Mike Urbonas – Product Marketing/Management and Business Intelligence Blog

Is this all the proof we need this child got an A+ in Handwriting?! Photo: A Taridona (Flickr CC)

Using the WordPress Tag Surfer feature, I just very quickly found a great interview of Timo Elliott, Senior Product Director for SAP Business Objects by fellow WordPress blogger Ajay Ohri (DecisionStats). Timo Elliot was employee number 8 for (SAP) Business Objects!

Timo Elliot weighs in thoughtfully on a number of different BI topics and future BI challenges, but the part of the interview that stood out for me was Timo Elliot’s comments when asked about BI and social media. Social media facilitates communication between lots of people, which could be used to enable large teams to collectively interpret business intelligence results; in other words, using collective intelligence as an aid for effective business intelligence:

Conversations and collaboration are an essential part of effective business intelligence … (W)hile it’s vital to try to give everybody access to the same data, there will always be plenty of room for interpretation and discussion. BI platforms need to support this collaborative decision-making.

In particular, there are many, many studies that show up our all-too-human limitations when it comes to analyzing data. For example, did you know that children with bigger feet have better handwriting? 

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I read a very interesting article in yesterday’s Boston Sunday Globe entitled The Truth About Grit, by Jonah Lehrer. The sailent point of Lerher’s article is “grit” is an essential, and often overlooked, component of success, say researchers. In fact, a strong sense of “grit,” aka “gumption,” is an even more important (actually, much more) determinant of success than high intelligence. Intelligence is important, but having a high IQ is not nearly enough for success.

Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, helped pioneer the study of grit. Her explanation of what grit is and how she came to research it is of value not only for individual career success, but the success of any business enterprise:

I first got interested in grit after watching how my friends fared after college. Those who were less successful were often just as smart and talented, but they were constantly changing plans and trying something new. They never stuck with anything long enough to get really good at it…

I’d bet that there isn’t a single highly successful person who hasn’t depended on grit. Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that’s what grit allows you to do…

Grit is very much about the big picture.  [It's not about short term goals;] it’s about picking a specific goal off in the distant future and not swerving from it (emphasis added).

Lehrer also mentions compelling research by Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, which found that a group of randomly selected New York City fifth graders praised for their effort and hard work improved their performance on a difficult test by 30 percent, while another random group who had been praised for their intelligence saw their scores actually drop by 20 percent. In other words, children praised for hard work soldiered on while kids put on a pedestal for their intelligence were much more likely to become discouraged by setbacks.

This same research is quoted by Malcolm Gladwell in his classic 2002 New Yorker piece, The Talent Myth, laying bare the ruinous and reckless assumption of Enron, and their enabling McKinsey consultants, that very high intelligence alone is the deteminant of success. Gladwell’s article is a must read to also understand how raw intelligence is overrated in the workplace (to a beyond the pale extreme in Enron), while grit often remains overlooked:

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Dan E. Linstedt has written many thought-provoking business intelligence topics; I have quoted his insights many times over the course of my BI product marketing work. Recently Dan blogged on the B-Eye-Network on the future of BI, wondering aloud why BI hasn’t seen the kind of visualization breakthroughs that continue on at breakneck pace in the gaming industry, resulting in games like Rock Star, Guitar Hero and more:

[W]e’re still dealing with the old column based [BI] delivery mechanisms, and we think that Pivot tables are “cool”…  Man, we’re stuck in the 80′s here people…

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Hire a game programmer to make BI/Analytics interesting, fun and maybe even addicting! What? And disturb the balance? What balance? What’s the hotest selling game out there (according to informal fad’s and polls and what I see selling)… maybe Guitar Hero? It’s on all the platforms. What does it do that makes you play it for hours on end?

INTERACT… It gives you a set speed, a set song, a stage, and a fake guitar with 5 buttons on it – you have (what seems like) infinite combinations of notes and speeds of notes to place your fingers on the buttons. Your skill level determines how fast the game goes…

Ok – so maybe the themes aren’t right for BI and analytics, but jeepers creepers, when I open up an application and the data sits there – I feel like I’m sitting in an elevator in the 1970′s listening to elevator music, waiting to push a floor button. Dry, Dry, Dry…

I like Dan’s line of inquiry here and so took up his challenge to reflect on this topic. What’s clear to me is the visual breakthroughs that have made games like Guitar Hero, Madden (NFL football) and countless others possible have been driven by the active demand of end users themselves, while this same end user demand for more realistic, graphical experiences doesn’t really exist for BI…

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