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

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.
 

Neil Raden’s thoughts on Business Analytics vs Business Intelligence

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Industry luminary Neil Raden, founder of Hired Brains, has weighed into the ongoing debate about Business Analytics vs Business Intelligence on his Intelligent Enterprise blog. The discussions were spawned by comments made by Jim Davis, Chief Marketing Officer of SAS, at a the recent SAS Global Forum. Neil was in the audience when Jim spoke and both his initial reaction and considered thoughts are worth reading.

Neil’s blog article is titled From ‘BI’ to ‘Business Analytics,’ It’s All Fluff.
 


 
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.

I also have featured an earlier piece that Neil wrote for BeyeNETWORK in “Can You Really Manage What You Measure?” by Neil Raden. You can find Neil’s thoughts on a wide range of technology issues in many places on the web and they are always recommended reading. 

Other Intelligent Enterprise articles referenced on this blog may be viewed here.
 

“Gartner sees a big discrepancy between BI expectations and realities” – Intelligent Enterprise

Doug Henschen
 
Doug Henschen at Intelligent Enterprise reports from the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit in Washington D.C., explaining that Gartner analysts John Van Decker and Kurt Schlegel cited five reasons why BI projects do not live up to expectations (article link here):
 

  1. No IT-Business Partnership – “We have to get away from thinking of it as a vendor-customer relationship,” said Schlegel.
  2. No Link to Corporate Strategy – BI team have to listen to the executives and develop metrics and measures that are aligned with their goals.
  3. No connection to the Process – “BI has been overtly disconnected for too long,” Schlegel proclaimed. It’s not enough to deliver the right information to the right users. You have to insert those insights into the processes and interfaces that business users live in every day.”
  4. No Governance or Too Much – It has to be just the right amount of governance. BI grew up departmentally, so it’s all too common to have many silos of BI. At the other extreme, some companies are so uptight about data standards that companies can’t get their data into the warehouse.
  5. No Skills – Business users often lack skills, chimed in Van Decker, citing the one area where the business side was said to be falling short. “Most companies have very sophisticated capabilities available that folks just aren’t taking advantage of,” he said, pointing to corporate performance management (CPM) software as a leading example.

 
I come close to the situation of words failing me when I read a list like this (though not close enough to prevent me penning an article of course). I appreciate that maybe a public seminar is not the easiest place to provide deep insights (I present a lot myself), but the commentary against each of the problem areas seems odd to me. I’m not sure that these are really the five reasons for BI continuing to disappoint in some organisations, while it continues to delight in others, but here are my thoughts on each headline.
 

  1. No IT-Business Partnership – We have to stop talking about IT and Business as if they were two parties trying to negotiate a cease-fire. IT is a business department, it carries out business projects. It would be ridiculous to say that there needs to be a Sales-Business Partnership, it should be equally so with IT. I expand on this theme in the very first article on this blog.
  2. No Link to Corporate Strategy – There should not be a link to Corporate Strategy, BI does not exist as a separate entity that requires linkage. Instead BI work should be an expression of Corporate Strategy (as should any IT project), what else is it an expression of? This is not about listening to executives (though that is important) it is about IT being part of the senior management team of an organisation and not some semi-detached entity, focussed only on the beauty of its own navel. I give some indication of how to go about ensuring that this is the case in two articles, one focussed on a European environment and one spanning four continents.
  3. No connection to the Process – I agree that embedding good BI in a coporoate culture requires effort (indeed I have written a series of articles on the subject, starting with this one), however I struggle to see how any BI team could fail to realise this and pay the area due attention. If this is truly a reason for failure, then it is because of a lack of basic project and change management skills in BI teams.
  4. No Governance or Too Much – I’m not sure that achieving the Goldilocks approach to Governance is the issue here. BI’s impact on an organisation is directly proportional to how pervasive it is. This means that silos of BI reduce value and the walls need to be knocked in. Does this have to be all in one go? of course not, there are always benefits in a balance between incremental progress and paradigm shifts. Any organisation who has gatekeepers who refuse access to the warehouse because of and overly rigid approach to data standards is going to have problems. Equally where systems are developed with little thought to the information that they provide and data is simply thrown over the wall to the BI team, this is going to destroy value. As ever, there needs to be a sensible balance struck, one that yields the greatest business benefit for the lowest cost.
  5. No Skills – “Business users often lack skills”, this seems both incredibly patronising (are only IT people smart enough to get it?) and also a poor excuse for BI teams not paying enough attention to education (see point 3. above). If business people truly lack the skills to use good BI, then they are probably unfit to be in business as the tools are pretty intuitive (if not over-engineered by an approach that is too technology-focussed). More likely, training has been poor, or the BI deliveries have failed to be tailored to answering questions that the business wants to ask.

 
In summary, I don’t have five reasons for BI failing to live up to expectations, I have one. I firmly believe that BI done well is both the easiest of IT systems to sell to people and has one of the highest paybacks of any IT initiative. BI done badly (at the design, development, implementation or follow-up stages) will fail.

The issue is basically a simple one: just how good is your BI team? If a BI implementation fails to deliver significant business value, then instead of looking for scape-goats, the BI team should purchase a mirror and start using it.
 


 
Continue reading about this area in: Some reasons why IT projects fail
 
 
Doug Henschen joined Intelligent Enterprise as Editor in 2004 and was named Editor-in-Chief in January 2007. He has specialized in covering the intersection of business intelligence, performance management, business process management and rules management technologies within enterprise applications and architectures. He previously served as Editor-in-Chief of Transform Magazine, which covered content management and business process management challenges.

I comment on another Intelligent Enterprise article, this one by Cindi Howson, here.
 

Cindi Howson at Intelligent Enterprise on using BI to beat the downturn

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Another interesting article, this time by Cindi Howson at Intelligent Enterprise. In this Cindi speaks about Four Business Intelligence Resolutions for 2009:

  1. Using BI to beat the downturn
  2. Developing a BI Strategy and Standardising
  3. Training Users, and
  4. Investing in yourself

I found some interesting parallels between Cindi’s thinking and my own. For item one, see the “BI and the Economic Crisis” category. For item two Holistic vs Incremental approaches to BI is possibly pertinent. Finally, I echo some of Cindi’s themes from item three in Education and cultural transformation.
 


 
Cindi Howson is the founder of BIScorecard, a Web site for in-depth BI product reviews. She has been using, implementing and evaluating business intelligence tools for more than 15 years. She is the author of Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App and Business Objects XI R2: The Complete Reference. She teaches for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) and is a frequent speaker at industry events.