What’s in your toolbox?  

Attention programmers and IT professionals: we have a pipeline of contract positions waiting to be filled.  If you have minimal programming experience and/or a strong affinity for software applications, this could be your opportunity. 

Crystal Report Pros is about to release a custom “fast track” training program designed to turn you into a crystal report pro!  Built with you in mind, our training program is the product of a partnership between one of the business intelligence  industry’s leading crystal reports experts and one of the top learning and development professionals in the country.  It’s the best of both worlds.

Stay tuned!

What’s wrong with Mikey?  He knows a stinky crystal report when he sees one.  Stinky reports come from stinky business intelligence practices.  So, continuing on our theme, here are some of the worst business intelligence practices:

1. Assuming the average business user has the time, inclination, or expertise to use BI tools
2. Using Microsoft Excel as the default BI platform
3. Believing that a data warehouse will solve all information access and delivery requirements
4. Selecting BI tools without a specific business need

One of the biggest issues we continually run across in our work with clients is a lack of clarity around business objectives.  Not having a clear picture of the end goal underlies all four of these worst business intelligence practices.  Ironic, isn’t it?  As data driven as our profession is, often times we forget the most important data – clarifying the business objectives and goals.  It’s up to us as business intelligence professionals to have the right conversations with the right people in our organizations to help clarify the goals. 

Keep your stakeholders – and Mikey – happy.  Help your stakeholders clarify their business intelligence goals.

Is failure an option for you?  Of course not – nobody wants to fail.  Yet why do so many business intelligence initiatives fail?

The lack of a clear, well developed and articulated BI strategy along with appropriate executive sponsorship are among the top reasons why BI initiatives do not achieve their potential or fail outright.

These words are from Bill Hostmann, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner.  To this I would add a lack of execution.  You can have a clear, well developed and articulated strategy, but if you don’t execute properly on that strategy, it won’t work. 

Here are a few more reasons why business intelligence initiatives fail:

1. Data quality issues – garbage in, garbage out.  Bad data leads to bad decisions.
2. Inability to adapt – requirements will change as your organization grows and evolves.  Be flexible!
3. Outsourcing – those implementing your BI initiative must understand and have an intimate knowledge of how your company works, its history, policies, practices, and customer demographics.  Intangible capital anyone?

Can you think of other reasons?

It’s no secret – the influence of social media channels is large, and growing.  Opportunities abound for companies willing to engage consumers via these channels.  Perhaps you’ve seen the Old Spice Guy videos on YouTube, in which he personally responded to Tweets from various celebrities and others?  Yeah, well Old Spice body wash sales DOUBLED as a result.

Still not convinced of the ROI of social media?  Check out this video by Socialnomics:

Some staggering statistics, no?  So what does all this say about us as individuals?  There’s no denying we are social creatures.  Something fundamental about our humanity drives us to connect with each other.  But what are the implications of this for the organizations we spend most of our time in, plying our trade?  Human beings are social . . . organizations are made up of human beings . . . ergo, organizations are social.

Organizations are more than just the brick and mortar, the equipment, the computers, the data, even the human resources, alone.  There is something about an organization, taken together as a whole, that is greater than the sum of its parts.  As social media continues to prove an effective channel to engage consumers, the question must be asked, can these channels help a company become more intelligent?  What does the astronomical rise of social media tell us about how people relate, connect and share information, and can organizations leverage this power for their own good?  It is our contention that the “intangible” assets of an organization – those which make it a living, breathing, intelligent organism – provide a real competitive advantage, if harnessed and leveraged properly.  This is what the “knowledge management” movement has been trying to get its hands around for so long.  If what makes an organization unique and competitive in the marketplace is its knowledge, so the argument goes, then this knowledge must be strategically and actively managed.

The question is not if, but how.  How can the principles and the tools of social media be used to help unleash latent knowledge and skill within an organization, to help it become more efficient, more effective – more competitive?  Further, how can business intelligence tools be used to help organizations measure and highlight the knowledge intangibles of an organization – to help drive innovation and to help managers make better decisions, faster?

James Kobielus at Information Management has identified some possibilities:

• Social BI interactivity: Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and kindred models of user-centric development, publishing, and subscription tools will move into the heart of the interactive BI user experience.  We’ll also see more solutions that enable reports, dashboards, charts, and other BI views to be embedded in social media.
• Social BI content marts: We can expect to see more BI solutions that support extension and/or replacement of traditional data marts with vast user-populated pools of complex, mashed-up, subject-oriented analytic content and applications.
• Social BI information integration: Users will be able to choose from a growing range of BI solutions that support discovery, capture, monitoring, mining, classification, and predictive analysis on growing streams of social media content, much of it coming in real-time from both public and private sources.

Smart companies see themselves as living, breathing organisms, and seek to leverage their knowledge assets to compete in the marketplace.  The social media tidal wave is here, indeed.  Are you swimming with the current?

Check out this SAP Business One success story by by SAP-TV.  Style West, a branding, distribution and marketing company for apparel and footwear brands, implemented SAP Business One to set themselves up for continued growth and success.  SAP Business One provides Style West with views into their inventory across multiple divisions, tracking all transactions from order to cash.  Check out their story!

Remember when Steve Jobs called out mobile analytics firm Flurry for collecting device data about Apple’s products?  Well, that mini soap opera opened a door for MixPanel.  Says a report from TechCrunch:

MixPanel has been a popular analytics company for about a year now.  In fact, they recently announced they were tracking a billion actions a month across a wide variety of applications on the web.  But that was only web applications (including Facebook apps), now they’re going mobile.

The company is launching an iPhone SDK library.  By inserting just a few lines of code into their apps, customers will be able to get MixPanel data in realtime.  And realtime is the key, while other analytics services say they have realtime data, MixPanel claims their’s is the fastest.  “We’ve built better plumbing,” Founder Suhail Doshi says.

They also believe it’s the most comprehensive.  While they aren’t tracking device data per Apple’s rules, they are offering “hardcore type analytics” that services have grown accustomed to on platforms like Facebook.  For example, in an iPhone game, you could track which users choose which weapon when they play the game on a certain level.  Or in an app like Yelp, you could tell which types of pages men keep coming back to.

Doshi compared the current crop of analytics services on the iPhone to Google Analytics — that is, more topical.  He says MixPanel offers more “sophisticated tracking.”

Really cool stuff.  Now let’s hope Mr. Jobs plays nice with MixPanel.

Wayne Eckerson says the key to analytics is asking the right questions.  Any analyst can find the answer to any question.  The key is knowing what questions to ask.  The best questions (and the best analysts) test assumptions about what makes the business tick.  Often, the obvious metrics aren’t the ones that produce the results you’re looking for.

Says Eckerson:

TDWI always mails conference brochures 12 weeks before an event.  Why?  No one really knows; that’s how it’s always been done.  Ideally, we should conduct periodic experiments.  Before one event, we should send a small set of brochures 11 weeks beforehand and another small set 13 weeks prior.  And while we’re at it, we should test the impact of direct mail versus electronic delivery on response rates.

These types of analyses don’t take sophisticated mathematical software and expensive analysts; just time, effort, and a willingness to challenge long-held assumptions.  And the results are always worth the effort; they can either validate or radically alter the way we think our business operates.  Either way, the information impels us to fine-tune or restructure core business processes that can lead to better bottom-line results.

Analysts are typically bright people with strong statistical skills who are good at crunching numbers.  Yet, the real intelligence required for analytics is a strong dose of common sense combined with a fearlessness to challenge long-held assumptions.

Are you asking the right questions?

So you’ve determined the key numbers and metrics you need to measure in your organization.  What’s next?  How do you make it work?

The key to making it all work is to have a good, single point accountable person (SPA) whose job it is to really dig into the different areas.  You’ll want this person to be able to highlight important trends or patterns in the data, so you can identify warning signs or significant opportunities.

You’ll also want to have a master list of who is responsible for what.  Build yourself a simple spreadsheet that has columns showing the metric in question, who is responsible for it, how often it will be reviewed, its status, etc.

 And keep it simple.  It’s easy to get all wrapped up in the data (like the guy on the left here).  Resist the temptation!  Keep it simple. 

So says Mary Adams, author of the new book Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century in a post entitled How can we use IT to optimize our Intellectual Capital?  We all live and work in the knowledge era, and we all know knowledge is where competitive advantage lies.  But it is the “operationalization” of knowledge that is the real key to success:

The real value comes when it is captured and operationalized in re-usable form.  Think training content or work processes.  Even better is when these processes are automated.  Then knowledge becomes re-usable and almost infinitely scalable.

That’s where IT comes in.  Information technology is the “steam engine” of the knowledge era.  It’s the technology that changes everything.  To a huge extent, however, it is still viewed as isolated tools that we use because we have to.

But IT has the potential to create infinite value by helping you capture and operationalize knowledge.

Hellooo, BI people of the world!

Michael Fitzgerald over at Computerworld says business intelligence is going mobile.  So what’s new?  Haven’t some companies been delivering business intelligence via mobile for some time now?  Well, yes:

But then the recession hit, and that stymied investment in mobile BI product development and marketing, Hatch says.

What the recession didn’t stop was the development of mobile gadgetry, most especially the iPhone, the iPad and the various Android phones. These new mobile hardware devices can finally handle the complexities of BI, Hatch says.

Companies are responding aggressively. In a May 2010 Aberdeen survey, 23% of the companies responding said that they now have a mobile BI application or dashboard in place, and another 31% said that they plan to implement some type of mobile business intelligence within the next year.

Instant access to real-time data to make real-time decisions, wherever you are in the world.  Cool stuff!