BI Blogs

Knowledge Harvests - what a great term! Authors Katrina Pugh and Nancy Dixon define a “knowledge harvest as a systematic, facilitated gathering and circulation of knowledge”. I stumbled upon their article on the topic in the May edition of HBR (Harvard Business Review). It was in the Forethought section of the magazine which looks at ideas and trends on the business horizon. Let me recap my now limited understanding of a knowledge harvest and then offer some thoughts on its challenge to us as we seek to leverage E2.0.

From their short article, I believe that a knowledge harvest is a simple but purposeful and interactive approach to a postmortem analysis or debriefing. The basic idea is that the intentional review of a business occurrence or process will yield helpful information or insights for the future; hence - a knowledge harvest!

However, there is a twist. The authors say that the first step in the process is to recruit a set of “knowledge seekers” who want to learn from the harvest. They go on to characterize these people.

Because seekers are self-interested, they ask tough, exploratory questions of knowledge originators, extracting important nuances – not only about how a project was executed but also about how costs built up, how knowledge might be applied elsewhere, what worked and what didn’t, and so on.

A knowledge facilitator leads these seekers through a process of interacting with the knowledge originators to derive key information and valued insights. The knowledge facilitator then works with the seeker to package the content and distribute it around the company.
My question is whether or not our E2.0 applications are focused enough on these knowledge seekers. Do we have people who are clearly articulating what they need to know in order to do their jobs better? Do our apps help to connect these knowledge seekers with the appropriate knowledge originators within the business? I have a feeling that a lot of our Web 2.0 content is produced by knowledge facilitators who are doing screen scrapes from knowledge originators with no idea whatsoever of the needs of knowledge seekers! What do you think?

I do believe that we have the tools and technologies but I’m not sure that we have them working together to support this interesting approach of a knowledge harvest.

Being a Boston Red Sox fan and always looking for new and intersting ways to visualize data, I found this tool on Boston.com very interesting. It tracks Manny Ramirez’s 496 career home runs and provides different ways to visualize what could be some pretty boring data if presented in a typical grid (see the HR information grid at the bottom). As a baseball fan, it is interesting to see the distances and ball parks where he has hit his homeruns. As a opposing manager, the Pitch count graphic would certainly be a tool to use when facing Manny. Certainly this only scratches the surface on the different ways that baseball measures performance (see Bill James and sabremetrics).

Two thoughts from here in London to follow on the two recent posts by my colleagues Alyssa and Peter. I’ll try to complement their thorough, thoughtful comments with a few brief, random ones from my work room that overlooks the amazing pitch of Wembley Stadium.

First, related to Tapscott and collaboration: I just now finished up a discussion with a customer who works for TMN, a Portuguese mobile provider. He did a presentation earlier about “Shared Business Intelligence as a Competitive Advantage,” in which he applied the new models of Web 2.0 — user-generated content and active participation – to the company’s use of analytics. In fact, I think he coined a new term: Participatory analytics. It’s not a new message for BI. We’ve been talking for some time about the democratization of data, but I hadn’t heard it positioned in this context before: giving access to data and analysis to more than 100 internal clients so they can produce their own analyses. As the business users’ knowledge levels increase, they can have more meaningful conversations about the shape and direction of their analytical efforts.

Before that conversation I also had the pleasure of sitting down with Andrew Winston for a few minutes, author of Green to Gold and one of today’s presenters on sustainability. I asked him how companies looking to integrate green practices can get started. Here are a few of his answers:

• Start with a good old SWOT analysis (he calls it AUDIO: Aspects, Upstream, Downstream, Issues, and Opportunities)
• Analyze your stakeholders’ wants and needs (internally and externally)
• Start the culture change by getting people involved in something like a green team.
• Little things mean a lot: UPS saved 28 million miles & 3 million gallons of gas by reducing left turns and the idling they cause.

This is along the lines of the energy savings promised with the switch from incandescent to fluorescent bulbs. (Did you know that the US is mandating the elimination of incandescent bulbs in seven years?)
Alyssa didn’t mention: during the press conference where we launched our sustainability solution, Alyssa was interrupted mid-sentence as she responded to a question from a journalist. A deep, booming British voice echoed out over the stadium intercom: PAGING MR. GREEN, PAGING MR. GREEN. It’s apparently a code-phrase for potential upcoming evacuation of the stadium (which didn’t happen), but those of us attending the briefing got a chuckle out of what felt like a ringing endorsement from the heavens.

You already know my answer to that question, right? After all, if I thought business intelligence was dead, I wouldn’t still be tagging posts with the BI label left and right.

So why did I write that headline? Other than for effect? A few reasons:

• I recently read the article, BI is Dead; Long Live BI, from InfoWorld, which I missed the first time around while on maternity leave.
• I’ve been eaves-dropping on this intiguing conversation about the commoditization of BI.
• I’ve heard Jim Davis make similar comments about BI, and I think his point is worth exploring.

Let’s start at the bottom of that list and move up. Recently, I heard Jim say, “BI - as - is dead.” The phrase, “as we’ve known it,” is clearly important here. So, what does he mean by that? You can find the answer in - you guessed it - sascom magazine. Specifically, in the first quarter 2007 cover story, The future of business intelligence, Davis said:

First, I think we have to talk about what BI is and what it isn’t. There is an old definition of BI, which is the query and reporting definition and describes the fact that you’ve given a user independence from IT. The future of BI involves things like consistency of information across the organization and predictive analytics that will support proactive decision making.

Finally, the InfoWorld article really says it all right in the headline: BI is dead; Long live BI. Interpretation: BI - as we’ve known it - is dead. BI - as we continue to redfine it - will have a long, long life to come.

Part Two of the CRMBuyer BI Boom Series was published on Monday. The article begins with this strong introduction:
“The new, agile players in the business intelligence market are breaking out the bag of tricks to challenge the dominance of established firms. Among the advances they are pushing are on-demand software, visual reporting and ease of […]

I’m saddened by the news that Ken Murphy has passed away. I have learned so much from Ken (although we’ve never met) and I already miss him. My condolences to his family…

Here’s how he felt about the “end” of FoxPro:

The decision to cease further development of VFP is one that I believe Microsoft, and especially, the SQL server division will come to regret. I develop database apps for charities, and it has been my experience that most of these charities eventually move to a SQL server back end. I would suggest that the same is true of many small businesses. VFP is a fantastic language for developing entry level database apps for small to medium businesses. The power and speed of VFP allows people like me to develop tools for these smaller organizations that allow them to grow. Evenutally, they outgrow the VFP back end and typically move to a SQL solution. If SQL were a major league baseball team, VFP would be their farm team. I wonder how many major league teams would succeed if they were to get rid of all their farm teams?

This will be how I remember him.

This is a line from L. Gordon Crovitz’s opinion article in the Wall Street Journal called “Trading on the Wisdom of Crowds” from April 28th. Prediction markets have been popular posts here on talkDIG the last couple of weeks and I apologize if I am sounding like a broken record. But the topic seems to be appearing every where. I rarely read the opinion section in the WSJ, but the title caught my eye. Crovitz discusses the topic of prediction markets and the deadly accurate Iowa Electronic Market. Now, if you think prediction markets are a fairly recent phenomenon, think again. According to Crovitz, some $165 million in today’s dollars were wagered on the 1916 election where Woodrow Wilson defeated Charles Evans Hughes.

One interesting topic that Crovitz raises is the difference between using the traditional form of predicting political results, statistical polling, and using a prediction market that trades future results like stocks. There are plenty of examples that prove that a properly formed market will provide more accurate results then a statistical polling sample set.

Are you convinced yet that prediction markets can be an effective tool for your organization? Have you identified any areas, either internally or externally where a prediction market can more accurately predict an outcome?

It’s that time in the release cycle. I know what the new features are going to be for Analysis Services (for a full list see here) and it’s rather like Boxing Day: I’ve just got my presents and I’m starting to wonder to what Santa will bring on his next visit. And to a certain extent I’m feeling as though I should have been a bit more specific when I was writing my Christmas list last time, given that I’m a teeny bit underwhelmed by the features I did get in AS2008. So here, for the benefit of the elves working away in Redmond, is a list of things I’d love to see in Analysis Services 2011 or whatever it will be called:

• Auto-partitioning
  Building and maintaining partitions is a job that almost everyone needs to do and yet it’s something that involves way too much hard work at the moment. As such it’s an ideal candidate for some form of automation, and indeed a while back Jamie Thomson posted the following suggestion on Connect: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=127378. Other possibilities include the use of data mining to determine how you should set the slices for your partitions (which I blogged about a long time ago) and something like the MDX driven auto-partitioning that Greg Galloway implemented for the Analysis Services Stored Procedure Project.
• Do away with the arbitrary shaped sets error
  This is a particular bugbear of mine. The more I work on cubes with complex calculations, the more I find that I want to scope calculations on arbitrary shaped sets, which of course I’m not allowed to do. That means I end up making several identical assignments to get the same result, which leads to way too much duplicate code and a maintenance nightmare. If I can break up an arbitrary shaped set into something acceptable to Analysis Services, why can’t Analysis Services do this itself? Here’s the Connect I logged on this: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=339861
• Fix parent-child hierarchies
  Parent-child hierarchies are a pain. For a start they cause performance problems so what I would want to see is the ability for AS to create aggregations at intermediate levels in a parent-child hierarchy at the very least; I’m sure there are a lot of other potential engine improvements that could be made for them. Secondly, scoping calculations on them is a real nightmare and on a related note trying to use dimension security with them is an equally thankless task. Given that there are some situations where you have no option but to use them, I think some time needs to be invested in making them better.
• Build parallelism into the calculation engine
  What with all the block computation improvements in AS2008, I’m finding that many calculations are performing a lot better than in AS2005. However I’m still finding scenarios where the calculation engine is the bottleneck and just one CPU is being used on the server when I’m running a query (something I discussed here). Surely it’s possible to get the calculation engine to do some calculations in parallel when a query is being run?
• Be able to rename attributes in role-playing dimensions
  If there was one feature I wanted to see in AS2008 it was this. It would have been so easy to do, I know loads of other people wanted it, and I did log it in Connect ages ago: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=144500. And it wasn’t included. All I want to do is to be able to rename the individual attributes of a role-playing dimension instead of just being able to change the dimension name - for example if I have Order Date and Ship Date role-playing dimensions based on a single Date dimension, then I want my ‘Calendar Date’ hierarchy in Date to appear as ‘Calendar Order Date’ and ‘Calendar Ship Date’ to my end users. Not being able to do this has stopped me using role-playing dimensions on so many occasions simply because seeing multiple hierarchies with the same name is too confusing.
• Support for cross-dimensional user hierarchies
  Sometimes I find myself in the situation where I’ve got a large dimension, such as a Customer dimension, where the lower-level attributes are queried much less often than the higher level attributes. Now AS2005 handles large dimensions pretty well, in my experience, but it would still be useful to be able to store less useful lower-level attributes in ROLAP mode and more useful higher-level attributes in MOLAP mode. One solution to this could be the ability to set the storage mode on individual attributes rather than the whole dimension but I’m not sure that’s practical; instead it would be great if you could split the attributes up into a ROLAP dimension and a MOLAP materialised reference dimension and be able to build a user hierarchy that spans both. So you’d be able to drill down from Country to City to Post Code to Customer, and when you were querying the first three levels you’d be hitting a MOLAP dimension and when you queried Customer you’d be hitting a different ROLAP dimension. In fact I’m sure the ability to set up cross-dimensional drill paths would be useful in other scenarios too and make cubes much easier to use.
• Support for partitioned dimensions
  Dimensions are getting bigger and bigger, and I wonder if at some stage it would be useful to be able to partition dimensions as well as measure groups to get better performance and manageability? Just a thought.
• Be able to manage unary operators and custom member formulas from the MDX Script
  Perhaps this is just me, but sometimes I find it’s a bit of a pain when you’re using unary operators and custom member formulas that their values have to be stored in the dimension table. Can’t we have the option to be able to set or override a unary operator or custom member formula from the MDX Script - after all, that’s meant to the one central repository for all my calculations. I wonder if this is possible anyway with an ALTER CUBE statement? Hmm, I don’t think so.
• New features for calculated members
  As I’ve mentioned here before, quite often I see people creating real members in dimensions then overwriting their values with scoped assignments when I’m sure they would be better off with using calculated members. So to meet that and other challenges, here’s a list of things it would be cool to allow with calculated members:
  • Allow calculated members to have other calculated members as children
  • Be able to control where calculated members appear in a hierarchy
  • Allow calculated members to have member properties, either returning static values or the results of MDX expressions
  • Following on from that, if calculated members can have calculated member property values, real members should have that too. For example, on a Customer dimension I might know a date of birth but I might also want to be able to calculate a customer’s age and show that as a property
  • Following on from that, it would be great to be able to create entire hierarchies based on calculated members or properties. So if I can calculate a customer’s age, and then have another calculated property that placed that customer into a bucket based on their age (eg 0-9, 10-19, 20-29 and so on), I’d also like to be able to determine the number of buckets based on some MDX as well (maybe using server parameters - see below) and create a user hierarchy where the top level would consist of calculated members representing these buckets and where I could drill down from these buckets to the individual ages and then down to the real customer members themselves.

bout it I could go on for even longer. I need to do some work! But what would you like to see in Analysis Services 2011? Answers in a comment, please…

In a panel discussion about innovation Tuesday at the Premier Business Leadership Series in London, the CEO of Telstra, Sol Trujillo, called upon business leaders to employ the “Wayne Gretzky” management technique. Instead of reacting to play occuring right now, move ahead to where you predict the puck will be and position yourself to receive the puck and score on the competition.

It’s hard to argue with the success that this technique brought Gretzky in his illustrious career – four Stanley cups, nine Hart Trophies as the most valuable player, and ten Art Ross Trophies for most points in a season. And Telstra, the largest telecommunications company in Australia, is in a transformative period under the direction of Mr. Trujillo as it moves from a state-owned monopoly to a competitive market. Telstra is anticipating the future and positioning themselves as the media and communications provider in Australia, with rapid expansion plans for Asia.

I heard this comment just a few hours before SAS launched a new business-focused solution: SAS for Sustainability Management. And as I studied the notes for our press panel where the launch announcement was made, I thought — we’re anticipating the puck!

This is the first solution of its kind on the market today. With global sales and delivery teams, SAS is well-positioned to address specific sustainability initiatives for key industries and regions around the world.

Market analysts, the perennial bellwether of IT trends, have been beefing up their research agendas on the topic of corporate social responsibility, the “triple bottom line” and green IT. But no market sizing or magic quadrants exist today. That is due, in large part, to the lack of definitive global standards for measurement and management of carbon. While the standards evolve and converge, we have to anticipate how that landscape is evolving and offer a solution today that advances the needs and interests of our customers.

So how do we “own the puck” and deliver value for our customers? We will apply the best practices in sustainability decision-support that we have learned in partnership with Cisco, and here at SAS, to other leading organizations.

Leading up to this product launch, I had conversations with companies across the financial services, paper and packaging, hospitality, government, and high tech industries. I learned that many of them have recently initiated projects to determine what data is required (and available) to calculate their carbon footprint. Others are setting groundwork to adopt sustainability performance reporting, such as the Global Reporting Initiative.

So it’s the perfect time to tie sustainability initiatives together and converge on a single platform for operational intelligence. The only way we … or our customers … will know if we’re staying in front of our competition is by analyzing data, setting goals, measuring our progress toward those goals, and exploring what-if scenarios to help us determine where the greatest impact can be made.

In a recent interview with CNN, Trujillo reflected on the competitive nature of business today. “[Y]ou keep score by how you’re growing [compared with] your competitors, how you’re growing your revenues, [and] growing margins.” Now, organizations will be keeping score on environmental and social responsibility. In fact, Telstra just released a report entitled. “Towards a high-bandwidth, low-carbon future.”

It is exciting for SAS to be in front of this wave. However, as we continue to develop and refine solutions that address sustainability management, we must keep Trujillo and Grezky in mind and anticipate the future challenges and opportunities that will be coming our way!

Yesterday (29 Apr) I was one of 1,200 or so delegates at the London leg of the Premier Business Leadership Series conferences – a SAS-sponsored, invitation-only executive conference. As a SAS employee you might be expect me sing its praises, but as someone who has been going to conferences for over 20 years it is no longer that easy to impress me. However, impressed I was – the venue, the organisation but most especially the quality of the speakers all contributed to a sense of knowing why ‘Premier’ is in the title of the conference. My blog entry today (and hopefully tomorrow) represents my personal takeaways from the conference.

The day started with a panel session hosted by UK TV news personality Nicholas Owen and brought together 3 globally-respected economists; Gerard Lyons PhD of Standard Chartered, Joseph Quinlan of Bank of America Global Wealth and Investment Management and Dennis Turner of HSBC plc. Between them the panel touched on some of the real issues that are driving the current global economy and affects the economic outlook for tomorrow.

Clearly there is an adjustment going on in the world economy, with a range of views as to what this means for the traditionally USA-led western economies (with some disagreement about whether there is going to be a recession, or just a slowing of growth). What was more interesting to me was the view that there has been a ‘decoupling’ of East and West, where a slowed western economic performance is sharply contrasted with continued growth in Russia and the East. There was also a consensus that the Eastern economies are not as dependent on Western markets as trading partners as previously, with new trade corridors with each other making up a larger share of their balance of trade.

That said, the West has sufficient capacity in their economies to weather the storm, provided the politicians can avoid the trap of populist policies of protectionism; pulling back from the global free market right now may not be a viable long-term strategy, even if it does win some votes. The UK economy was held up as an example – the current economic factors are positive so growth will slow, but it will still be growth. That fundamental economic strength and market liberalism will be vital as ‘UK limited’ starts to play its part as a business unit of ‘Global plc’. One cautionary note was sounded however about the levels of debt in the UK, especially in the younger segment of the population; sustained economic growth cannot be founded on continued borrowing – there has to be some real earnings in there somewhere.

Continue reading “On the line from the Premier Business Leadership Series, London”

(Long-time fans of the Pittsburgh hockey team will understand the title of this post. Go Pens!)

Es un placer invitaros a la presentación de la monografía sobre IT Governance del número 191 de la revista Novática, que tendrá lugar el próximo miércoles 14 de mayo en la sala Verdaguer del Ateneo Barcelonès.

En palabras de Antonio Valle (Gran GURU y mejor PERSONA)

Check out this 5 minute video Q&A with Gerhard Gschwandtner at Selling Power. It provides an overview of how the right approach to sales analytics can help you you optimize the sales process and maximize sales performance. This is part 1 of a 2 part interview with Ken Rudin.