I was discussing performance management requirements with a potential customer the other day and it turned into an interesting conversation regarding the best way to approach performance metrics. They had been looking at the situation by starting with what data they had access to and then determining who might benefit most from access to that data. I’d describe that as an “inside-out” approach and as the conversation evolved we moved away from that approach to more of what I’d view as “outside-in” approach to performance management.
This approach can be summarized as: Read the rest of this article…
Whenever the use of business technology is covered in a mainstream publication, you know it is on the verge of broad adoption. So it was with interest that I read an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “So, What’s Your Algorithm?” that highlights the growing use of real-time analytics in the business world. In summary it outlines the how analytics harvested from massive databases will be used to inform day-to-day business decisions. I really like the quote that “Over time, this will change your world more than the iPad 3″ – not that I’m adverse to using my iPad.
Although the focus of the article is on analytics associated with big data applications, there are many applications for real-time and near-real-time analytics. These include aspects relating to more efficiently conducting business transactions, including: Read the rest of this article…
In the world of business intelligence and analytics, we sometimes run into a mis-understanding about what information is best presented in a tabular report versus information that is best analyzed using an interactive, analytic dashboard. It comes down to the characteristics of questions and answers that are required to enable actions or support decisions. Reports are great for static, single-question snapshots of a list of items. For example, if you need the following information, a tabular report generated from your transactional system is probably most appropriate:
- A list customers that placed an order in the last 5 days;
- A list of all students currently enrolled in a particular class;
- A list and quantity of products currently in backlog;
- A list of customers with payments outstanding for more than 60 days;
- A list of opportunities scheduled to close this week.
Another way of looking at this is that reports provide “what is” and “who are” type answers that are used to take tactical, operational actions.
Read the rest of this article…
In a recent post, I described the power of Visual Analytics, so it was gratifying to see a new report by David White of Aberdeen titled “Agile BI” that investigated the benefits of visual/interactive BI. In his survey with more than 200 respondents, David found that those using visual/interactive BI as opposed to traditional BI or a combination of both had:
- greater ability to get information on time;
- increased self-sufficiency and a greater percentage of power users;
- that users had greater capabilities to drill into detail, filter and explore data and tailor their experience.
This certainly mirrors what we perceive in the market and the capabilities we strive to deliver. Previously I have described the need for BI to operate at “business speed“, personalization and the concept of interactive investigation of data. All of these are key to delivering the requirements for rapid business insight within today’s organizations. As Aberdeen says, the decision window is shrinking which presents a challenge to IT departments and visual/interactive BI addresses this challenge and increases the business’ ability to meet the shrinking decision window.
At myDIALS, we tend to think of ourselves of providing business intelligence and analytic capabilities through a very intuitive, interactive user experience. Lately as I’ve been talking to various people in the industry, I’ve heard our capabilities described more frequently as “visual analytics”. I’ve been thinking more about this as it does describe what we do, particularly as it relates to the way we utilize analytics to help people draw more information from the data we present. We have enhanced this significantly with our upcoming myDIALS 3.4 release, and here are some examples of the sort of visual analytic workflow we now make possible.
Let’s start with a fairly standard trend dial showing overall product production: Read the rest of this article…
As a proud father, I get to watch my daughter mature, explore her universe and express her individuality in new and meaningful ways via interconnected communication mechanisms that simply weren’t available when I attended university. She has immediate access to a vast array of online data sources, can filter that information using search engines to find relevant information on topics of interest and then distill and contribute her own thoughts, and collaborate with others via Facebook, blogs, twitter etc. We’ve all seen the power of distributed information and real-time collaboration in the Middle-East and closer to home with the “Occupy ….” movement. In short, her college experience is “not her father’s experience”, and it’s probably far richer with a broader perspective and greater engagement.
The business world has similarly evolved to the point where vast amounts of data are readily available and tools exist to enable people to collaborate quickly and effectively. Of course taking advantage of that data to improve business operations and results is not so easy. This is the province of business intelligence (BI) and there are lessons from our personal lives and interactions that help provide the characteristics of effective BI: Read the rest of this article…
The primary purpose of Business Intelligence software is to turn vast amounts of business data into useful, actionable information so that business people can make better decisions, more quickly. If we take an example of a sales manager, there are typically a number of questions they have to answer on a daily basis, including:
- What is the most probable forecast for sales this period?
- To make this forecast what are the must-win deals I need to ensure close?
- Are deals moving through the sales cycle as required to ensure they close?
- Which deals in the forecast are suspect or at-risk?
- Which reps should I focus on, based on must-win or at-risk deals, past history etc?
- How is my pipeline looking for the next period?
- What is contributing to the change in the pipeline?
- How does the pipeline compare to the prior comparable / sequential period?
- Which reps should I focus on from a pipeline perspective?
Read the rest of this article…
I’ve been traveling a lot lately having initial conversations with many people from within the industry including potential customers, partners, investors – the primary reason my blog posts have slowed. At most of these meetings, I end up demonstrating myDIALS and the universal reaction is something like: “that’s a pretty user interface” to “that’s very cool”. If you haven’t seen the myDIALS interface, take a look at http://bit.ly/ofxp5d . Although our user interface has evolved over time, the basics are very similar to those outlined by my co-founder and CTO, Peter Long, when we were first getting starting. Because we live with it every day we take it for granted, but based on the positive feedback we continue to receive, I started to reflect on what makes our user interface so attractive.
I’m sure Peter could do a better job of outlining the process he works through as we created and enhance the user interface, but I believe in essence it comes down to the following (this outline is within the context of a business intelligence solution but is reasonably generic) : Read the rest of this article…
I’ve had some interesting discussions lately about the advatages of using a multi-dimensional approach to performance metrics, analysis and operational performance improvement. If you are not familiar with the concept of a multi-dimensional data store, it is a construct that enables rapid queries to be performed across any and all relevant aspects or dimensions of the data at any level in the dimensional hierarchy. To explain that a little further any metric can have multiple dimensions of interest. For example if we take sales orders we might have the following dimensions:
- Time is typically always a dimension – I might want to query for this month, last month, last quarter, year to date etc;
- Customer;
- Sales Rep;
- Product;
- Partner (if selling through or with partners);
- Marketing campaign (that generated the lead the converted to an order);
- Etc.
In each of these dimensions there can be a hierarchy, for example along the Sales Rep dimension we might have the following structural levels:
- Individual Sales Rep.
- Sales Team.
- Sales Region.
- Sales Country.
- Global Sales.
Read the rest of this article…
For some time, I’ve been very interested in the power of analytics as applied pragmatically to help people make better decisions in their every day work lives. In fact from the day we founded myDIALS, we wanted to address our personal frustrations about things that seemed to get in the way of making better, quicker business decisions. These came down to three important criteria we felt were required to change the decision making dynamic:
- Ensure everyone has access to timely information (this can vary from real time to periodic update depending on each metric characteristics);
- Allow people to personalize their information layout, content and presentation (within the constraints of security access); and
- Empower them with relevant, easy-to-use and consume analytics to aid their understanding of the situation.
I’ve previously described our approach to immediate data update in this blog and the advantage of personalization here. I’ve also blogged previously about the concept of providing analytic views to everyone in order to help them better characterize issues and determine their cause. Our approach had been to pre-configure the analytic functions associated with each Dial based on the characteristics of the underlying metrics, and allow these to be used simply by asking for an analysis view.
In the spirit of further democratizing Business Intelligence and analytics we are now taking that further and putting full control in the hands of the person making decisions, rather than the person configuring the dashboards. When viewing metrics on a dashboard, decision making can be significantly enhanced by enabling people to interactively apply different analytics and immediately see the results, for example when trying to determine what the future results of a particular metric, the person might:
- Ask for a linear trendline, switch to a polynomial or moving average trendline to see which best fits the data;
- If in doubt, they could ask for error ranges to be applied to the trendlines to see which is best fit;
- Now they ask for the most appropriate trend line to be projected forward to see the forecast.
Or maybe the decision maker might want to examine different aspects of the data being presented, and could take actions such as:
- Apply a control chart to see how tightly the values are grouped around the mean to see if the process is controlled, or if there is a systemic problem;
- Look at a histogram of the values to see if there is a clustering effect that might indicate a root cause of an issue or where to focus their investigation;
- Apply a variance analysis against the target or budget to quickly see where and when the process is performing above or below expectations;
- Look at a comparison to a prior comparable or sequential period to see if there is a seasonality affect and whether the process has improved over time.
There are other examples, but I’m sure you get the value of providing this type of interactive analytic capabilities that can be used in an iterative cycle to quickly understand what is happening, why, what are the major contributors and how to improve results.
I’m excited about these enhanced capabilities and in a future post I’ll provide more details and some screen shots to show how easy it is for everyone to be empowered with powerful, intuitive, interactive analytics.
