New Frontiers in Business Intelligence

Keeping the numbers simple and making them work in business

2011-12-28T15:36:19Z

As anyone who has run a small business will tell you, the secret to success is managing cash and managing it well! But how do you get to good cash management? Greg Crabtree writes about these secrets in a short but very useful and informative book - Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!. Greg writes about the four secrets of making a small business financially successful:

--Calculating and paying yourself an owner's salary without fail.

--Keeping pre-tax profits above 10%.

--Making sure that the labor you hire is productive enough to justify their numbers.

--Managing the four core cash-flow forces: taxes, debt, core capital and distributions.

Greg raises and discusses some very important points in this book regarding these topics (along with others about reporting numbers, etc.). Many small businesses are run on blind trust and faith.The numbers may be telling you a different story and you may not be listening to them properly--especially in terms of making sure that the numbers add up enough to justify paying yourself a decent salary and ensuring that the people you hire are justified in being there.

Sweat equity is great if the payoff is certain in the future and large enough to justify all the sacrifices you make. Greg is not against it, but once you take investment money from others, you will have to make sure that everybody's time and effort, including yours, is rewarded appropriately. Taking too much money away from investments to pay yourself is not fair to your investors, but not taking any is not fair to yourself.

The levers of taxes, debt, capital and distributions are critical to managing cash since you could run out of cash even if you are profitable on the books. Greg does a terrific job identifying and talking about numbers in a business. Passion is good and necessary, but, unfortunately, passion doesn't pay the bills.

This is a great book that ever small business owners should read and have on the bookshelf.

Ah, take the cash in hand and waive the rest. - Edward Fitzgerald

A Systematic Approach to Creativity? It might just work!

2011-11-22T16:18:07Z

A systematic approach to creativity? It might just work! Doesn't that sound like an oxymoron? Alicia Arnold has me convinced, though!

Having sat in countless meetings where we were supposed to brainstorm and come up with creative solutions, I have found that groups of people wander aimlessly, finally ending up solving some other totally unrelated problem.

Doesn't happen that often? It happens more often than we think! Alicia Arnold in this book "Creatively Ever After" outlines her crisp creative process she labels Creative Problem Solving Process (CPS).

She breaks the whole proces down into Identify the Goal, Wish or Challenge, Gather Data, Clarify the Problem, Generate Ideas, Develop Solutions, and Plan for Action.

Makes a lot of sense. Alicia continues with the story of Jack and Jill (the same couple who went up the hill to fetch a pail of water) and sets the process in their quest to go up the hill and fetch a pail of water. She uses the story motif throughout the book to break the steps above into finer-grain observations and actions.

Small, but very good book indeed! Would recommend it to any individual or business to set the creative problem solving efforts on a goal-oriented path.

Reminded me of the story of the Stanford Design Institute students and baby incubators in Nepal. A group of students were sent to Nepal by the Stanford Design Institute to solve the problem of premature babies dying soon after they are born. They were sent there to solve the problem of installing more preemie-incubators in Nepalese Hospitals. How they solved the problem illustrates the efficacy of Alicia's approach.

When the students got to Nepal, they found that most women had their babies born at home and not at the hospital. So even if they had baby incubators at the hospitals, they would have been useless. So the problem was redefined to one of saving the babies where they were born rather than coming up with creative uses to get more baby incubators in the hospitals.

Now most of the women did not have electricity in their homes, so the incubator needs to work without electricity. They solved the problem by coming up with an idea of a blanket that is like a sleeping bag but can be filled with hot water to keep the preemies warm--a simple solution that is not very expensive and solved the problem. It took off like a rocket and now they are manufacturing it in India and serving Nepal and lots of other similar countries. Focus on the goal, redefine the problem if necessary, identify all constraints and come up with a solution!

Just what Alicia teaches in her book. Small but great book to read by individuals and people in organizations.

No great thing is created suddenly - Epictetus

Hospital Costs, Quality and Financial Performance Intelligence - Useful for Lots of Stakeholders

2011-11-06T15:23:37Z

I had a very interesting conversation with Paul Shoemaker, CEO of American Hospital Directory (also known as ahd.com). AHD is in the business of collecting, updating and making available financial performance, quality and cost data about hospitals in the U.S.

You can also look up profiles of individual hospitals, different inpatient and outpatient services they offer, the management teams, costs for various procedures, etc.

You can compare one individual hospital with a "peer group" of hospitals, say, in the same city or state, and compare it to the national averages.

What is most interesting are some examples of what all this data is used for:

a. A hospital bed manufacturer can look up how many patient beds each hospital has and when the organization are likely to replace these with new beds.

b. Hospital administrators can compare their own financial performance and quality achievements against those of their own peer group and the national averages.

c. Insurance companies and attorneys can look up the prices these hospitals charge for various procedures for whatever purpose they need that information.

AHD is an incredible hospital data intelligence tool, if only you know what it contains and how people can use it.

It's a veritable gold mine of information for a varietry of purposes. The data is valuable because it has been sourced from various sources, cleaned up and made available in one place. Most important, it is updated as soon as information is available and so at any time you get the most up to date information.

With deductibles increasing every year, even employers and employees are getting interested in data like this because a lot of these involve out-of-pocket costs that are directly payable by the person rather than the Insurance company.

AHD charges an annual subscription for all this data and also has a few specialized applications that can take subsets of this data and present them in specialized report formats.

Trust, honesty, humility, transparency and accountability are the building blocks of a positive reputation.Trust the foundation of any relationship. - Mike Paul

Oracle Ropes in R Analytics in the Latest Offering for Big Data

2011-10-03T23:22:33Z

Some time ago, I wrote about the utility, flexibility and versatility of the R Language and R Analytics: Leveraging Language, Cluster and the Cloud for Analytics.

Today at the OpenWorld Conference, Oracle announced that it is bundling hardware, software and a storage appliance running an open source distribution of Apache Hadoop software, a new Oracle NoSQL database and an open source distribution of R for statistical analysis. The product is designed to work alongside Oracle Database 11g, its Exadata appliance and its new Exalytics appliance for business intelligence applications.

This is really big news for companies trying to make sense of unstructured data and extract some kind of statistically significant information out of it. Now they can do it with a lot of OpenSource stuff.

Information overload, especially unstructured information is a huge problem, whether you are a security agency, a financial services firm or a manufacturing company.

Homeland security and national security agencies around the globe already get petabytes of information, text, voice, etc -- all unstructured. Many describe this as looking for a needle not in a haystack, but in a haystack entirely made up of needles. At the same time, if you ignore something and it turns out to be a successful terrorist threat, you have failed.

Financial services companies also get floods of unstructured information in terms of news about new and existing products, sales of companies they are evaluating for investment or assessments of how well the companies they have invested in are doing, and more.

Oracle's offering is a very good alternative for organizations considering big-data solutions from companies such as HP or IBM. With R Analytics rolled in, they can finally get some statistical sense out of unstructured data!

Way to go, R Analytics!

Information is not knowledge. - Albert Einstein

Stopping Trainwrecks You Know are Going to Happen

2011-09-27T20:29:34Z

How often have you been on projects that you know are trainwrecks on Day 1 of the project?

Me, too. Way too many times to count.

No Wishing Required by Rob Prinzo talks about software development and implementation projects that derail and are abject failures because of reasons that were present right at the beginning of the project.

Lack of upper management committment, lack of uniformly good requirements, changing requirements, indecisiveness and many other factors that project team members see clearly from the beginning can lead to a series of minor disasters, ending with to the realization that the whole project is now one major disaster. Been there, experienced that.

Rob Prinzo talks about his methodology,"collaborative intervention," where you stop a disastrous project dead on its tracks, take stock of all issues that are preventing it from being a success, address them one by one and then, and only then, move forward the rest of the project.

Quite often we get into the rituals of the project as a matter of routine, as if a disaster, routinely implemented with routine rituals, would somehow right itself and become a success overnight. That hardly ever happens, unless basic fundamental problems are addressed solidly and once and for all.

Prinzo teaches about this methodology, but sets it in a fictional form, following an ERP implementation that has gone awry. It's an excellent book with very valuable advice and a methodology for many a small and large project. It may just prevent you from watching a project with mini-disasters turning into a major disaster right before your eyes.

Highly recommend this book!

I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity. - John D.Rockefeller.

How to use the most popular BI tool available

2011-08-26T18:27:35Z

Yes. I mean Excel spreadsheets!

That's the dirty little secret of many companies and organizations. They may have terabytes of warehouse data, tons of reports already in production and tons more in the making. Scratch the surface and you will see that they all take the data out of these, put it in an Excel spreadsheet and use it to create the reports they would use.

Bernd Held has written a really good book: Microsoft Excel Functions and Formulas.

Now this is a book worth having in every bookshelf. I have used Excel countless times and have always wondered what all those functions and formulas did while still struggling mightily to get the kinds of things done that I wanted done.

Bernd Held takes a very calm, systematic approach to explaining each of these functions and formulas, providing lots of examples for each one (for different purposes, how to use different variations of the same function, for example). The functions are organized in terms of Logical, Text, Date and Time, Statistical, Mathematical, Financial, Database and Lookup and Reference functions.

Then he provides examples of how to use formulas. This followed by a ton of real examples of people trying to use Excel formulas and functions for various purposes and this provides a real nice window into how someone could use all these features.

I have seen Excel spreadsheets being used almost like a real powerful computer program, except they have all been built by very experienced Excel power users. Formulas and Functions make Excel a very powerful tool, as many in the business intelligence community can attest to.

No matter what your product is, you are ultimately in the education business. Your customers need to be constantly educated about the many advantages of doing business with you, trained to use your products more effectively, and taught how to make never-ending improvement in their lives. -- Robert G. Allen

Leveraging Language, Cluster and the Cloud for Analytics

2011-08-10T15:33:46Z

I had the great opportunity a few days ago to learn about a fabulous open source programming language called R and a company called Revolution Analytics that helps you build, on top of R, many easy-to-use statistical analysis models and reporting.

R is a C-like language but dedicated to statistical computing. You can write a program in R to do a series of complex statistical calculations.

Revolution Analytics is a company that has built a number of pre-packaged programs in R that they call "Packages." Rather than everyone writing their own programs to do the same statistical calculations over and over again, Revolution Analytics packages do a lot of the work.

What's even more exciting is that these packages can be running on other machines in a cluster of inexpensive servers. What it enables you to do is to run large data sets through these packages on many servers at the same time and use the results.

Here is a video that teaches you some basics about what R is first:

Here Revolution Analytics shows how simply you can use of their packages to run a large data set to calculate a statistical measure, in parallel, on multiple inexpensive servers on a cluster.

Very powerful indeed!

This is a very exciting development in analytics, especially fpr those that are very involved and need analytic packages specially developed for them.

Here are some good examples of how people are using R and Revolution Analytics packages.

Here's an example of how Genomics Research is using them and another one in how a re-insurance company is using them for actuarial purposes!

With grid computing they can acquire the processing power they need when they need it and only for how long they need it to run their calculations. - Norberto Fueyo

Mobile Business Intelligence - Some New and Exciting Possibilities

2011-07-27T15:19:09Z

A few days ago I wrote another entry in this blog: Mobile Business Intelligence--Opportunities, Challenges & Solutions.

I suggested that HTML5 may be a good option to pursue since you do not need to do one app each for each of the platforms. No matter what the platform is, HTML adapts and presents a near-native interface to the user.

Apart from this, HTML5-based BI addresses some of the biggest concerns of CIOs:

a. How do I do remote wipe of sensitive data? You don't need to. There is no data on the device. Everything is only on the server.

b. How do I ensure physical device security--what if it gets lost or stolen? You don't. Disable the account and the device does not matter anymore.

c. Can I get as good an interface on an HTML5 interface as I can on a native app? Yes, you can.

Here are two companies, Geckoboard and KlipfolioBoard, which use HTML5.

Here's Geckoboard:

Here's Klipfolio:

Everything should be as simple as possible...but no simpler! - Albert Einstein

Mobile Business Intelligence - Opportunities, Challenges & Solutions

2011-07-21T18:36:36Z

The promise of mobile business intelligence has been talked about for some time.

Many companies are beginning to implement BYOM policies: Bring Your Own Mobile.

There are a number of opportunities, challenges and also solutions.

The opportunities are plenty. CXO-level people on the road can use business intelligence with highly visualized formats that can enable them to digest information quickly, especially the latest ones. If anything, business intelligence in the hands of such users, if successful, can see widespread adoption very quickly.

However, the challenges are many also--primarily, security. What data is stored locally on the mobile device? What if a person leaves behind a mobile phone or a tablet computer with sensitive data in a coffee shop and it is stolen?

Or what happens in the case of data on an employee's mobile device when that person has left the company?

More than anything, the mobile and tablet-device market is going through rapid changes and market adjustments. Many new tablet operating systems, such as the HP WebOS and BlackBerry PlayBook, are joining the already popular Apple iPad and the new big kids on the block, Android tablets.

With this many devices would a company develop an app each for each of the platform? How do you guess which platforms your employees may have on their own mobile devices?

Luckily, there are some good solutions emerging for these challenges: HTML5 for example. If you can serve Web pages in the "near-app-like" user interfaces possible with HTML5, you solve many issues in one sweep. There is nothing stored locally. Everything is served through HTML5 pages. You can change the user name or the password of an employee who is leaving and that person can no longer access sensitive data.

You may still face some pesky issues, such as local caches, but I am sure HTML5 either already has or will come up with some mechanisms to clear the cache before the browser window is shut down.

I think that the time for mobile BI is fast approaching and the opportunities and the technologies may just be beginning to jell.

The mobile Web initiative is important. Information must be made seamlessly available on any device. -- Tim Berners-Lee

New Ways to Visualize and Use Skills Intelligence

2011-07-11T18:51:10Z

I ran across a very interesting company a few days back and it had some interesting ways of showing where the skills you need are located.

I talked to Jeff Leventhal, CEO of Work Market, an integrated hosted portal that is sort of like an ERP system allowing you to find the technical and non-technical skills you need to work on projects. It takes the process end-to-end--from locating them to vetting them to hiring them and finally paying them.

It's not uncommon for people to go to various portals and individual sites and companies to get different parts of the above end-to-end process. Then you need to check out their work or talk to references and finally hire them. Once you hire them, you need to pay them and also keep track of the payments. You might be using a different service for that.

Work Market brings it all into one site with a paid subscription model. You can conduct the entire lifecycle of contracted work online. But what really interested me were some of the visualizations they have used in seeing where the skills might be.

Here are some examples:

Here's another example:

Here's one more that's interesting:

Visualize this thing that you want, see it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blueprint, and begin to build.- Robert Collier

Why is social BI just as important as regular BI?

2011-06-27T18:36:26Z

Social business intelligence is not just trolling for company and product mentions in Tweets or in Facebook. There is so much useful information available, way ahead of time, but many companies do not have a formal way of collecting and distributing it and so fail down the road in ways that could have been anticipated.

Regular BI is the analysis and dissemination of information from your data warehouses. Social BI deals with what your various departments and people in those departments will tell you, if only someone bothered to collect all that information.

How many product managers periodically have informal conversations about the quality of the products from the customer support or service departments? Go down to the warranty claims department and talk to people about what kinds of warranty claims they are seeing?

Or saunter to the legal department and chat with them about any complaints or lawsuits their products are making come the company's way?

Or talk to that remote sales person in Boondocks, Faraway State, to listen to what their prospects are saying about their products?

The information is there, actively collected but not yet distributed in proper and efficient ways.

TIBCo's Silver Spotfire solution is a produce that collects and disseminates information from social media networks.

This can be very useful. But I think that the eyes and ears of a company's employees are much more reliable and provide first-hand information more immediately than hearing about it on the public social media, especially if what is said about the company is bad. By that time, it is more a matter of damage control rather than learning from the market.

If you go back in corporate history the last fifty years, there have been countless recalls, especially of automobiles, after companies have received complaints for years and years. Companies do not react even when they are being sued! Not all lawsuits may be genuine, but closing the communication gaps between employees in different departments is a great way to create and use social BI to help prevent such issues.

It's not that the mechanisms are not available yet. Here is a great New York Times article: Companies Are Erecting In-House Social Networks.

It talks about new corporate social media tools like Yammer and Chatter that many companies have started using. This will make it very easy for people within the same company but in different departments to pass on social BI. "Hey. Here's something I heard from my prospect today....." is so easy to do with these tools.

Something to think about!

A single conversation across the table from a wise person is worth a month's study of books - Chinese Proverb

Fixing the Fifth Root Cause of Bad Data Quality - Errors in the BI Reporting Logic

2011-06-21T13:40:52Z

Some time ago I wrote another blog entry - Five Root Causes of Bad Data Quality in Business Intelligence.

The fifth root cause of bad data quality is errors in the BI reporting logic.

In the ideal world, enterprises have ONE SINGLE BI ARCHITECT and PROGRAMMER who has been there for ages, knows the business inside out, knows the data-reporting requirements inside out, has designed the data warehouse from scratch, and has designed the reports themselves all on his own, satisfying perfectly the needs of his BI users.

But we are not in the ideal world, are we?

Just ask people developing BI reports in a company what the definition of a customer or a client is. From every one of those, you will get a different answer, and some may even have more than one definition.

Many times, bad data quality may not be in the data itself, but how it is interpreted and reported.

There are so many ways that data can be interpreted and reported by different people within the company that quite often what is perceived as bad data quality may be bad data interpretations.

Typically, BI reporting evolves over a long period of time, maybe 10+ years in some instances. The original business groups and the original IT folks that designed the data warehouse have moved on and a second or third generation of business owners and programmers may be in place now. Do they understand how the data was structured, has evolved, and how it is interpreted now?

This problem can be minimized in a number of ways:

a. Extensive Documentation: Archiving and preserving all old discussions and designs leading up to the present day data warehouse is crucial for passing on somewhat precise definitions of what was done before.

b. Data and Information Dictionaries: A centralized data and information dictionary is crucial for maintaining a common understanding among all stakeholders, especially when they are changing over a period of time.

c. Periodic Review of Terms, Data and Information Directories: Do we still mean what we meant something to mean some time ago? Are we all on the same page with respect to what the data means?

Bad data quality may be a false negative when the data is correct but our definitions for BI reporting are wrong. Chasing our own tails can be avoided if this can be explored and eliminated by chasing after bad data quality and fixing it.

Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy, it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things - Anonymous

'Reboot Your Life' to make it more interesting

2011-06-14T13:02:03Z

This week, I thought I would take a sabbatical from covering business intelligence to write about a very good book I read recently--about sabbticals.

"Reboot your Life" is one of those books that comes in handy when you are in your thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and now, with the work life of everyone being streteched as far as you can see, maybe in the seventies and eighties also!

Taking a break from what you do every day and doing something different to recharge yourself, your brain and coming back all energized to do the same things better or something else--this is not something that is a luxury anymore, but a necessity.

This book explains very well why you need to take a break, preparing ahead of time what you will be doing (or not doing!) when you do so, as well as preparing those around you for you doing something different, doing it, and then coming back and reintegrating yourself into your usual run of things.

None of those steps can be skipped. When you have been doing the same thing for years and years and then do something else, those around you need to adjust more than you do. How true this is, as anyone who has stayed home for any extended period of time between jobs or for health reasons knows full well. How many marriages have fallen apart because one of the spouses retired and the other one cannot stand the puttering, free, cranky spouse anymore?

The best chapters are those that discuss re-entry and thinking hard about whether you want to come back and do the same thing again after a sabbatical. Most vocations and jobs are just those--a way of making a living, although at the time, we imagine them to be much more. After a sabbatical, you can come back and start doing something else with even more vigor and interest. When you are learning something new and trying to do well in it, life suddenly perks up.

This book is a gem and a must-have in any professional's library.

The Coming On-slaught of Business Intelligence on Tablet Computers!

2011-06-06T19:12:26Z

Earlier in March of this year, I wrote about How and Why Tablets will Revolutionize BI.

Now there are more articles about how it is actually spreading, like this one - Tablets 'Secret Weapon' for Getting Executives to Back BI.

There are a number of interesting themes going on here - the first of which are the words "to back BI". It is true that C-Level and top executives always ask for all kinds of reports, KPIs, and Dashboards but never use them for the most part. Probably beyond the first day of checking them out on a laptop or desktop through a browser, they are not handy enough!

Business Intelligence in the hands of top managers needs to be always available, simple and easy enough to see at a high level and comprehensive enough to drill down to lower levels to figure out root causes or even to unearth "hidden intelligence" (simple example - Average of two performances of two entities - one Very Good and one Very Bad is "Average"! - you will not know this until you drill down to constituent elements).

Now many more things are happening that are putting in bright focus, the future of tablets in Business Intelligence. The devices themselves are getting lighter and less expensive everyday and more capable.

The Android Operating System is racing to capture more and more market share and will soon become very viable for many enterprise applications.

In any case, between the iPad and Android Tablets, there will be many more users and those who use it for BI.

Tablets simply have a very good form factor and usability quotient for a colorful, graphic oriented user interface.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Fixing the Fourth Root Cause of Bad Data Quality - Inadequate Training on Software Systems

2011-05-31T20:59:21Z

Sometime ago I wrote in another blog entry - Five Root Causes of Bad Data Quality in Business Intelligence.

The fourth root cause of Bad Data Quality is inadequate training on software systems!

Many software systems suffer from inadequate buy-ins from end-users in the first place. How many warehousing systems have been implemented after getting ideas and buy-ins from warehouse workers?

Most likely, they were decided by Centralized IT, Business Managers, and Analysts in that function. The people who actually do the work may have had some very spectacular ideas about doing things in simpler but better ways; may be cutting some costs in the process!

On top of this, towards the end of most implementation efforts, you run out of time and schedule and so you cut short training. There is nothing like this to create bad data that does not set the factory on fire immediately or cause any other immediately noticeable catastrophe but slowly builds up the bad data as time goes along!

Something as simple as training users to doublecheck the name and address of a customer against a Drivers License or an ID could eliminate creating two identities for the same person within your system, just because you accidentally transposed two letters!

A lot of bad data may not come as a result of something that can be fixed in the software itself but something that is part of training to make sure what you entered is good data - like cross-checking if you have spelled a name properly against an ID.

Inadequate training is one of those insidious things that has a delayed effect but nevertheless brings the value of all that money spent on creating data that can be used properly.

I hated every minute of training, but I said, "Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion. - Muhammad Ali