linkedin.com

Another social media-inspired meeting

Peter James Thomas business intelligence, data warehousing, microsoft, social media , , ,

Lights, camera, action!

Back in June 2009, I wrote an article entitled A first for me. In this I described meeting up with Seth Grimes (@SethGrimes), an acknowledged expert in analytics and someone I had initially “met” via Twitter.com.

I have vastly expanded my network of international contacts through social media interactions such as these. Indeed I am slated to meet up with a few other people during November; a month in which I have a couple of slots speaking at BI/DW conferences (IRM later this week and Obis Omni towards the end of the month).

Another person that I became a virtual acquaintance of via social media is Bruna Aziza (@brunoaziza), Worldwide Strategy Lead for Business Intelligence at Microsoft. I originally “met” Bruno via LinkedIn.com and then also connected on Twitter.com. Later Bruno asked me for my thoughts on his article, Use Business Intelligence To Compete More Effectively, and I turned these into a blog post called BI and competition.

bizintelligence.tv - by Bruno Aziza of Microsoft

We have kept in touch since and last week Bruno asked me to be interviewed on the bizintelligence.tv channel that he is setting up. It was good to meet in person and I thought that we had some interesting discussions. Though I have done video and audio interviews before with organisations like IBM Cognos, Informatica, Computing Magazine and SmartDataCollective (see the foot of this article for links), these were mostly a while back and so it was interesting to be in front of a camera again.

The bizintelligence.tv format seems to be an interesting one, with key points in BI discussed in a focussed and punchy manner (not an approach that I am generally associated with) and a target audience of busy senior IT managers. As I have remarked elsewhere, it is also notable that the more foresighted of corporations are now taking social media seriously and getting quite good at engaging without any trace of hard selling; something that perhaps compromised the earlier efforts of some organisations in this area (for the avoidance of doubt, this is a general comment and not one levelled at Microsoft).

Bruno and I touched on a number of areas including, driving improvements in data quality, measuring the value of BI programmes, using historical data to justify BI investments (something that I am overdue writing about – UPDATE: now remedied here) and the cultural change aspect of BI. I am looking forward to seeing the results. Watch this space and in the meantime, take a look at some of the earlier interviews that Bruno has conducted.
 

 

Other video and audio interviews that I have recorded:

 

Independent Analysts and Social Media – a marriage made in heaven

Peter James Thomas blogging, enterprise performance management, oracle, social media, twitter ,
Oracle EPM and BI Merv Adrian - IT Market Strategies for Suppliers

I have been a regular visitor to Merv Adrian’s excellent blog since just after its inception and have got to know Merv virtually via twitter (@merv) and other channels. I recently read his article : Oracle Ups EPM Ante, which covered Oracle’s latest progress in integrating its various in-house and acquired technologies in the Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence arenas.

The article is clearly written and helpful, I recommend you take a look if these areas impinge upon you. One section caught my attention (my emphasis):

Finally, Oracle has long had a sizable base in government, and its new Hyperion Public Sector Planning and Budgeting app suite continues the integration theme, tapping its ERP apps (both Oracle E-Business Suite [EBS] and PeopleSoft ERP) for bidirectional feeds.

My current responsibilities include EPM, BI and the third Oracle ERP product, JD Edwards. I don’t work in the public sector, but was nevertheless interested in the concept of how and whether JDE fitted into the above scenario. I posted a comment and within a few hours Merv replied, having spoken to his senior Oracle contacts. The reply was from a vendor-neutral source, but based on information “straight from the horse’s mouth”. It is illuminating to ponder how I could have got a credible answer to this type of question any quicker.

To recap, my interactions with Merv are via the professional social media Holy Trinity of blogs, twitter.com and LinkedIn.com. The above is just one small example of how industry experts can leverage social media to get their message across, increase their network of influence and deliver very rapid value. I can only see these types of interactions increasing in the future. Sometimes social media can be over-hyped, but in the world of industry analysis it seems to be a marriage made in heaven.
 

 
Analyst and consultant Merv Adrian founded IT Market Strategy after three decades in the IT industry. During his tenure as Senior Vice President at Forrester Research, he was responsible for all of Forrester’s technology research, covered the software industry and launched Forrester’s well-regarded practice in Analyst Relations. Earlier, as Vice President at Giga Information Group, Merv focused on facilitating collaborative research and served as executive editor of the monthly Research Digest and weekly GigaFlash.

Prior to becoming an analyst, Merv was Senior Director, Strategic Marketing at Sybase, where he also held director positions in data warehouse marketing and analyst relations. Prior to Sybase, Merv served as a marketing manager at Information Builders, where he founded and edited a technical journal and a marketing quarterly, subsequently becoming involved in corporate and product marketing and launching a formal AR role.
 

Who should be accountable for data quality?

Peter James Thomas business intelligence, change management, cultural transformation, data quality, it business alignment , , ,

The cardinality of a countable set - ex-mathematicians are allowed the occasional pun

linkedin CIO Magazine CIO Magazine forum

Asking the wrong question

Once more this post is inspired by a conversation on LinkedIn.com, this time the CIO Magazine forum and a thread entitled BI tool[s] can not deliver the expected results unless the company focuses on quality of data posted by Caroline Smith (normal caveat: you must be a member of LinkedIn.com and the group to view the actual thread).

The discussion included the predictable references to GIGO, but conversation then moved on to who has responsibility for data quality, IT or the business.

My view on how IT and The Business should be aligned

As regular readers of this column will know, I view this as an unhelpful distinction. My belief is that IT is a type of business department, with specific skills, but engaged in business work and, in this, essentially no different to say the sales department or the strategy department. Looking at the question through this prism, it becomes tautological. However, if we ignore my peccadillo about this issue, we could instead ask whether responsibility for data quality should reside in IT or not-IT (I will manfully resist the temptation to write ~IT or indeed IT’); with such a change, I accept that this is now a reasonable question.
 
 
Answering a modified version of the question

In information technology, telecommunications, and related fields, handshaking is an automated process of negotiation that dynamically sets parameters of a communications channel established between two entities before normal communication over the channel begins. It follows the physical establishment of the channel and precedes normal information transfer.

My basic answer is that both groups will bring specific skills to the party and a partnership approach is the one that is most likely to end in success. There are however some strong arguments for IT playing a pivotal role and my aim is to expand on these in the rest of this article.

The four pillars of improved data quality

Before I enumerate these, one thing that I think is very important is that data quality is seen as a broad issue that requires a broad approach to remedy it. I laid out what I see as the four pillars of improving data quality in an earlier post: Using BI to drive improvements in data quality. This previous article goes into much more detail about the elements of a successful data quality improvement programme and its title provides a big clue as to what I see as the fourth pillar. More on this later.
 
 
1. The change management angle

Again, as with virtually all IT projects, the aim of a data quality initiative is to drive different behaviours. This means that change management skills are just as important in these types projects as in the business intelligence work that they complement. This is a factor to consider when taking decisions about who takes the lead in looking to improve data quality; who amongst the available resources have established and honed change management skills? The best IT departments will have a number of individuals who fit this bill, if not-IT has them as well, then the organisation is spoilt for choice.
 
 
2. The pan-organisational angle

Elsewhere I have argued that BI adds greatest value when it is all-pervasive. The same observations apply to data quality. If we assume that an organisation has a number of divisions, each with their own systems (due to the nature of their business and maybe also history), but also maybe sharing some enterprise applications. While it would undeniably be beneficial for Division A to get their customer files in order, it would be of even greater value if all divisions did this at the same time and with a consistent purpose. This would allow the dealings of Customer X across all parts of the business to be calculated and analysed. It could also drive cross-selling opportunities in particular market segments.

While it is likely that a number of corporate staff of different sorts will have a very good understanding about the high-level operations of each of the divisions, it is at least probable that only IT staff (specifically those engaged in collating detailed data from each division for BI purposes) will have an in-depth understanding of how transactions and master data are stored in different ways across the enterprise. This knowledge is a by-product of running a best practice BI project and the collateral intellectual property built up can be of substantial business value.
 
 
3. The BI angle

It was this area that formed the backbone of the earlier data quality article that I referenced above. My thesis was that you could turn the good data quality => good BI relationship on its head and use the BI tool to drive data quality improvements. The key here was not to sanitise data problems, but instead to expose them, also leveraging standard BI functionality like drill through to allow people to identify what was causing an issue.

One of the most pernicious data quality issues is of the valid, but wrong entry. For example a transaction is allocated a category code of X, which is valid, but the business event demands the value Y. Sometimes it is possible to guard against this eventuality by business rules, e.g. Product A can only be sold by Business Unit W, but this will not be possible for all such data. A variant of this issue is data being entered in the wrong field. Having spent a while in the Insurance industry, it was not atypical for a policy number to be entered as a claim value for example. Sometimes there is no easy systematic way to detect this type of occurrence, but exposing issues in a well-designed BI system is one way of noticing odd figures and then – crucially – being able to determine what is causing them.
 
 
4. The IT character angle

I was searching round for a way to put this nicely and then realised that Jim Harris had done the job for me in naming his excellent Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality blog (OCDQ Blog). I’m an IT person, I may have general management experience and a reasonable understanding of many parts of business, but I remain essentially an IT person. Before that, I was a Mathematician. People in both of those lines of work tend to have a certain reputation; to put it positively, the ability to focus extremely hard on something for long periods is a common characteristic.

  Aside: for the avoidance of doubt, as I pointed out in Pigeonholing – A tragedy, the fact that someone is good at the details does not necessarily preclude them from also excelling at seeing the big picture – in fact without a grasp on the details the danger of painting a Daliesque big picture is perhaps all too real!  

Improving data quality is one of the areas where this personality trait pays dividends. I’m sure that there are some marketing people out there who have relentless attention to detail and whose middle name is “thoroughness”, however I suspect there are rather less of them than among the ranks of my IT colleagues. While leadership from the pertinent parts of not-IT is very important, a lot of the hard yards are going to be done by IT people; therefore it makes sense if they have a degree of accountability in this area.
 
 
In closing

Much like most business projects, improving data quality is going to require a cross-functional approach to achieve its goals. While you often hear the platitudinous statement that “the business must be responsible for the quality of its own data”, this ostensible truism hides the fact that one of the best ways for not-IT to improve the quality of an organisation’s data is to get IT heavily involved in all aspects of this work.

IT for its part can leverage both its role as one of the supra-business unit departments and its knowledge of how business transactions are recorded and move from one system to another to become an effective champion of data quality.
 

Jargon

Peter James Thomas business, change management, cultural transformation, it business alignment, technology , , , , , , ,

Alice consulting with an industry expert

  `As I was saying, that seems to be done right — though I haven’t time to look it over thoroughly just now — and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents –‘

`Certainly,’ said Alice.

`And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’

`I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘

`But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.

`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

`The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

`The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master — that’s all.’

Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there, by Lewis Carroll

  

Yesterday I was moved to post the above section from one of my favourite books on the LinkedIn.com Organisational Change Practitioners forum. The precise thread was entitled, Commitment during Change (as ever you need to be a member of LinkedIn.com and thr group to access the preceding links). The context was an increasingly intricate discussion about what constituted a “burning platform”; if this was a good thing to be standing on, or not; and whether such a situation was likely to lead to a positive or negative reaction on behalf of those standing on it.

My first contribution to this section of the discussion was as follows (with some light editing):

A burning platform tends to suggest panic and an imperative to do something (anything) right now. Think about it; the burning bit and… well… being on a platform. I am not sure that this is the best metaphor for instilling commitment.

Commitment may be passionate, but it is more rational, more of an active choice as opposed to, “what do I have to do to get out of here, my toes are getting hot?”

Telling someone that they are on a burning platform will certainly get their attention – they may also be willing to listen to you if you have some suggestion that might help, but this does not sound like instilling commitment in them to me; more like instilling fear.

Commitment tends to suggest a belief on behalf of the committed that what they are being asked to do is right for them and necessary for the broader organisation (despite it potentially being difficult and/or painful).

Commitment is not fleeing a burning platform – that’s just a survival instinct. Instead commitment might be exhibited by a person deciding to return to a burning platform to rescue some one.

The Alice quote came after I had posted the above thoughts, but before the post that I wanted to focus on in this article. This was about professional jargon and was as follows (again lightly edited):

When I was studying Mathematics, the use of words to mean something other than their ordinary meaning became second nature. The uninitiated would never have guessed the recherché meanings we ascribed to everyday words such as “ring”, “field” or “group”.

Early in my IT career I went over to the dark side, quoting impenetrable acronyms with the best of them. However as my role became more part of the business, I had something of an epiphany. I realised that people were not really that impressed by jargon, that they were more likely to assume (sometimes correctly) that the jargon-user was trying to cover something up or sound clever, and that maybe there was a better way.

Nowadays I am sometimes guilty of using complicated English, but I hope that it is mostly just English (as opposed to English 2.0 – now with even more terminology and even less meaning). I will crave your indulgence about the bit of French above of course :-o.

I think that jargon is both useful and inescapable when communicating efficiently with fellow professionals in a field (no not the Maths meaning of “field”); in all other cases it is mostly a hindrance to being understood.

Now I am sure that an assidious reader would have no problem whatsoever in finding counter-examples to my call for plain-speaking about IT; they are probably sprinkled liberally throughout this blog. Maybe this is a case of doing what I say, rather than what I do. However, it is interesting the number of commentators who have suggested that it would help IT professionals to increase their standing with their colleagues if they dropped the technical jargon and learned to speak more like a business person (e.g. see my comments on Ilya Bogorad’s article about Talking Business).

While getting business people to terminate their love affair with their own version of jargon might be wishful thinking, it is pleasing to go beyond Ilya’s recommendation and contemplate a world where a spade is called a spade and not a terrain relocation appliance.

Sadly it is all too often the case that the number of words used in a business context is inversely proportional to the quantum of meaning that they convey. Perhaps it is time for professionals in all walks of life to take a lead from Humpty Dumpty and begin to better assert their mastery of vocabulary.