Therefore a great crucible and proving ground for business processes, and a great source of "real-life" business intelligence (BI). Which I'm defining as "knowledge that helps to improve business operations in credibly demonstrable and measurable ways."

In this context, a single warehouse can be a treasure trove of actionable intelligence focused on getting orders fulfilled and goods in and out the door, metaphorically and otherwise. So imagine what one could learn - and what one really needs to know - to manage East and West coast US facilities. Or to ship more than 3 million unique orders containing more than 40 million items , many with localized and personalized messaging, to thousands of locations worldwide. Then, imagine managing all of this effectively with manual, human-driven tools and processes.

Welcome to Synq Solutions, a provider of marketing, merchandising, and training solutions from literature fulfillment and campaign measurement to on-demand production and delivery of regulatory compliance documents for financial services providers. And the company that, when faced with the above challenges, decided to take a more technology-enabled approach.

Synq implemented a warehouse management system (WMS), Latitude from PathGuide Technologies. Latitude basically automates warehousing and distribution operations, from receiving and order picking to generation of manifests and management of routes and stops for delivery trucks. Latitude also provides real-time, online information about inventory and order status.

These features let Synq's warehouse managers and staff do more work more efficiently, with far fewer human-introduced mistakes and inconsistencies. The company could handle significantly more order volume almost immediately after implementing Latitude. And greater visibility into accurate, timely inventory and order information lets the company deliver better customer service, by delivering more orders on time and answering questions about orders more accurately and rapidly.

When Synq needed to improve handling of so-called promotional orders, a key element of the company's business, PathGuide worked with Synq to develop a hybrid manual-automated approach using Latitude. The combination of manual picking with automated fulfillment and inventory management let Synq improve operations related to promotional orders, without imposing onerous training requirements or costs.

Overall, since 2004, Synq executives reckon that PathGuide and Latitude have helped Synq to improve on-time order completion to 99.99%, while expanding capacity as much as five times over previous all-manual systems. Oh, and the company has improved customer satisfaction and employee productivity, while enjoying estimated cost savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. And because Latitude integrates seamlessly with Synq's enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution of choice, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Synq's getting more value out of both solutions, while positioning itself well for future growth and new BI initiatives.

What have we learned? The more you spend on making current things work and interoperate, the less you can spend on things like business intelligence. The more productivity you can inculcate throughout your value chain, from the factory, retail, and/or warehouse floor to the executive suite, the more you can take business advantage of the information generated by your business.

Also, most good systems generate and support metrics that have immediate business value, before they get integrated with larger systems. For example, a good warehouse management system tells you a lot about in-the-warehouse performance, providing ample opportunities to improve in-the-warehouse efficiencies. Anything that increases visibility of any critical element of your business value chain is a potentially significant contributor to your BI efforts.

Now, your company may not own, operate, or even interact with any warehouses. But there are still some valuable lessons at Synq for you, too. Perhaps the most important is to recognize that whether they're formally documented and enforced or now, your business and its BI efforts run on processes - and processes can always be improved. The first steps toward improvement, though, include visibility, documentation, acknowledgment, and consensus among key stakeholders. Listening to what those stakeholders and incumbent processes and results tell you, learning from that listening, and leveraging that knowledge to improve processes and supporting solutions is a pretty sure path toward a more intelligent business. As I may have said previously.

If you've got a BI success story, or even/especially a less positive experience with BI, let me know. If I can extract value from or add value to said story, I'd love to share it with those of you reading my ramblings. Thanks in advance!

That's what SQLstream, a company that just announced release 2.0 of its innovative solution, intends to help you do. The solution basically analyzes data as it streams into a business environment, using queries based on business rules and goals.

Previous approaches to this problem, including proprietary hardware and throwing lots of boxes at the problem, create their own challenges. SQLStream decided instead to apply SQL, the popular and well-understood Structured Query Language, to the problem. User-defined SQL queries continuously applied to data "on the wire," with results pushed to the information consumers as changes occur. It's basically querying data that's coming - "the future" - rather than the past.

This approach can triage the data and focus on information generating useful initial query results, instead of trying to capture everything and wade through it with analysis, as is done with most data warehouses. Also, the SQLstream approach does not remove the need for or value of a data warehouse. Where a warehouse exists, SQLstream helps to reduce volumes, and focus the warehouse on what it does well - historical analysis - while adding proactive/real-time data stream analysis features previously unavailable. And where no warehouse exists, SQLstream helps to translate high volumes of streaming data into information that can actually be used and acted upon by mere business mortals.

I've chatted with corporate management and seen a credible demo of the software. It has numerous applications, such as detection and prevention of fraudulent online transactions, for data-intensive businesses, and what business isn't data-intensive these days? It's native, standards-compliant SQL, which minimizes developer training (and, hopefully, whining). Also, the results of initial queries can help to refine and improve those very queries. Finally, queries and other application elements are reusable, to make new applications easier, faster, and more consistent to build. (There's even a Java interface that generates live code compliant with the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) application programming interface (API).)

If your enterprise has challenges related to managing and leveraging high volumes of rapidly changing information, or to getting more business value out of database and data warehouse investments, you ought to check out SQLstream 2.0. Ditto if you are, say, attempting to map enterprise information resources and their interdependencies. Or perhaps to gain insight as to how users are using those resources and the effects of that use on business and IT infrastructures. Just thinking out loud, here...

(Oh, and by the way, if you do check out or have already checked out SQLstream, let me know your experiences and thoughts, please. After all, we now already know what I think...)

In the episode's prologue, Ira talks with Will Felps, a professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, about the effects a single bad worker can have on an entire team. Felps formed teams, then infiltrated them with an operative variously instructed to act like a jerk ("I don't have any alternatives to suggest, but I know your ideas won't work!"), a slacker (who would, for example, start eating or texting friends while the team was supposed to be collaborating) or a depressive pessimist ("Who cares about what we're supposed to be working on, anyway?"). And despite the declarations of the Jackson Five - a source of guidance I had always trusted implicitly before - one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch (girl).

I'll leave it up to you to go download and listen to the entire episode podcast - it's worth the effort, and it's free. (Since if you're reading this, you probably have a job, if you find the episode entertaining, you might consider throwing a few bucks at Chicago Public Radio, so they can keep giving "This American Life" podcasts away.) But here's the best part. Professor Felps decided to do some additional research, to try to figure out how best to mitigate the negative effects of bad apples on teams. So far, he told Ira, what he's found is that the teams best equipped to overcome negativity are those with at least one member who focuses on diffusing conflict and engaging other team members - by listening, then asking questions.

This has profound implications for the intelligent business, which, I perhaps naively assume, is the ultimate goal of all business intelligence efforts. If a business can construct an maintain a business-driven, IT-enabled infrastructure that encourages and supports the ability of people to listen, then to capture, learn from, and leverage what they hear, interesting things become possible. That business can become more internally and competitively agile and responsive, and perhaps even become a more satisfying place to work and a more attractive business partner. And there's money in that to boot.

The Take-Away: If "readin' writin', and 'rithmetic" are "the three Rs," business intelligence efforts may be best driven by the three Ls - listening, learning, and leverage. Those efforts should be individually and collectively aimed at three goals - enablement of the company's ability to listen to all constituents and stakeholders, to learn from what they say, and to leverage what they learn. This approach makes business intelligence a key enabler of process improvement, across almost all business actions, transactions, and processes.

A good first step? Assess all incumbent collaboration tools, to ensure they enable your business to gather, save, and analyze information about who's using what to do what. You can use that information to improve internal collaboration, then to improve interactions with customers, partners, and prospects. You might start by asking your users what they like and don't like about the tools they use now, and the processes governing those tools. At the very least, users will appreciate knowing that someone, somewhere within the managerial labyrinth actually cares about their opinions.