Mike Urbonas – Product Marketing/Management and Business Intelligence Blog

Source: Rick Steves Press Room

I am a longtime fan of Rick Steves, host of the long-running PBS television series Rick Steves Europe and author of an extensive series of European travel guides. His London guide helped me make the most of limited free time while traveling to the old world on business.  I hope to return sooner rather than later!

Always keeping an eye out for interesting business analogies, I suggest Rick Steves and highly user-friendly BI tools actually have a lot in common.   For openers, Rick Steves has a knack of making European travel as non-intimidating as possible for new travelers; very user-friendly BI tools help eliminate the ‘intimidation factor’ non-technical personnel might feel when trying to use an analytical tool. 

I think the analogy between Rick Steves’ brand of travel and user-friendly BI tools goes much deeper, after reading Rick Steves’ unique travel philosophy…  Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: ThisIsIt2 - Flickr CC

Somehow, until recently, I had overlooked a particular Neil Raden BeyeNETWORK blog entry which really struck a chord.  The title speaks for itself: You Cannot Fix a Broken Company by Measuring How Broken it is.  Neil Raden’s post goes to the heart of what Business Intelligence is, and what it is not.  From Neil’s post:

The BI industry has sort of casually sent the message that BI makes companies better. I’ve seen this in presentations, webinars, seminars, books and blogs from vendors, practitioners and analysts. But the question is, once you expose something that needs attention, what next? As a consultant and implementer of data warehousing and BI for many years, I never really came up with a good answer…

And here is an especially important comment:

Even when we did everything we set out to do [in a BI/DW consulting engagement], when approaching management about the next phase of the operation, to help the client start addressing the problems with employee morale, high turnover, inventory snafus, poor customer service, etc., the response was usually something like, “Neil, aren’t you the data warehouse guy? Shouldn’t we get McKinsey in here to work on that?”

I empathize with Neil and this ‘You’re just the techie’ brush-off, but management’s response to Neil’s inquiry raises much more serious concern: the first response by management to address serious business problems was to bring in outside consultants…?  Was the accidental point of the response that the company’s executives perceive they cannot effectively address, on their own, the issues identified by Neil Raden’s BI solution?

One more quote from Neil’s post:

In short, if you’re involved with BI, you may have as good or even better insight into what is going on in the company, but you clearly lack the portfolio to do anything about it…

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Source: Lifehacker.com

I just read a clever tip on the Lifehacker website on how to easily reuse sturdy electronic device boxes for shipping or storage: turn the box inside out.  Many electronic device boxes use no glue or tape at all, making the process very easy.  You end up with a like-new, “fresh” box ready for easy labeling for shipping, storage use, etc.

In fact, a shipping box company has taken the inside-out box idea further with a reusable box design that turns inside out, by enabling easy removal and reattachment one of the glued box edges.

This tip suggested to me a business metaphor: Think outside the box by turning it inside-out! After all, that’s one thing that takes place when implementing a business intelligence system: data and insights previously not visible become available for many, if not all, people in the organization to see.  That can be regarded as a boon or a liability depending on one’s perspective.  Indeed, a significant hindrance to business intelligence acceptance is the perceived loss of control over the data, and therefore perceived risk of judgment and  reprisal, of one’s department, region, product line, etc.  In her book Successful Business Intelligence, Cindi Howson quoted a senior executive who said, “Some departments don’t like [their] data being exposed…others may see they are not doing a good job…” (p. 159).

Maureen Clary wrote an excellent article for the BeyeNETWORK on proactively addressing people problems that might derail a business intelligence initiative.

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