TDWI Conference – Day 2 Highlights

Another great day at the TDWI BI Executive Summit, covered a lot more ground today.  Here is my list of highlights and “a ha” moments:

• Many Data Warehouses only get leveraged for standard reporting, it takes a leap to start leveraging this investment for true analytics.
• An assessment of who does reporting / BI and what systems they leverage is an essential step to understand the requirements for BI at your organization.
• Just having the latest tools doesn’t ensure success in your BI program, you need to engage your business closely to get true value.
• Think hard about what will amaze and delight your end users when it comes to the customer service you provide through your BI team.
• Text Analytics is critical to gaining insight from the vast amount of unstructured data your organization has.  Lots of great applications of how to understand and take action on the feedback from your customers.
• Idea of having people in your BI team be adept at all parts of the technology stack from Database, ETL, and BI reporting (and requirements).  This helps ensure that you implement business logic in the right part of the stack.  For example, a report developer will put the logic in the report, because that is what they know.
• Business Intelligence is a process of discovery, it is worthless to document requirements at the beginning of an iteration because these requirements will and should change.  Document what you have to once you have what the customer wants.
• User happiness is the key to success, the goal of meeting the requirements as documented at the beginning of the project is meaningless.
• Everyone on your BI team needs exposure to the end customer to truly understand their needs, including your ETL developers.  Strikes me that your ETL developers probably know your organization’s data the best, and can bring this knowledge to the conversation with your customer.
• Lots of discussion on data governance / MDM in the afternoon:
• Data quality needs to be part of everything you do, it is not just about a governance model
• Idea of putting the name of the business owner on the report, they should be the ones answering questions about data quality
• Pick your battles, only focus on data quality issues that have significant impact
• You need to link data quality / governance to business process management, they are very tightly linked
• It is not really about garbage data, it is about bringing together multiple, valid formats so they can be integrated and linked.

Tomorrow wraps up the BI Executive Summit with a half day of content focused on future trends in the BI space.  Should be interesting!  Stay tuned for tomorrow’s update.

Mark

TDWI Conference – Day 1 Highlights

It was a long day at the TDWI BI Executive Summit yesterday, my head was spinning with everything that I heard.  Here are the highlights or “a ha” moments that I captured:

• Lets change the term “data acquisition” to “data provisioning”.  I work for a Telecommunications company and a big part of our business is provisioning customer equipment to turn on their services.  Love the idea of us “turning on” our business partners ability to make good decisions by providing good quality data.
• We need a “BI Review Board” that includes the front lines of our organization from the business through to IT to be involved in approving new standard reports.  This way you ensure more areas of need are met through one standard report.
• Said it before, Agile BI requires a lot of discipline to maintain quality while delivering faster, better, cheaper.  Invest time in your enterprise data architecture as this is the baseline for everything.
• Opening up the development of BI reports to your business is like sending a child out into the world for the first time.  You have to rely on the effort you put into developing your child (i.e. standards, best practices) to help guide them on their way (taking on their own development)
• Avoid the HiPPO when making business decisions (Highly Paid People with Opinions).  In the absence of good data, the HiPPO rules.
• Put more effort into asking good Questions than providing good Answers.  We need to understand the business challenge to use our data knowledge to provide information, rather than simply responding to a question.
• How many of your BI reports are forward looking vs backward looking?  If you are reporting on what happened yesterday, your program is reactive; you need to look to the future.
• We need to do more “A/B Testing”!  Experiment with a new idea on a small piece of your business, then analyze the results before rolling it out across the board.
• Big theme of decentralizing your BI team to meet the needs of specific business units.  How do we do this and keep the standards and best practices that keep your Total Cost of Ownership low.
• Unstructured data is growing exponentially faster than structured data (think social media), your BI program must take this hidden gold mine of data into account.
• Statement: If you don’t have an analytic database capability, then your competitors do!
• Visualization techniques are vital to understand patterns and value in large data sets.  The only way you can get 10,000 data points on one page and have it still be effective.
• Visualization is still mostly a science, but you need that artistic ability to make it appealing and useful.  Struck me that a background in GIS will be very valuable in this space.

There of course is a lot more, but these are the ones that stuck out.  Definitely getting a ton of value out of this conference!  Highlights from Day 2 coming later this evening.  Any comments / questions, please let me know.

Arrived at the TDWI World Conference

Just arrived in San Diego at the August 2010 TDWI World Conference.  Really looking forward to a week spent opening my mind to what is going on in the industry.

The overall theme for the conference is “Agile BI”.  Pretty much every BI article I’ve seen over the past 6 months has something to do with Agile.  Somebody must have heard me complaining about how we haven’t embraced Agile in BI!

I will be attending the BI Executive Summit, so looking forward to the presentations and especially the panel discussions.  If you are interested here is the agenda:

http://events.tdwi.org/events/san-diego-bi-executive-summit-2010/home.aspx

My intended outcomes for this conference are:

• Learning about how other organizations are getting their BI programs more Agile
• Learning about BI Competency Centres and how other organizations structure their BI teams
• Making 10 new contacts to expand my network

I will be posting updates via this blog and real time from my twitter account (http://twitter.com/markcudmore).  Would love to hear your comments via twitter, comments to this blog or by email at mark.bibrain@blogspot.com (with that many choices you have no excuse).

Mark

Level Up Your Leadership Style

One of the better books about Business intelligence that I read recently was Cindi Howson’s “Successful Business Intelligence - Secrets to Making BI a Killer App”.  One chapter focusing on the organization required for a BI program referred to the concept of Level 5 leadership.  For those of you that have read “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, you are familiar with this concept, but in short Level 5 leaders are:

“Leaders who blend personal humility with intense professional will to focus not on their personal gain, but rather, on ensuring the success of the company.”

In my experience, leaders of BI organizations have a huge number of stakeholders across different areas of the business.  It constantly amazes me how many people I know across the organization due to the interactions of my role and team.  When you are in this type of situation you are constantly learning and having to rely on the individuals in the business to provide their expertise to solve their BI questions.  As a leader of a BI team you must foster an environment of collaboration and partnership across many different areas of the business.  You certainly can’t do it on your own, and you need to bring together the right people to make it happen.

Building a BI program is darn hard!  It is a long and difficult journey to move from a pre-BI environment with no tools or quality data through to a fully mature environment that provides predictive capabilities and is tightly integrated with corporate performance management.  Along the way your program will meet with many challenges and hurdles to overcome.  It takes long term commitment and a vision for the future to stick with it and make it happen.

It is essential that you have the right leadership to champion your Business Intelligence efforts.  Take stock of your own leadership abilities and those of your team before you embark on your journey.

Mark

Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own

One of my favourite songs is “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own”, a signature U2-styled track.  To change the song title up a bit when thinking of BI, the title becomes “You Can Never Make It On Your Own”.  Business Intelligence is a discipline that spans many areas of IT and the business, and you need all stakeholders fully engaged in your BI program to be successful.

Due to the nature of BI architecture and applications, we are always downstream of other IT systems as they are our data source.  You must be tightly integrated with the other groups within IT managing these systems, as any changes can impact the availability and quality of your data.  For example, it is a well know fact within Data Governance programs the more you push the resolution of data quality issues back to the source systems, the more effective the solution.  BI is also a data hog, requiring large amounts of storage and processing power to analyze your organization’s data.  You need to have all the IT stakeholders invested in your BI program to ensure you have the relationships to keep your BI architecture stable.

Most importantly, BI is not an IT discipline, it is a corporate discipline.  Many BI organizations sit within IT under the accountability of the CIO, but in many other organizations this function may be centralized under Finance, Marketing or your corporate governance function.  That assumes that you are lucky enough to have a centralized BI function at all, in most organizations you will find BI scattered throughout the organization.  If we go back to the concept that this is a corporate discipline, we should be doing everything we can do encourage widespread use of common BI methodologies to maximize value.

Once you realize that you have many areas in your organization doing and supporting BI, it will become apparent that a decentralized structure is what is necessary.  To drive the maximum effectiveness you need to have some common thread pulling these groups together.  Having a competency centre type approach, where you provide common standards, access to data, and a means to collaborate are essential for success.

I will be writing a lot more about developing a competency centre to support BI over the coming months, stay tuned!

Mark

What Target Are You Aiming At?

I have been spending quite a bit of time on the KPI Library website lately.  This site originally was setup as a library of common metrics categorized by industry.  Over the past number of years this site has grown and changed to include interesting forums and expert blogs.  I highly recommend signing up for this service (it’s free) and taking a look around.

http://www.kpilibrary.com

Too often we consider metrics an end in themselves, we put all our focus on discovering what data exists, acquiring that data, building reports and dashboards, and once it is up on your company’s BI portal we think our jobs are done.  This is a criminal waste of time if this is all you do.

We must think back to the original question that prompted us to do all this work to get this metric.  A common question in my industry is “Which customers are churning out of our services the most?”  We need to at a minimum define the following before we embark on our analytical journey:

1. What results or objectives are we trying to achieve?  i.e. Improve profitability by lowering acquisition costs
2. What measures can we track to see how we stand against the objective? i.e. do we only measure disconnecting customers or do we delve deeper to understand if the churn is desirable?  Some customers you are better off not having!
3. What targets do we want to set to compare to our measures?  A measure is just flapping in the wind with nothing to relate it to.  i.e. Controllable churn target of 1.5% per month
4. What actions are we going to take based on comparing our measures to targets? i.e. Contact our customers after their initial promotion expires with a value reminder communication

This sets up your framework to measure the right performance, analyze the results, determine actions to improve performance and then to act.  Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat until you meet your objective.  The measure of success for any BI organization is that action is taken on the information you provide.

Don’t Follow the White Rabbit

There is something special ingrained in the soul of a BI practitioner.  We love to think of all the twists and turns that we can take to analyze the data we are working with.  This comes in the form of dashboards with countless dials, traffic lights and indicators, graphs with multiple series, axis and dimensions, and grids and grids of good ol’ tabular data.  All this stuff makes us very, very happy with ourselves.

Ok checkpoint, a couple issues with this approach.  First of all, all this data can detract from the very business question you are trying to answer with your analysis.  Think about it, do you know of any user that actually has the time to sit down and analyze 200 points of information on a single report?  No, we need to enable our users to make the best decision in the least amount of time.  There are likely 2 to 3 key data points that will get them there.  Yes, it is ok to show basic trends and change indicators, but for Pete’s sake keep it simple.

Secondly, the more we go with this smorgasbord approach to BI we are encouraging requirements bloat in the next BI project or iteration.  Users will simply say to myself: “I should ask for everything I think I might need just so I know I can get it if I need it.”  Why wouldn’t they think that, when that is how we have delivered BI to date?

Fight the urge to go down the rabbit hole; strive to deliver 80% of the value with 20% of the work.  How much more value could you drive for your organization if you can quickly move on to the next opportunity rather than lingering in analysis paralysis?

BI Leadership Article

It isn’t often you come across a good article that brings together developing a Business Intelligence vision and the behaviours BI leaders need to demonstrate to make this vision a reality.  Well worth a read if you are a BI leader or are just trying to understand them…8)

Creating Shared Responsibility for Success in Your Business Intelligence Team

I’m glad to see we are already doing some of this in my current organization, but there are a number of areas discussed in this article that can be improved.  The fun never ends!

P.S. Apologies for the lack of updates to this blog, good weather calls!

The BI Experience: One Size Doesn’t Fit All

The enemy of BI adoption is treating all your users the same.  Each role and person in your organization will use your BI platform differently, so you must deliver a solution that fits each individuals needs.  You should consider aspects such as tool complexity, usage of visualizations, navigation and accessibility.

Executive Users will be best served with high level dashboards, mobile access, and real time alerts.  The typical executive (an effective one anyways) doesn’t spend a great deal of time behind their computer.  When they do, they are likely short on time and are looking for the bottom line on their organization’s performance.  Dashboards are great for displaying all the relevant information on a single screen, allowing your user to have a one stop shop for when they are at their computer.  With most of an executive’s time comprising of meetings and talking with folks, having mobile access from their handheld device (BlackBerry, iPhone, etc.) will provide them with metrics where and when they need them.  Couple this with real-time alerts via email, and your Executive users will be able to leverage your BI platform according to their needs.

In contrast, front line users (Customer Service Representatives, Sales Representatives, etc.) need intelligence that is bundled in with their business processes.  To drive maximum effectiveness you want to inject Business Intelligence into the operational systems these people use every day.  This can take forms such as surfacing a Customer Lifetime Value score to assist with save strategies when a customer is calling to disconnect, or providing real time alerts into your Customer Relationship Management system when a critical order deadline has passed.  You certainly don’t want these roles that are the face to the customer wasting time flipping between their operational screens and the BI portal!

The way you provide a tailored user experience to your BI clients is critical to drive adoption towards the goal of pervasive BI.  Spend extra time and attention to this aspect when you are planning any major BI deployment and you will reap the benefits.

Related Posts:

• Icing the BI Cake with User Experience
• It Just Has to Work
• Will the BI portal last?

Icing the BI Cake with User Experience

The true power of BI is the ability to present actionable information to decision makers.  All the data quality governance, ETL excellence, and dimensional analysis will mean nothing if the business can't intuitively interact with the information through their BI tools.  You must ice the cake with an exceptional User Experience to drive the most value from your BI investments.

 

A focus on User Experience is key to your BI program's success for the following reasons:

• Enables a faster "mean time to answer".  Reducing the number of clicks and searches makes your applications more satisfying and efficient to use.
• Consistency.  Once a user understands how to read one report or dashboard, they can apply the same methodology across all BI applications.
• Expose correlations.  Simply combining data on a visualization like a chart or a scatter plot can immediately show a correlation between 2 measures that are not as readily apparent as pure numbers.
• Guide your user through tried and tested analysis processes to expose the knowledge of power users to the larger user base.
• Simplify the experience of finding information by improving navigation structures.  Ensure your search capabilities are optimized to return the most relevant results.

In order to drive the most value from your user's experience you need to have a consistent approach across all the user touch points in your environment.  My recommendation is to designate someone to be accountable for User Experience across the board.  Depending on the size of your BI program this may be part of someone's role, a full person, or a small team.  Only with a centre of excellence can you drive consistent standards across all groups creating end user content.  This team would also serve as a consultant to projects to ensure that the reporting and visualizations are designed to be intuitive and useful.

You can have all the wonderful architecture and data quality you want, but without an effective User Experience your clients will not see the value of all your hard work and will be less likely to adopt your BI environment.  First impressions only happen once.

Related Posts:

• It Just Has to Work
• Cut to the Truth: Answer a Business Question

The Tactical Data Mart Advantage

The capabilities of current BI tools allow us to drive down the costs to develop BI applications / data marts.  This means that we can quickly develop tactical applications leveraging standard tools and methodologies to reduce development cycles.  This enables the deployment of applications to support specific decision making problems that would normally not be supported by a quality BI environment due to the short turnaround required.

Some people get upset about building these so called silos that aren't integrated.  I take a different perspective that these tactical data marts expose the power of tactical Business Intelligence, and if you manage it well they are a great complement to your core infrastructure.

"A good solution applied with vigour now is better than a perfect solution applied ten minutes later.” - General George S. Patton

It is critical that you have a checkpoint or a regular environment review that you can rely on to take one of the following actions at the end of the decision making life cycle:

1. Decision has been made and there is no need for continued access to the data mart.  Simple response, retire the data mart and free up system resources for the next initiative.  Celebrate the success.
2. The information within the data mart has continuing value to the organization.  In this case you need to have room in your requirements funnel to incorporate the data mart into your permanent BI infrastructure.

Don't hold your business back by sticking to a traditional release cycle.  Build a team within your BI program that can quickly spin up the appropriate BI solution to support tactical decision making.  You can't win the war if you don't win a battle now and then!

Data Integration and Your Organization

Today we had John Schmidt, VP of Global Integration Services at Informatica come speak to our teams about best practices for setting up an Integration Competency Centre (ICC).  John made an interesting point that your various Integration functions may be included in Competency Centres in different ways depending on the organization.  

If you have researched Business Intelligence Competency Centres (BICC) you will often find a Data Integration function as one of the functions staffed within the BICC.  However, Business Intelligence is just one part of the pie when it comes to integrating information across the enterprise.  You will also need data integration expertise for data quality, Master Data Management, and other non-BI specific projects.  A number of these projects may not impact BI significantly if at all.  If you want a holistic view of data across your organization you must either create a standalone ICC with strong ties to your BICC, or incorporate all areas of integration practice within a higher level Information Management Competency Centre.

Good BI is enabled by quality data.  Since data quality lives along the information management timeline from your source systems to your analytic databases, it is critical you have technology, process and people engaged all the way along to ensure the best data is delivered for BI.

Keeping your BI environment clean

Over the past year or so the "green" revolution has been sweeping IT as a way for organizations to reduce their environmental impact and to cut costs at the same time.  This has driven the need for robust measurement systems to manage the transition to being a green organization.  A number of the big BI vendors have come out with pre-packaged solutions to drive more "green"  for organizations by encapsulating best practices.

It is great for BI teams to provide these systems to the organization, but we would be remiss to not apply these techniques within our BI environments.

What can you do?  One thing I recommend you do is to perform a complete review of your Business Intelligence data stores and reporting at least once a year.  The overall goals of this review are to remove obsolete information and to address any deficiencies.  There are a number of activities you could incorporate into this review:

• Validate with your business stakeholders that the information has continuing value.  Solicit feedback on the information that is valuable, but is somehow incomplete.
• Review usage statistics for data marts and reports to determine what content is accessed regularly and by whom
• Validate that the report or data store reflects current business logic
• Gather metrics on batch load processes, response time, and storage usage to ensure your environment is stable and is scaling as volumes grow.  I've never heard of a Data Warehouse that shrinks in size over time.

The majority of these activities do not cost you a dime other than people's time.  This is especially attractive in a financial environment like today, when capital spending is being closely scrutinized.  Putting in place a regular program such as this will enable your organization to realize the following benefits:

• Reduce maintenance costs for your BI environment.  Less data marts and reports to support as your environment grows and changes.  You can quickly find yourself drowning in too many items to support.
• Lower the related data centre costs to support your infrastructure.  Believe it or not, all your ETL processes, database servers and storage solutions consume significant amounts of power and cooling.
• Identify duplicated information that is redundant.  Root out conflicting business definitions.
• Reduce the opportunity for information overload.  Having focused information will allow your users to find what they are looking for quicker.

Spare the environment and lower your costs by supporting less while extracting maximum value from your existing investments.  You can't beat this type of ROI!

CIA: Collaboration in Action

One of the greatest examples of effective collaboration is the partnership between 007 and Q in the James Bond movies.  Q would design and build gadgets that seemed to be uniquely suited to the next round of challenges and daring escapes James would encounter on his upcoming mission.  During each movie it appears that James just drops in to Q's lab after receiving his assignment to find everything he needs ready and waiting for him.

Being this ready for anything doesn't happen magically, but is the result of an agile development methodology.  Delivering information solutions is a constantly changing landscape that can benefit from applying the design principles used in Q's lab.

• Rapid Prototyping - Every time James would drop by, the "latest" version of a new tool is ready to be tried.  Take every opportunity to show your users the look and feel of your solution, this will unleash their creativity and you will benefit from their increased engagement and suggestions.
• Fail and Fail Fast - These gadgets would often have unintended side effects, or would explode spectacularly.  There was never any other reaction than cool, collected analysis to fix the problem.  Create an atmosphere where the ability to quickly fail, learn from the mistake, and try again happens as quickly as possible.
• Open Environments - Tests were not undertaken in closed laboratories, but were instead conducted in environments that were open to other researchers and their devilishly handsome customers.  Have a physical environment that encourages collaboration with everyone that is core to a project.  Virtual environments are great, but nothing replaces in person communication.
• Continuous Improvement - Every time 007 returns his shot up, smoking, destroyed vehicles, he provides feedback directly to the designer on what did and didn't work properly.  Find different channels to receive feedback from your users, and make a point of acting on it.

Business Intelligence is not something that is done well in isolation.  Encourage your team to use the above concepts, and look for every opportunity to engage the right people in your initiatives no matter what area of the organization they are from.

"Now do please remember to take care of all this equipment 007...DON'T TOUCH THAT!!...That's my lunch!" - Q

BI for BI

One of the core disciplines within a Business Intelligence team or program is to develop internal metrics and performance management practices. The idea of "BI for BI" is to exploit your internal strengths and live the fact-based decision mantra.

Business Intelligence is a core component of corporate performance management systems. Conversely, Business Intelligence can only deliver maximum value when it is coupled by a strong performance management culture. In order to communicate the value of spend on BI / performance management initiatives, we need to talk about both the BI technology and the culture required to support it.

If we have the management practices in place to constantly act on and refine our internal program / departmental metrics, we can then use this as a working example to the rest of the organization. Not only will you be able to demo the metrics produced for your team, but you will be able to relate success stories that you had acting on this information. Not only show a dashboard trending average bugs per release, but also tell the story of how your team saw a negative trend 6 months ago, implemented an improvement to the code review process, and reduced overall bugs by 50%. How powerful is that!

Here are just a couple examples of metrics you could put in place to measure your BI program:

• ETL Job Completion Times
• Uptime by Infrastructure Component (Presentation, ETL, Database Layers)
• Volume of Requests for Information
• Average Frequency of Visits to BI Portal (i.e. 3.5 times per week)
• Volume of Data Quality Issues
• Resolution Time on Service Tickets
• Production Incidents by Severity
• Changes to Report / Asset Catalogue

A couple hints on how to put this in place:

• Make people accountable for their metrics. They own them and report on them.
• Start small and grow. Start with measuring only a handful of metrics, and add additional metrics over time. Look for patterns of key performance indicators, and their relation to other metrics.
• Review and publish your metrics. Have a regular time set for metric review. Make metrics available to anyone that interacts with you, including your customers. Open the Kimono!

It is a basic professional requirement for an organization to produce regular metrics on their performance. Leverage your team's expertise in the discipline of Business Intelligence to improve your team's performance, and show the rest of the organization how it is done!

The Agile Organization: Powered by Data

One of the core characteristics of an analytical competitor is the ability to rapidly leverage the organization's data to make decisions faster than their competitors. Being first to market with a new idea, product or service will ensure success when the profit margins are high before the big new thing becomes a commodity.

Here is an example of a business using analytics to gain market share:

We need to retain our high end customers with a loyalty program. Who are our most profitable customers?

Our most profitable customers must be the ones that drive highest revenues, lets go and see what this customer base looks like.

Thus begins a cycle of analysis to answer this question.

• Data Discovery - What data is available on revenue? What systems contain this data? What is the quality and integrity of the data?
• Data Acquisition - Know that I know what data is available, how do we get it? Does it have to be brought into the Data Warehouse? Do I need to get an extract from the ERP system?
• Analysis - Looks like our highest revenue customers are large call centres...
• Act - Call these clients as the pilot group to offer them 5% off new equipment installs.
• Measure - Gather feedback from commercial account reps

Feedback comes in stating that many customers offered this discount said they would prefer more free support calls instead. What type of support call volume do we have anyway?

So begins another cycle of analysis to look at support call volume. If this data does not exist in a readily available source such as a Data Warehouse, then we have to go through the whole cycle starting with Data Discovery.

If we go through this again, we will likely lose at least days if not weeks until we are able to determine the next course of action on our journey to retain our most valuable customers. If a company is able to cut out the Data Discovery and Data Acquisition phases, they will be that much farther ahead of the competition.

Having high quality data that is available to decisions makers when they need it is essential to becoming an analytical competitor. Focus on building out a robust information architecture that contains data that is relevant to your business today. With this approach you will literally be two steps ahead of the competition.

For What It's Worth - My 2009 Predictions

I recognize that I am a little behind the ball on predictions for the BI space in 2009.  We are technically not a full month into the new year, so I'll sneak this in.  I have to admit that I have had the opportunity to read a number of other posts on this topic, so I have late bloomer advantage.  I'll focus on areas that I think will have a large impact on us all.

Drum roll...  2009 BI Predictions

• The Big 4 (SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) will continue to gain market share in the Business Intelligence and Performance Management spaces.  This will be driven by the ongoing consolidation and integration of the various home grown and acquired technologies to deliver a more cohesive user experience.  These platforms will be attractive to the IT organization due to the ability to consolidate licensing with one vendor and to have one set of management tools to support.
• Open Source BI platforms will spread BI below the $500M in revenue organization.  The cost of mainstream BI platforms can be prohibitive for small to medium size companies.  Open Source platforms will open up the power of BI to these organizations, allowing for zero cost proof of concepts and a lower TCO for a supported enterprise solution.  Expect these platforms to deliver 80% of the functionality at 20% of the cost.
• Business Intelligence becomes a core requirement.  Given the uncertainties in the market, we will see an increased awareness of the importance to have the information to make the right decision.  In a strong market where people are buying products and services, it is easy to roll with the times and accept positive results without really knowing why.  When times get tough, risk tolerance becomes much lower.  This risk is mitigated by having the best possible information to make the decision at hand.

No matter what, it should be an exciting year!

For an exhaustive list of BI predictions for this year, visit the BI Questions Blog for a consolidated list.

BI Questions Blog - The Complete List of 2009 BI Predictions?

Cut to the Truth: Answer a Business Question

As the wealth of data available to consumers of Business Intelligence in your organization exponentially increases, so does the opportunity to expose all this data... Even when we shouldn't...

What?? Don't leverage any and all information to analyze every aspect of the situation? Bite your tongue!

When we have decision makers that need to make a call and move on to the next problem, they don't have the time (or the patience) to sort through endless reams of data to find the nugget or two that will help them make the decision. It is critical that we always ask the golden question, "What business question are we trying to answer?"

Once we have identified the end purpose of our analysis, we can then focus our energies on leveraging all this data to show the proper trend, scoring or visualization as our end result. Don't try to overcomplicate your analysis, just focus on the 80% value you can deliver with 20% of the effort. Your customers will love you for making their jobs easier, and your solutions will be less costly and easier to maintain.

Don't you love the 80/20 rule? Simplicity at it's best.

Keep Your KPIs Fresh

One thing that has caught my attention over the past couple of months is the emphasis on new financial metrics in this depressed market. Employment statistics used to be mentioned in passing, and now we breathlessly await the monthly numbers. Clearly the global recession is an entirely new environment, and investors would be wise to not rely on old metrics and approaches to guide them.

This made me think of how a core component of a good performance management system is keeping your metrics relevant to the current business environment they are attempting to measure. There is no such thing as permanent performance indicators. If your metrics don't change, then there is something wrong with your process. It is critical to keep your performance metrics focused on the current objectives and strategies of your business.

If your company is spending money differently, as all companies are doing in some way, then your performance indicators must change to reflect this. In these types of rapid change it is entirely possible that your core business strategy can shift significantly. It is essential that the keepers of corporate performance make it a continuous cycle to review and evaluate the suite of KPIs to ensure they are aligned to today's business reality.

This also speaks to the need for the IT organization to be able to rapidly respond to these changes in direction to provide the necessary data for the new KPIs. The best BI infrastructures are highly adaptable and responsive to change.

Step back and take a look at your metrics. Are they still relevant?

Leapfrogging the Competition

These are unsettling times, every family and every organization is looking closely at what they spend their money on, and the value they get from these expenses.  In order to do this effectively, it all comes down to making sound decisions with the best possible information you can obtain.  You wouldn't decide to change anything in your household, such as trading in your SUV for a Volkswagen without understanding all the angles such as financing, gas mileage, capacity, warranty, etc.  Hmmm, decisions and information... sounds like a recipe for Business Intelligence!

Every organization is in their own unique way poised to take advantage of better access to information to make sound, informed decisions to guide them in this current market economy.  Rather than cutting costs without understanding the long term impacts, use information and analytics to truly understand the cost from all angles (slice & dice).  We can also use information to look for new opportunities, such as using this downturn to acquire customers from our competitors by targeting them with advertisements that show the value of the product to them (segmentation & personalization).

This may be the time to consider increasing your company's investments in Business Intelligence technology and people, rather than trimming costs.  ROI doesn't stop happening in a down market, get out there and leapfrog your competition!