Tag Archives: DataDrivesMe

A Week’s Reading For May 3rd

Continue reading →

A Week’s Reading For April 25th

Continue reading →

Delusion

Behind the Romney Victory Delusion

We don’t know why the internal numbers of the Romney campaign were so far off, but I don’t think there’s an excuse. The fact is that Nate Silver, Princeton and others used models that once again predicted states correctly (Nate scored 100%), plus Senate and House races too. Reality was not only available, it was free.

This is one of the human factors of analytics: reality is not always welcome. You can beg that management not shoot the messenger, but practice ducking anyway.

Lame!!

I know lame BI when I see it. BI is lame when it show KPIs without insight into why they’re failing or succeeding. BI is lame when it shows sales figures without enough context to judge performance. BI is lame when it shows the same Top 10 Customers every day when it should show the Top 10 Customer Calls You Need To Make ASAP.

But I’ve never stopped and considered what separates lame BI from quality BI. Curt Monash, in his excellent blog, DBMS2, identifies 2 axes of Business Intelligence: operational and root cause. Into the quadrants he fit the descriptive names that belong there. That gives a matrix like so:

What this also shows is that lame BI has little to do with the product used. Real-time means “in time to make a difference”–Curt Monash uses the phrase “human real-time”–but most businesses can measure that in minutes or hours: long enough for BI to play a pivotal role. Some products do give an advantage. QlikView is excellent for investigative BI and its rapid development model makes it easy to prototype, test for value and deploy a working BI tool.

Lame BI is a product of something else. Politics leads to lame BI. Expose a KPI in a dashboard and if it goes the wrong direction someone gets blamed. Building the real-time or tactical BI to address the issue is someone else’s problem. Somehow this passes for “managing on results.”

Wishful thinking or inexperience is another cause of lame BI. People believe that having a dashboard at their fingertips, whenever, wherever, will improve management. This promise is what continues to sell lame BI. Hopefully they don’t run out of money or lose faith before getting the BI they really need.

Data quality is a major cause of lame BI. KPI’s are looking where the light is. To look at root cause in a tactical app requires that you have captured the cause. Real-time alerting requires that some actionable fact be available on a shorter timeframe than the KPI is measured.

BI is a primary interface to business data. It is often the only interface to data spanning business departments. Therefore, BI is the last stop and the most important place to add context, gain insight and influence business decisions for better or worse. Lame BI is wasting money, time and opportunity. Don’t let another lame BI tool get built in your company.