading for Success with your Business Intelligence Initiative: Part 2, I discussed the value of Structuring-creating a shared vision and building an atmosphere of engagement and energy for the BI initiative. The most important aspect of Structuring is that it incorporates and defines the entire BI ecosystem (culture, goals, people, process, technology, information) that people want to be a part of and contribute to. The next key to improving your success is improving your Understanding of the ecosystem.
The U in Success
Understanding
Another good investment is taking the time to build relationships with and among the BI development team and stakeholders. Actively involving others, with a working knowledge of the BI ecosystem, in planning and design issues is critical to building institutional commitment and designing the right solution. Research shows that the bigger the issue, the more likely we are to suck it up to ourselves. While this may seem like the wise course, think about the message it sends. Either that your people aren’t capable of handling these issues or that you don’t trust them. Another implication is that they don’t gain the experience and skills they would need to eventually handle tough issues. So, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most importantly it prevents you and the BI initiative from utilizing self organizing teams-one of the other keys to BI success.
It’ll be easier for people to get behind you and support the BI initiative if they feel some direct connection to who you are and what you’re about. This doesn’t need to be personal information. What you need to concentrate on is sharing information about (a) how you see the team living up to the vision; (b) improving the depth of understanding of the BI ecosystem; (c) sharing some of the obstacles the team faces; and (d) building trust and soliciting their input. Where feasible, let them in on new developments and provide context that will help them understand the necessity for the change. In short, create the narrative of what’s happening in the larger institution and create an atmosphere of trust and open communication. If you can do this then you have an opportunity to utilize “Self-Organizing” teams. Self-Organizing teams (a) assign tasks to each other; (b) they coordinate and review each other’s work artifacts; (c) they collaborate on project activities; (d) they make project-related decisions (together); and (e) they take on another team member’s tasks when needed. Additionally, working in this way is (a) much faster; (b) communicating and coordinating activities among all the team members is more efficient and less error-prone; and (c) greatly improves synergy and knowledge transfer among team members. These are all critical factors for improving you BI success.
Even if you aren’t ready to unleash a self-organizing team, I would recommend creating a recurring forum where a workable number of employees, say six to ten, can interact personally. In addition to hearing your thoughts, they could ask questions about the institution and provide feedback about any impediments in their part of the BI solution to achieving the vision.
Leading for Success with your Business Intelligence Initiative: Part 2
August 13, 2010 | 1 Comment
This is part 2 on my thoughts on Leading for Success with your Business Intelligence Initiative. In my previous post, I stated that BI success will be improved if you can tap the creativity and commitment of your entire institution and fully engage the BI team. The remainder of this series will explore some thoughts on strategies that may help you do just that.
The ” S” in Success
Structuring and Setting the Stage
A powerful way to get and keep your stakeholders and BI team aligned is to define, and garner complete buy-in to the Nature of the BI initiative. The Nature of the BI initiative is an enrolling vision for the initiative; one that goes beyond defining what currently exists to creating a picture of what it can become and how it will improve the success of the institution. Additionally, you need different granular levels of the vision. You need to have an enterprise-wide vision to get and maintain the executive sponsorship, but you also need to paint a more detailed picture for your BI team and individual projects. Involving as many of your key stakeholders and BI development team members as possible in the visioning will create engagement and energy around the deliverables. Just remember, that everyone involved must have some skin in the game. The three key constituencies for business intelligence that you must address include the executive sponsors of your BI initiative, the principal users of the BI tools, and consumers who will benefit from it.
Defining the Nature of the BI initiative and visions is simply a picture of a desired future state. I recommend staring a discussion using the following questions:
- What will the institution look like if our BI program and projects are accomplished?
- What will be happening within our institution?
- What will we have to do to establish the “Culture of Evidence”
- What will our institutional colleagues be saying about us?
- What will be our call to arms and message be?
- How will we feel?
The most important thing is that it defines the entire ecosystem (culture, goals, people, process, technology, information) that people want to be a part of and contribute to.
Frustrated with IT But Still Wanting a BI Solution?
July 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment
The volume of structured data, contained in transaction systems generated by organizations, is at an all time high and will continue to increase. This structured data, however, now needs to be combined with the unstructured data that represents the majority of corporate data and the new social network data. More importantly, knowledge workers and decision makers want this data accessible and made available for analysis. Additionally, much of the unstructured data is already is in the hands of the departmental knowledge workers, but they lack the tools to use it.
Business Intelligence Platform selection has traditionally required the approval of two groups at once, Information Technology (IT) and the departmental knowledge workers, which has always made purchasing and implementing a business intelligence (BI) platform a tricky thing to do. Anyone reading this can probably relate to the tension you’ve observed between your IT department and departmental end-users. Trying to get consensus and agreement on a new platform, typically dead in the middle, takes time and normally leads to some sort of compromise. But the new economic conditions are forcing IT and knowledge workers to look at different approaches for BI.
The new economic realities are driving CIO’s to look at lower cost solutions that provide the additional analytical capabilities demanded by knowledge workers. See my last post for additional information. But the knowledge workers can no longer wait and their increasing frustration appears to be fueling a growing bifurcation with central IT over the nature and future of BI. Specifically, IT led/managed BI versus departmental led/managed BI. Pressured by the new economic realities, the need to cut costs, the need for more information and analytics, and the need to quickly demonstrate business value is pushing the knowledge workers to look past central IT to address their unmet needs. The perceived benefits of improved analysis and decision making are so compelling that the knowledge workers are making the choice towards SaaS/Cloud, despite the risk of creating new fragmented silos of applications and tools.
What makes SaaS/Cloud so compelling?
SaaS/Cloud BI’s key selling points, the ones that are getting the knowledge workers to open their wallets include: (a) the ability to get a BI solution with an almost total lack of IT involvement; (b) little or no upfront cap-ex expenditures for the solution; and (c) op-ex based subscription model that allows you to pay-as-you-go (subscription fee per month instead of a large annual license fee).
Is the future of BI in the Cloud? I‘d like to hear your comments.
I would like to remind our readers that this blog is not just about ASR, nor is it about any specific vendor , infrastructure or solution– it’s a forum for “us” to express thoughts and ideas about the nature and state of business intelligence (BI). I say “us” because a blog is only a one-sided conversation unless there is input from you. Keep the comments coming and make this a repository for industry awareness and better practices. Also, feel free to ask questions or let me know if there are special topics that are interest to the ASR community, and we will try to find the answers for you.
CIO’s’ Top 5 Technology and Business Priorities for 2010
July 8, 2010 | 1 Comment
Recently, Gartner released its 2010 survey of chief information officers (CIO) priorities. The survey of 1,560 CIO’s notes that “2009 was the most challenging year for CIO’s in the corporate and public sectors as they faced multiple budget cuts, delayed spending and increased demand for services with reduced resources”. Gartner also notes that “CIO’s have suffered through a difficult budget tightening period, with budgets essentially cut back to 2005 levels”, but Gartner predicts that budgets will stabilize or grow slightly this year.
Listed below are the top five technology and business priorities for 2010 in order of importance.
Top 5 Technology Priorities
- Virtualization
- Cloud computing
- Web 2.0
- Networking, voice and data communications
- Business intelligence
Top 5 Business Priorities
- Business process improvement
- Reducing enterprise costs
- Increasing the use of information/analytics
- Improving enterprise workforce effectiveness
- Attracting and retaining new customers
Collectively, the respondents indicate that there main focus is on business process improvement and increased use of information. Specifically, the use of business intelligence (BI) solutions, cloud computing and virtualization technologies. Additionally, the findings indicate that business expectations and CIO strategies appear to be in alignment.
Traditionally, technologies like virtualization and cloud computing have been used to enable organizations to get out from under a front-loaded heavy capital investment. Paradoxically, Business Intelligence solutions have traditionally required a front-loaded heavy capital investment (CAPEX) that can initially limit the agility and flexibility of both IT and the business. Additionally, given the cutbacks in organizational budgets, the only new funds available for IT investment and process improvement come from reductions in organizational costs, which are typically operational budgets (OPEX).
Gartner also notes that CIO’s are prioritizing “technologies that can be implemented quickly and without significant upfront expense, instead of investing millions of dollars to get millions in benefits, with these technologies, up front investments are measured in thousands of dollars to get those same benefits.”
Should CIO’s and the business leaders be looking at BI as a Service to resolve the paradox?
What are your thoughts?