actionable information

Neil Raden on sporting analogies and IBM System S – Intelligent Enterprise

Peter James Thomas business, business analytics, business intelligence, ibm, industry commentary, technology , , , , , , ,

neil-raden

I have featured Neil Raden’s thoughts quite a few times on this blog. It is always valuable to learn from the perspectives and insights of people like Neil who have been in the industry a long time and to whom there is little new under the sun.

In his latest post, IBM System S: Not for Everyone (which appears on his Intelligent Enterprise blog), Neil raises concerns about some commentators’ expectations of this technology. If business intelligence is seen as having democratised information, then some people appear to feel that System S will do the same for real-time analysis of massive data sets.

While intrigued by the technology and particular opportunities that System S may open up, Neil is sceptical about some of the more eye-catching claims. One of these, quoted in The New York Times, relates to real-time analysis in a hospital context, with IBM’s wizardry potentially alerting medical staff to problems before they get out of hand and maybe even playing a role in diagnosis. On the prospects for this universal panacea becoming reality, Neil adroitly observes:

How many organizations have both the skill and organizational alignment to implement something so complex and controversial?

Neil says that he is less fond of sporting analogies than many bloggers (having recently posted articles relating to cricket, football [soccer], mountain biking and rock climbing, I find myself blushing somewhat at this point), but nevertheless goes on to make a very apposite comparison between professional sportsmen and women and carrying out real-time analysis professionally. Every day sports fans can appreciate the skill, commitment and talent of the professionals, but these people operate on a different plane from mere mortals. With System S Neil suggests that:

The vendor projects the image of Tiger Woods to a bunch of duffers.

I think once again we arrive at the verity that there is no silver bullet in any element of information generation (see my earlier article, Automating the business intelligence process?). Many aspects of the technology used in business intelligence are improving every year and I am sure that there are many wonderful aspects to System S. However, this doubting Thomas is as sceptical as Neil about certain of the suggested benefits of this technology. Hopefully some concrete and useful examples of its benefits will soon replace the current hype and provide bloggers with some more tangible fare to write about.
 

 
You can read an alternative perspective on System S in
Merv Adrian’s blog post about InfoSphere Streams, the commercialised part of System S.
 

 
Other articles featuring Neil Raden’s work include: Neil Raden’s thoughts on Business Analytics vs Business Intelligence and “Can You Really Manage What You Measure?” by Neil Raden.

Other articles featuring Intelligent Enterprise blog posts include: “Gartner sees a big discrepancy between BI expectations and realities” – Intelligent Enterprise and Cindi Howson at Intelligent Enterprise on using BI to beat the downturn.
 

 
Neil Raden is founder of Hired Brains, a consulting firm specializing in analytics, business Intelligence and decision management. He is also the co-author of the book “a consulting firm specializing in analytics, business Intelligence and decision management. He is also the co-author of the book Smart (Enough) Systems.
 

The confluence of BI and change management

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, change management, cultural transformation, enterprise performance management, it business alignment, management information, technology , , , , , , , , , , ,

y =x^3 + 2x^2 - x + 1

The tag-line of this blog brings together business intelligence and cultural transformation. While one driver for this is that I have led BI projects that had explicit goals of cultural transformation, I think that there is a deeper connection to be explored here.

In other articles (notably “Can You Really Manage What You Measure?” by Neil Raden and Actionable Information), I discuss my experience that BI only adds value if:

  1. The information it provides answers pertinent business questions, and
  2. The answers to these questions lead to people taking action.

This means that any successful BI implementation has to consider such messy and difficult things as changing how people behave. This is where the link with change management arises.

Now of course you can argue that change management is an indispensible discipline for any business project (my strong opinion is that any IT project is a type of business project) and this is clearly true. However the parameters within which a new transaction processing system has to operate are different. Here if a person does not use the system, then work does not get done. Either it is impossible to carry out your job without the system (maybe only the system generates the necessary documentation), or not using the system to record transactions is a breech in compliance (keeping paper copies in your drawer).

BI systems are not like this. People chose to use them because they judge that they either make their business life easier, or they help to improve their decision-making (hopefully both). If someone doesn’t want to use a BI system, then they won’t and can probably get on with other parts of their job. The reason that change management is even more important in BI projects is that the element of compliance (or even coercion) is absent. If you want people to use the system and behave differently as a result, then you need to think about how best to influence them in these directions.

I have written elsewhere about the importance of marketing, education and follow-up in these areas. It also is important to explicitly recognise that a BI practitioner needs to be fully engaged in change management if they are to be successful.

A final thought also worth considering is that, as the BI industry matures and focus turns more to making it work in a business context than the latest flashy dashboard technology, it is likely that one of the things that will differentiate the best users of BI is how well they manage the necessary and desirable change that it drives.

πυρὸς θάνατος ἀέρι γένεσις, καὶ ἀέρος θάνατος ὕδατι γένεσις

 

“Can You Really Manage What You Measure?” by Neil Raden

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, change management, cultural transformation, enterprise performance management, it business alignment, management information, technology , , , , , , , ,

beyenetwork2

I have to say that BeyeNETWORK is becoming the go to place for intelligent BI insights.

In this recent article, Neil Raden challenges the received wisdom that, if you can measure something, managing it follows as a natural corollary. This is a problem that I have seen in a number of BI implementations. It can be characterised as the Field of Dreams problem, if we build it, they will come!

One way to better align BI provision with the management of an organisation is to make sure that any BI element that you deploy is targeted at answering a specific business question. It is important that answering the question leads to action.

If the reaction to learning that sales in the Philadelphia office are down by 2% is a shrug, then not a lot has been achieved. If instead it is easy to further analyse the drivers behind this (e.g. which part of the sales funnel is suffering from a blockage?, is this a temporary blip, or a trend?, is the phenomenon centred on a specific product, or across the board?, etc.) then we begin to embed the use of information to drive decision-making in the organisation. If this leads to an informed telephone conversation with the Philly branch manager and the creation of an action plan to address the fall-off in sales, then BI is starting to add value. This gets us into the area of Actionable Information that Sarah Burnett writes about.

This is one reason why it is important that business intelligence is considered within a framework of cultural transformation; one of the main themes of this blog.
 

 

BeyeNETWORK provides viewers with access to the thought leaders in business intelligence, performance management, business integration, information quality, data warehousing and more.

Neil Raden is an “industry influencer” – followed by technology providers, consultants and even industry analysts. His skill at devising information assets and decision services from mountains of data is the result of thirty years of intensive work. He is the founder of Hired Brains, a provider of consulting and implementation services in business intelligence and analytics to many Global 2000 companies. He began his career as a casualty actuary with AIG in New York before moving into predictive modeling services, software engineering and consulting, with experience in delivering environments for decision making in fields as diverse as health care to nuclear waste management to cosmetics marketing and many others in between. He is the co-author of the book Smart (Enough) Systems and is widely published in magazines and online media. He can be reached at nraden@hiredbrains.com.
 

Actionable Information

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, enterprise performance management, it business alignment, management information, technology , , , , , , , , ,

sarah-burnett

I was browsing through Sarah Burnett’s blog and came across an article about Actionable Information. I thought that this was making a very strong point about what constitutes good BI and what doesn’t. While BI technologists can become incredibly focussed on the intricacies of warehouse design or complex ETL, it is undeniable that all of this is worthless unless it serves to answer real business questions. You can have a perfect technical information architecture and yet all of your efforts will go to waste if there is not sufficient alignment with what people actually want to report on.

This seems like a really obvious point to make, but during my career I have seen many reporting and analysis systems fail to take it into account and observed their designers consequently scratching their heads over poor usage numbers. Elsewhere I have argued that it is helpful to treat the systems (and the change related to them) like products that have to be marketed professionally. The product analogy works equally well in stating that BI needs to address the requirements of its users, else it will stay on the shelf of the systems’ super market. Sarah makes this point very well in her article and it is one that I will come back to in the future.
 

 
Sarah Burnett is a software industry analyst. Her main area of research is Business Intelligence. She am also interested in Public Sector IT and Green IT.