Mike Urbonas – Product Marketing Blog – Business Intelligence Blog – Personal Branding Blog – Job Search Blog

In May 2009 I blogged about an article by BI authority and writer Dan E. Linstedt in which Dan called for a visualization breakthrough in business intelligence, on a par with the graphical breakthroughs seen in such popular games as Guitar Hero. I suggested that “most of the ‘must have’ visual features of BI are already fairly well covered” and “this same end user demand for more realistic, graphical experiences [as for gamers] doesn’t really exist for BI.” I agreed with Dan that BI should be “used” and not be “merely useful,” but innovations were better focused on such breathtaking areas as…Excel integration. Okay, Mike!

My suggestions were, in fact, already soundly debunked by global health professor and data visionary Hans Rosling in his simply amazing 2006 and 2007 TED talks, which I have just gotten around to discovering for myself. Hans Rosling’s presentations prove a “Guitar Hero-style experience” with data is not only possible but also highly beneficial. Hans Rosling turned global health and poverty data into graphically engaging, focused, insightful, compelling, even exciting stories. I am certain you will be captivated by both presentations and be as convincingly informed by them as I was. Here they are…

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Photo: mrwilleeumm (Flickr)

Recently I blogged on how organizations all too often “do the wrong things right” (see part 1) due to misguided, fundamentally flawed traditional management techniques of rule enforcement and incentives. I also noted that Business Intelligence/Business Performance Management (BI/BPM) software is often misused by supporting misguided rule enforcement and incentives. In other words, many companies are unwittingly “measuring the wrong things right” to help “do the wrong things right”!

I have repeatedly pointed to Barry Schwartz’ related TED talk in past postings (here and also here) for good reason: I think any successful deployment of BI/BPM solutions must begin with full awareness of Barry Schwartz’ warning that rule enforcement and incentives will often lead workers to “stop being wise” — that is, unwittingly discourage workers from independently “doing the right thing” in a given work situation. I also believe organizations can and do unwittingly misuse BI/BPM solutions to help “do the wrong things right” by “measuring the wrong things right.” 

I cited a worker behavior example in my above-linked posts. Consider a much bigger, all too real example: CEOs have been compensated quite handsomely — even grotesquely – only to see the companies in their care later implode. Why? Because those CEOs were often heavily comped on one key measure, most notably increasing stock price. Unfortunately, many a CEO “earned” treasure troves of incentives for hitting that higher stock price, only to be found out later the CEO failed to do so in a sustainable, ethical or even legal manner. It’s as if the CEO stuck his or her hand over a glass thermometer, made the measured temperature go “up” and then proclaimed, “See? The room is warmer now! Where’s my bonus?!”

OK, so how can organizations “measure the right things right” and “do the right things right”? It all starts with the company’s mission statement.

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“[I know of] employees who plan ahead to sit next to their CEO on a five-hour flight to bend his or her ear, thinking it will boost their career.  Don’t do it! Again, it’s an example of doing the wrong things right, which will only harm your career.” — Jeffrey Fox

The phrase “doing the wrong things right” came up in in my phone interview with best selling business author Jeffrey Fox for an article available on this blog.  And if I recall our conversation correctly, someone really did do the ‘annoy the CEO for five hours on a plane’ tactic, thinking it would help their career. It didn’t.

I Googled “doing the wrong things right” and found a very interesting blog, The Effective CIO by Chuck Musciano, and a very relevant article Right or Wrong? Well or Poorly? (One quibble: for Chuck’s chart (see left) accompanying his blog post, it is the “doing the wrong things right” quadrant that should be red; doing the wrong things with relentless speed and efficiency is the worst of all possible worlds!)

From Chuck Musciano’s post:

Doing the wrong things right is often known as “paving cowpaths.”  Some awful business processes are so entrenched that they cannot be rooted out.  Discretion being the better part of valor, we choose to automate bad processes, throwing good technology at a bad system.

Hear, hear!  But how do such awful business processes come into being in the first place?  I suggest those ‘cowpaths to hell’ were paved with good but badly misguided intentions, using misguided information. 

I think the key cause to “doing the wrong things right” from a BI perspective is clearly traceable back to “measuring the wrong things right.” 

While browsing the plentiful BI blogs on the BEyeNetwork, I came across a recent posting by business perfomance management expert Craig Schiff.  I have read many of Craig’s insightful articles, but a recent blog posting of his led me to concern over “measuring the wrong things right.”  Specifically, Craig wrote:

The holy grail of business performance management (BPM) is to compensate people based on their achievement of corporate, departmental, and individual goals and objectives. While BPM is good at measuring progress against objectives, it is of little value if it doesn’t change people’s behavior, which in turn should help improve the bottom line. Incentive compensation based on what is being measured by the BPM system is a way to do that.

It is true that setting incentives will change employee behavior, but unfortunately not as often for the better as one might imagine.  I have major concerns with the concept of widespread, heavily incentive-driven compensation, based on the certain data measures tracked by a BPM/BI solution…

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Recently WordPress announced it is now easy to embed video from TED conferences, past and present. That’s very good news, as I very much want to share a particular presentation which especially resonated with me, and for many who had the good fortune to be in attendance: a TED talk by Barry Schwartz appealing for wisdom in the workplace and beyond.

The good news is you don’t have to be brilliant to be wise. The bad news is that without wisdom, brilliance isn’t enough. It’s as likely to get you and other people into trouble as anything else. — Barry Schwartz

You can view Schwartz’s talk now (Thanks, WordPress!):

I reflected on Barry Schwartz’s fine presentation from a business intelligence perspective. Consider Barry Schwartz’s compelling example of janitors who modify or skip their usual tasks for the benefit of patients and their families. Now imagine a supervisor, relying only on the numbers from time and attendance reports, who might reprimand these janitors for not completing their work tasks in a timely manner (rule enforcement)! Similarly, consider a supervisor, again relying on reports, has the epiphany to offer a wage incentive for janitors to complete their tasks ahead of schedule.

In both cases, supposedly justified by business intelligence, rules or incentives might be enforced that unwittingly discourage janitors from performing their tasks with empathy and in the long run will have a detrimental impact on patient care…

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