I was recently invited by recruitment consultancy La Fosse to chair an roundtable event for fellow Business Intelligence professionals. We held the meeting last Thursday evening in London. There was a good turn out with delegates representing the following industries (number of attendees in brackets):

• Insurance and affiliated (5, including me)
• Investment Banking and affiliated (2)
• Manufacturing (2)
• Media (2)
• Aviation (1)
• Public Sector (1)
• On-line (1)

As chair there is always the dread of the tumbleweed moment; everyone staring at each other with nothing to say. However, I needn’t have worried as each of the group members had a lot to share based on their extensive and varied experiences in the area. We started at 6pm, rolled through the call for early departures at 7:45pm and dissolved into smaller groups around 8:30pm. As several people said via e-mail the next day, without journeys home to consider, we could have happily kept talking for several more hours.

There were a number of encouraging aspects to the event. First of all, in chatting to various people before we formally kicked off, I found that many (like me) had worked in a number of industries in addition to the one where they were currently employed. There was general agreement with my view that this can often broaden perspectives and that at least several central elements of BI are pretty transportable between different areas of business endeavour. Of course in-depth exposure to one sector is invaluable, but leavening this with a few years in different sorts of organisations can produce a more rounded individual with a wider range of experiences.

The second encouraging aspect was the nature of the conversations. There was little interest in the latest and greatest technological tools (though we did spend a bit of time on the almost mandatory topic of Big Data). Instead virtually everyone wanted to talk about the human aspects of their BI programmes; past and present. Questions included: how to generate enthusiasm; how to reflect business needs when these were often changing in line with rapidly shifting strategic and competitive environments; how to both provide payback and demonstrate that you were doing this; how to become an embedded part of the business, not a technology bystander. People were happy to offer examples of what had worked (and failed to work) for them and to enrich these with interesting anecdotes and pertinent analogies. I suppose if I achieved anything as chairman (and it was a relatively easy group to chair), this was to ensure that everyone had some airtime.

It would be untrue to say that there was unanimity on all points; some things had worked for some people, different ones for others. However it is fair to say that, at least at a conceptual level, there was a degree of commonality of opinion about success factors. More positively (and in line with my now ancient article A bad workman blames his [Business Intelligence] tools), no one felt that the answer to the challenges they faced was the latest dashboard or data visualisation tool. Most people felt that we have had the technological tools and general knowhow to succeed in information-centric programmes for years, if not decades. Reasons for success and failure have always been (and remain) in the rather messier areas of business engagement, sound programme management, strong communications, pragmatism and responsiveness to developing needs.

While the fact that so many BI practitioners shared these (in my opinion) well-informed views is perhaps not great news for the vendors of information platforms and tools, it does suggest that – after a troubled childhood – BI is coming of age. In established and well-understood areas of business what counts is not technology, but how you apply it and align this with what people need. If this approach is becoming mainstream in Business Intelligence, and on the evidence of last week’s meeting is it, then maturity seems to be within reach; truly an encouraging thought.
 

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This IRM UK event will be taking place in central London from the 5^th to 7^th November 2012. As ever, it is co-located with the IRM Data Management & Information Quality Conference. Full details may be obtained from the IRM conference web-site here.

The title of my presentation is: “Formulating a Business Intelligence / Data Warehousing Strategy”.
 

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The following article could claim some connections with both mathematics and social media, but in truth relates to neither. Its focus is instead on irritation, specifically a Facebook meme that displays the death-defying resilience of a horror movie baddie. My particular bête noire relates to the following diagram, which appears on my feed more frequently that adverts for “Facebook singles”:

It is generally accompanied by some inane text, the following being just one example:

I got into a heated battle with a friend over this… I got 24 she say’s 25. How many squares do you see?

Nice grocer’s apostrophe BTW!

I realise that the objective is probably to encourage people to point out the error in the ways of the original poster; thereby racking up comments. However 24?, 25??, really???, really, really????

Let’s break it down…

Well there is clearly one big square (a 4×4 one) staring us in the face as shown above. Let’s move on to a marginally less obvious class of squares and work these through in long-hand. The squares in this class are all 3×3 and there are 4 of them as follows:

1…

2…

3…

4…

Adding the initial 4×4 square, our running total is now 5.

The next class is smaller again, 2×2 squares. The same approach as above works, not all the class members are shown, but readers can hopefully fill in the blanks themselves.

1…

2…

Skip a few…

9…

Adding our previous figure of 5 means our running total is now 14; we are approaching 24 and 25 fast, which one is it going to be?

The next class is the most obvious, the sets of larger 1×1 squares.

It doesn’t require a genius to note that there are 16 of these. Oh dear, the mid-twenties estimates are not looking so good now.

Also we shouldn’t forget the two further squares of the same size (each of which is split into smaller ones), one of which is shown in the diagram above.

Our previous total was 14 and now 14 + 16 + 2 = 32.

Finally there is the second set of 1×1 squares, the smaller ones.

It’s trivial to see that there are 8 of these.

Adding this to the last figure of 32 we get a grand total of 40, slightly above both 24 and 25.

Perhaps the only thing of any note that this rather simple exercise teaches us is the relation to sums of squares, inasmuch as part of the final figure is given by: 1 + 4 + 9 + 16, or 1² + 2² + 3² + 4² = 30. Even this is rather spoiled by introducing the intersecting (and interloping) two squares that are covered last in the above analysis.

Oh well, at least now I never have to comment on this annoying “puzzle” again, which is something.
 

Michael Koploy of on-line technology consulting company Software Advice recently asked me, together with four other people from the Business Intelligence / Data Warehousing community, to contribute some definitions of commonly-used technology jargon pertinent to our field. The results can be viewed in his article, BI Buzzword Breakdown. Readers may be interested in the differing, but hopefully complementary, definitions that were offered.

In jockeying for space with my industry associates, only one of my definitions (that relating to Data Mining) was used. Here are two others, which were left on the cutting room floor. Maybe they’ll make it to the DVD extras.

The above comments are perhaps most notable for representing my first reference to the latest information hot topic, the rather misleadingly named Big Data. To date I have rather avoided the rampaging herd in this area – maybe through fear of being crushed in the stampede – but it is probably a topic to which I will return once there is less hype and more substance to comment on.
 

Disclosure #1: As is inevitable for any IT professional, the author has used Microsoft’s enterprise products at many points during his career. As is inevitable for any sentient inhabitant of planet Earth, he has used their more broadly targeted software on a daily basis for longer than he can remember (many of the images on this site were created via the combination of Visio supplemented by the non-MS – and horribly old school – PaintShop Pro). He has no direct holdings in Microsoft, but undoubtedly must have some interest in the company indirectly via pension or investment funds; something that would probably also hold for all of Microsoft’s main competitors.

Disclosure #4: The author has neither seen directly, nor further still touched a Surface – though if Microsoft wanted to remedy this situation, he would at the very least guarantee them a thorough (and professionally neutral) review.

It’s somewhat odd to report that I am rather excited by an announcement Redmond’s finest (with apologies to Nintendo America). Like many people I have had a love / hate relationship with the Washington behemoth for more years than I care to remember; having lived through the hype and subsequent let down of every MS O/S since 95. Come to think of it, as my girlfriend suggests, that would be a great slogan: “Microsoft – disappointing expectant millions since 1995!”

Maybe my general take on the firm’s recent output was best summed up by another noted industry commentator:

“My new computer came with Windows 7. Windows 7 is much more user-friendly than Windows Vista. I don’t like that.”

However, having had to put up with umpteen technology industry commentators sycophantically parroting Cupertino’s “the PC is dead, long live the tablet” mantra over the last few years, it is gratifying to think that there may (and I stress may) soon be a tablet available that is also a proper computer; i.e. one that you can actually do useful things on, rather than fashion accessory cum entertainment centre with a bad browser and support for only for the type of games that you can play equally well on your Facebook page. Please don’t get me wrong, as I mention above, I’m as much a fan of Angry Birds as the next guy, but as a lapsed gamer myself I can hopefully tell the difference between a gaming platform and an amusing diversion.

The ubiquitous iPad has been touted as bringing computing to the non-technically literate masses. Instead it has brought a grossly watered down ability to conspicuously consume at the expense of any support for creative activities. In my opinion, the oft repeated phrase that “there’s an app for that” tends only to work when “that” is a pretty narrow range of activities. I’m on my iPad; I want to update my Facebook status – tick; I want to upload an un-edited photo I just took – tick (on some models at least); I want to tweet something (maybe even including a URL I have copied from elsewhere) – tick (fiddly as this might be); I want to write a lightly formatted blog post without too many typos and which includes a couple of images I have either lightly-edited, or created from scratch – um…

That’s where most types of tablet seem to hit their limit, Android as well as iOS (and undoubtedly Amazon’s offering as well); casual surfing (be it browser or other app based), checking mail, watching a movie, working out what street I am on, simple social medial interactions. These things are all OK and all are light on content creation. Anything else (even a lengthy e-mail – something I specialise in) quickly becomes a chore. Pointedly, all of the things that I have mentioned working well on tablets, also work at least to close to as well on a decent sized smart ‘phone, which also has the benefit of actually being portable and also (at least in most cases) of being a ‘phone.

So, given my zeitgeist-busting lack of whelmedness with tablets, where does that leave Ballmer’s latest offering. Well, let’s discount the ARM-based, “me too” version (with apologies to my fellow inhabitants of Cambridge; East Anglia, not Massachusetts) and focus on the Ivy Bridge-powered Surface Pro. This is (as far as can be discerned from the [limited] information that Redmond have thusfar divulged) where the real attention will inevitably focus. As the BBC’s (oft lampooned) technology correspondent states:

“At one small business this week – my excellent local optician – I learned that the owner plans to replace all his PCs with Surface tablets when they come out. Why not go straight to iPads, I wondered – only to learn that just about every ophthalmic application was Windows-based.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18626087

I.e. there are an awful lot of proper, grown-up applications out there which only work on the dreadfully uncool WinTel platform. Indeed, outside of the creative industries (like other parts of industry can’t be creative?) and parts of science that rely upon tuned-up versions of graphical software that emanates essentially from the former (or which were provided “free” back in the day by those awfully nice Apple chaps), most business-focussed software (that is not already web-based) is WinTel based.

The idea of a proper computer that can (as far as we can tell at present) support all of the above, plus coming in a conveniently portable tablet-like package; but – crucially – with adult input devices like (shock-horror) a keyboard and track-pad and (even more shock and even more horror) a DisplayPort port for those tasks (like many of mine) where at 10” monitor is way too small and (Nightmare on Elm Street levels of horror) a USB 3.0 port; sounds awfully like the tablet concept coming of age (or, for those with an historical bent, fulfilling the vision that Bill Gates originally outlined for the device, long before the late Steve Jobs imbued it with his irreplaceable and inimitable coolness).

Many much wiser commentators than me have stated that the Surface will live or die based on the quality and extent of the app ecosystem it develops around it. For me the Pro has all the apps you could ever need, the Windows ones that people use to actually do things.

Of course the devil is in those (perhaps worryingly as yet undisclosed) details. What will the precise specs of the Surface Pro processor and RAM be? What is the screen resolution? How long will the battery last? How good a keyboard substitute will the Type Cover be in practice? Why on Earth does the RT come with Office and the machine set up to run it properly apparently doesn’t? Will Metro be pleasurable to use in those (infrequent) moments when all you actually want is an entertainment platform? These will all become clear in time no doubt, and there is obviously more than enough scope for Microsoft to disappoint me again. However, at present I am holding on to the glimmer of hope that this time they have got it right. If they have, the Surface could be very good indeed. As Don Maclean never sang:

I quite like WordPress.com’s latest data visualisation tool, which allows you to see the spread of people reading your blog. The data only goes back to February 25th 2012 and presumably a number of hits can have no country attributed to them, but it’s still a nice addition and interesting for me to see the number of different places that readers come from.

Perhaps we’ll gloss over the Mercator Projection and also how annoying and fiddly the WordPress app for iOS is; then things are always harder on iPad – right?
 

This IRM UK event will be taking place in central London from the 7^th to 9^th November 2011. It is co-located with the IRM Data Management & Information Quality Conference. Full details may be obtained from the IRM conference web-site here. I am speaking on the morning of the 9^th and will be building on themes introduced in my previous artcile: A Single Version of the Truth?
 

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Business Intelligence Group

 
The following is a lightly edited transcript of a reply I posted to a question asked on the LinkedIn.com Business Intelligence Group. This was entitled What should companies consider before investing in a BI solution?.

I suggest some of the following:

1. What business problems would a BI solution address?
2. Within these, what questions do people want to ask and what action will the answers lead to?
3. Why can’t these people get the answers today, or – if they can – what is wrong with them (incomplete, inaccurate, not detailed enough etc.)?
4. What is the business impact of the lack of these answers (poor decision-making, missed opportunities, inefficient processes, poor monitoring, lack of tools to manage people’s performance)?
5. If these questions were to be answered, broadly speaking, which different data sources would need to be brought together (assess different country / divisional systems and different types of systems – sales, Finance, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, complaints, external data, others)?
6. How aligned are the various different elements within these (e.g. customer records, products, territories etc.)?
7. To what level is the data required to answer the questions identified above captured (are there gaps and does new data need to be entered)?
8. How accurate is this data (does it actually reflect business events)?
9. What is the overall quantity of both historical and current data that needs to be looked at and how much of this regularly changes?
10. How frequently will users need to ask questions and how up-to-date does the answer need to be?

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Although tinyurl.com was a pioneer in URL shortening, it seems to have been overtaken by a host of competing services. For example I tend to use bit.ly most of the time. However I still rather like the tinyurl.com option to create your own bespoke shortened URLs.

This feature rather came into its own recently when I was looking for a concise way to share my recent trilogy focusing on the use of historical data to justify BI/DW investments in Insurance. There is something satisfying in thinking that the following will persist as long as tinyurl.com does:

It is nice to make a [semi-] permanent mark from time to time!
 

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It’s almost enough to make me forgive them for Gmail’s consider including “feature”. Almost!
 

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