Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Author Note: This blog post was originally a guest entry at The Decision Factor, a site that appears to have ceased publication. I have reproduced it here. It was fun to write, and I hate to see good content go missing. The original post was published in 2012 but I believe the content is still relevant today.

In my first Star Trek post, I explored two lessons learned from Captain Kirk’s leadership skills and how we could apply them to business intelligence. Today, I’ll cover three more lessons.

Be Part of the Away Team

Captain Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation rarely joined the away team, leaving that role to his Number One, Commander Riker. Kirk operated with far more freedom. Whenever there was an opportunity to beam down to a new planet, he was there. His leadership style demanded that he lead from the front.

I think the corollary with business intelligence work here is obvious: the success or failure of our systems depends far more on establishing correct requirements than on the actual implementation. By being part of the away team, we can be directly involved. Lack of user involvement and poor requirements gathering are generally two of the top reasons projects of any kind fail, and business intelligence is not immune to this problem.

Play Poker, not Chess

In Star Trek, there were numerous times when Captain Kirk and his crew were in a bad spot. In one episode, The Corbomite Maneuver, the Enterprise and her crew were experiencing first contact with a new alien race and it wasn’t going well. At one point, Spock had to tell Kirk that they were out of options and the alien had backed them into a corner from which there was no escape. In chess terms, checkmate. Spock, as a character, was the very embodiment of chess: cold, logical, and process driven. It was natural that he would see things this way. But Kirk was different.

Capt. Kirk: There must be SOMETHING to do. Something I’ve overlooked.
Mr. Spock: Chess: When one is outmatched the game is over. Checkmate.
Capt. Kirk: Is that your BEST recommendation?
Mr. Spock: I’m s… I regret that I can find no other logical alternative.
Capt. Kirk: Not chess, Mr. Spock. Poker!

Kirk took inspiration from the game of poker and bluffed his way out of the situation. How can this possibly apply to business intelligence? We don’t want to lie to our business partners, do we?

Perhaps we do – but in a good way.

I often come into contact with people or business processes that have been rigidly followed for many years. To the mind of the many, there’s no other way to do that particular process. In order to convince them otherwise, sometimes we have to bluff. I like to call this a demo. 😉 In order to make a difference, we have to get past that initial resistance; and sometimes a well-placed bluff demonstration helps us along that road.

Blow Up the Enterprise

Sometimes there’s no way around it. A system that’s well known, trusted, and loved just isn’t cutting it any more. The original Enterprise made it through several years of TV shows and a couple of movies before ultimately meeting her end. As much it pained Kirk to let her go, he realized that in order to move forward, the Enterprise had to be sacrificed. (I may have shed a tear or two myself.)

Legacy systems can often inspire the same attachment, but at some point we have to blow them up so we can move on. “It’s always been done that way” is a poor reason to keep a system around when there are so many new and exciting technologies that have come to market recently. Don’t be afraid to blow up the Enterprise to move forward.

But I think the overwhelming lesson to be learned from Star Trek is don’t wear a red shirt to work.

Author Note: This blog post was originally a guest entry at The Decision Factor, a site that appears to have ceased publication. I have reproduced it here. It was fun to write, and I hate to see good content go missing. The original post was published in 2012 but I believe the content is still relevant today.

While the touch-panel displays on Star Trek: The Next Generation certainly foreshadowed the iPad, the focus of my discussion today is around another blog: “Five Leadership Lessons from James T. Kirk,” published by Forbes Magazine.

While Captain Kirk had his flaws—making his character all the more interesting—he certainly was the unquestioned leader of the Enterprise. I enjoyed reading the article and think the specific lessons outlined also apply to business intelligence.

I’ll share the first two with you today and save the others for a future post.

Never Stop Learning

When Kirk ran the Enterprise, the Federation was much younger. Their mission was to seek out and explore, encounter new civilizations, and learn from them. The opening monologue said it all:

Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Sounds like good advice for business intelligence professionals too, right?

In order to deliver effective results, we have to first understand the business. Whether we work for a large company or a small start-up, knowing the business (and the data) is the first step towards providing business value. It doesn’t help to design solutions in a vacuum that the business won’t understand, won’t use, and doesn’t need.

As a business intelligence professional, I look forward to those times when I get sent to the far reaches of our enterprise (see what I did there? 😉 ), so that I can directly observe business processes in action. The lessons learned might not provide an immediate benefit. It might be months or even years, before I can put something I have learned to good use. What’s important is that I do interact with the business and learn from that experience.

Have Advisors with Different Worldviews

Captain Kirk was blessed with a diverse crew, not only on the bridge of the Enterprise but throughout the ship. This was no accident. James Roddenberry, the visionary behind what ultimately became one of the biggest TV and movie franchises of all time, intended this to show how a diverse crew of different ethnicities, genders, and planetary origins could act together in towards a common goal. Spock and Dr. McCoy could hardly have been more different, yet each was able to provide valuable input to Captain Kirk’s decisions. They each supported his role as their captain and leader in their own way, often in direct opposition with each other.

In the business intelligence role, it’s just as important for us to seek out and explore diversity. Before designing a system, I need to talk to everyone who might use the system and gather their input. Getting only one side of the story could lead to incomplete requirements, which in turn leads to wasted time and money. In this day and age (much less the 23rd century), we can’t afford to do much of either.

Stay tuned for more business intelligence lessons from Star Trek

In a few weeks I’ll return with the final three leadership lessons from Star Trek that have implications for business intelligence professionals. In the meantime, I wish you success in exploring the world of business intelligence.

Author Note: This post was originally a guest post published on “The Decision Factor” blog. Since that site seems to have disappeared I am re-posting it here. The original publication date was November 1, 2012, but I believe the content is still relevant.

What’s the purpose of a business intelligence (BI) dashboard? It’s not just to look sexy. The primary purpose of a dashboard is to convey information. A secondary purpose is to inspire a behavioral change based on the information that’s being conveyed. Nobody wants to be “red” on a dashboard reviewed by executives, so they’ll change their behavior in order to get into the “green” area.

But humans are a creative species. What happens if their behavior changes in an unanticipated way?
Continue reading “Lessons in Business Intelligence: Be Careful What You Wish For”

Since this was actually recorded and published several weeks ago, I guess I’m late to the party. You may have already seen this if you follow the Diversified Semantic Layer, but in case you haven’t, I was a guest on their video podcast a few weeks ago. Eric and Josh hosted Derick and me in an hour-long discussion for all things semantic layer.

Universe Design Hacks

It was a ton of fun, even if it looks like I can barely keep my eyes open. Trust me, it was Josh (based in Australia) that should have been the sleepy one! We talked about subjects ranging from the very specific (why put aggregate functions on every measure) to more broad (do you let your business users build universes) while Eric tried to keep us on track. There were quite a few topics that we agreed we should come back to and cover in more detail.

And then I showed yet another trick during my DFW ASUG chapter session, which caused Eric to tweet this:

@dagira_tweets just taught me a #UDT hack I could have been using for oh say 15 or so years. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE? #ContextsSuck

— Eric Vallo (@ericvallo) December 5, 2013

What can I say, we only had an hour? 🙂

I was looking over some financial sites the other day and ran across this visualization that is based on the stock market. The overall presentation is divided into blocks of companies grouped by sector. The size of the company within their sector is based on their market capitalization, and the color indicates the current stock price trend. Clicking on a sector allows the viewer to “drill” down into the sector data. At the bottom of the frame is a drop-down that allows you to specify the time range used to identify the up or downward trend, with options for since last close, 26 weeks, 52 weeks, or year to date. While the color (green or red) shows the direction of the stock price move, the intensity of the color shows the percentage of the move. A company like Barrick Gold which has dropped substantially during 2013 (down ~48%) is fairly bright red, while PepsiCo (up ~25% YTD) is a muted green.

I think this is one of the best uses of this visualization style that I have seen, and decided to share it.

Click through for more from the same artist.

Hello folks, I’m back after a nice break with a quick comment from our favorite curly tie engineer:

I needed a break from various things, but I should be back and blogging soon. Conference season is starting up. BI2013 was going to be first on my list, then SAPPHIRE. I had to back out of BI2013, and the jury is still out as to whether I’ll make it to SAPPHIRE/ASUG Annual Conference just yet.

I have finally started to do some serious work using the Information Design Tool, and my first blog post related to work flow differences between IDT and Universe Designer should be ready to come out shortly.

Finally, I have added a new permanent page to my side menu titled, “Donating To Dagira.” Please check it out and see if it’s something you would be willing to support, thanks!

I am way behind on approving comments. 😳 I will be working through those this week.

It has been a busy couple of weeks (months!) and my production here has suffered. My most recent post is not here but a guest blog at The Decision Factor: Be Careful What You Wish For. I was inspired by a post at the Freakonomics Blog that discussed human nature and the unanticipated result of incentive programs as I remembered one particular client experience with a dashboard. If you haven’t read it yet, give it a try.

I’ll be back here soon.

Author Note: The original link to The Decision Factor no longer works so I have recreated the post here. The link above will take you to that post instead.

Wow, lots going on. It’s the end of day two and I’m only now sitting down to write my first blog. Then again, much of what I am going to cover has probably been mentioned in a tweet or two. 😉

We started on Sunday with our 3rd annual Influencer Summit. We opened with a recap of the prior year activities from each of the four SIG chairs. The four strategic SIG areas were Product Direction, Education, Support, and Integration. One of the interesting results of the pre-conference survey was that these four areas were still the top vote recipients as areas of concern. My take-away from that is that while we have definitely made progress, there is still room for improvement. One important difference this year was SAP representatives were in the room for the entire session this year so they were able to witness and participate in the entire process. I’ll be honest; if you attended the conference this year and didn’t try to come to the Influencer Summit, you should come next year. We’re getting better and better at how we run these (we had to make some new processes up as we went along because we were doing something new) and the more people and viewpoints that SAP can hear, the better.

ASUG provided an “app” for the conference this year which has been fantastic. I don’t have a paper schedule, we don’t have to fill in paper evaluation forms that will later have to be transcribed into digital form for analysis, I don’t miss important updates during the day… in short, it’s exactly what a conference app should do. Excellent addition to the event.

Because of the app, I can tell you exactly what I did (and when) on Monday. 🙂

My first session on Monday was a follow-up to the Strategic SIG panel. Unfortunately there were not a lot of people there. One of the action items that I got out of the session Sunday and the lack of attendance on Monday is that we need to do a better job of figuring out how to communicate what the SIG is doing. It’s important to get that message out, so that more folks can participate.

Visual Intelligence First Look

Also on Monday I got my first look at Visual Intelligence (aka “Visi” in keeping with our normal name-shortening practice) which was first shown at SAPPHIRE / Annual Conference earlier this year. It’s an interesting offering. It’s a desktop client but requires a 64 bit operating system, so that knocks out a whole bunch of potential users on older operating systems. It uses local data but can also connect via Freehand SQL. It will also connect to HANA. Universe support is supposed to be out very soon. What is it? It’s a data collection, analysis, and visualization tool. Yes, another tool. I will admit that I left that session feeling… underwhelmed.

But the price is right; you can download a free 90-day trial and see what you think.

Later Monday evening I had the opportunity to catch up with Timo Elliott and expressed my “underwhelmed-ness” about the tool. 🙂 He had a different way to look at it, which I am shamelessly stealing and representing here. The conversation went something like this:

Me: I did see Visi today for the first time.
Timo: What did you think?
Me: Meh
Timo: It’s like second gear.
Me: ???

The idea takes more explanation than that, of course, but I don’t want to keep trying to relate it as a conversation. Timo suggested that today many businesses have first gear (Excel) and third gear (data warehouses or data marts) but nothing in the middle. Excel is first gear. We can grab data and do some basic analysis and visualizations, but each time we get new data we have to reinvent things. And merging two (or more) different sets of data in Excel is problematic at best. To do full blown data cleansing and merging we often move to the next step of a data warehouse, which is far more complex than the Excel model and therefore third gear. Timo’s view is that Visual Intelligence provides a second gear which can smooth the transition from first gear to third. I can see his point.

What about transitions between gears? Is there a transmission holding all of this together? It turns out that Visual Intelligence can start with Excel data, so there’s an easy link between first gear and second gear. Ultimately I am told that Visual Intelligence can export its results to HANA, which could become the start of a full-fledged warehouse. But at each point I am just moving the data from one gear to another; the work that was done is lost. I don’t think I can export a visualization into Explorer, for example, for use once the data is in HANA. I can’t transport a visualization into Xcelsius either, or Web Intelligence. So once again SAP has presented us yet another tool that we have to figure out when to use.

John Schweitzer Keynote

John Schweitzer took the stage on Tuesday morning for the opening keynote speech. He and Adam Binnie recreated “Back to the Future” complete with a skateboard powered by a flux capacitor. They needed it to process the 1.21 petabytes of data. 😉 It was an entertaining skit, even if John messed up and called Adam “Adam” a few times rather than “Doc” as he was supposed to. 😆 I’ll post some more thoughts on the keynote when I get time.

Semantic Layer Influence Council

One of the primary benefits of ASUG membership is the ability to participate in influence councils. I have been privileged to be a member of the Semantic Layer influence council over the past year, and while I can’t tell you anything (or I will have to … you know) I can say that I am extremely pleased with the direction of the conversations and the progress being reported. Each council runs for a year, so this version will be retired and a new one will start. If you’re an ASUG member you can check on asug.com for details on when the new council opens up for applications. If you’re passionate (or at least have a passing interest) in the direction of the semantic layer, I encourage you to consider applying for a spot.

Go, Universe, Go!

I delivered my presentation titled, “Go, Universe, Go!” today just before lunch. I’ll have the session posted for download from my blog hopefully this weekend. To be honest, I covered a couple of topics that I’ve covered in some depth before here (shortcut joins and index awareness) but I also covered aggregate awareness, so expect a blog post (or two) on that subject soon.

Developer Wars!

The evening closed with the Developer Wars presentations and awards. All I can say is that if you were here at the conference and didn’t go to this event, you missed out on a lot of great fun. The teams all did fantastic, the judges tell me that the final scores were extremely close, and John Schweitzer did an awesome Simon Cowell impression. Gabe Orthous did a mean Johnny Depp impression as a member of the Irate Pie-Rates, a dragon mascot asked for chicken, and the red-tie and blue-tie candidates came to a consensus showing that apparently even politicians can make BI work. The fourth team did not do anything for costumes, but they presented four bags of groceries to the food bank, and their sponsor (Decision First) decided to award their final day booth prize ($250 gift card) to the food bank as well. The food bank provided the data for the different teams to use during the challenge.

It was great fun, and I think all of the participants agreed that we need to do it again next year.

Wrap Up

It seems like every year I have new folks coming up to me and telling me stories about how BOB or my blog or something I have done has helped them solve a problem. If you are one of those people, please know that I genuinely appreciate the fact that you share your stories with me. Knowing that I have helped people is something that never gets old, so thank you. 😎

There is a “satisfaction” poll running right now on BOB that asks folks how they feel about the Web Intelligence experience in BI 4.x. If you’re currently using BI 4, please consider logging in to vote. (Only registered BOB members can vote on polls.)

BI4 Web Intelligence Satisfaction Poll

Thanks