Oz Analytics

Day 1 Week 5 of the CORTEX MBAnalytics

Welcome to week 5 - part of the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX.

The CORTEX

Master of Business Analytics

Week 5, Day 1

Theme: Analytic Errors

Week 5, Monday

This week's theme is mistakes. Today we look at the analytic implications with the old trick of astroturfing finding new impetus in social media. 

LISTEN     Today's task: Don't trust the web     23MB (also streamed below)

50 minutes

'Don't Trust The Web', presented by Hagar Cohen, ABC Radio National's Background Briefing. Broadcast yesterday. Also available online here.

Key takeout: Armies of analysts are being employed to mine social media. It should be commonly accepted that social media will suffer from a variety of types of manipulation. How often, though, are these biases taken into account? How does this impact the quality of the resulting analysis?

As always, comments, questions and ideas are all welcome. 

The MBAnalytics is just one part of the Business Intelligence CORTEX - a community of Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Analytics and Project Management professionals in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Membership is free and the forums are very active with over 20,000 posts offering a uniquely Australasian viewpoint.

Day 4 Week 3 of the CORTEX MBAnalytics

Continuing week 3 - part of the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX.

The CORTEX

Master of Business Analytics

Week 3, Day 4

Theme: Communication & Collaboration

Week 3, Thursday

This week's themes are communication, and if you are listening and willing, a resulting collaboration. 

WATCH    Today's task:  Economist special report on social networking    180KB

45 minutes

Economist Magazine ''A World of Connections - Social Networking Special Report',

January 2010. Online here.

Key takeout: Social networking has changed the way people communicate.

This report discusses the resulting changes. The Economist regularly publishes

excellent special reports of interest to analysts.

 
As always, comments, questions and ideas are all welcome. 

The MBAnalytics is just one part of the Business Intelligence CORTEX - a community of Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Analytics and Project Management professionals in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Membership is free and the forums are very active with over 20,000 posts offering a uniquely Australasian viewpoint.

Forrester's Empowered Era

Earlier this week I attended a seminar delivered by Forrester, the global research company. This was my first ever Forrester event, but I have been an enthusiastic consumer of their marketing, collaboration and information management research for some time. So I was keen to see what they offered 'live'. The event was entitled "Welcome To The Empowered Era" and promised analysts Ted Schadler (US), Mark Mulligan (UK), together with Australian analysts, Tim Sheedy and Steven Noble.

The seminar is built around the book Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business, by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler. Here is a bit of the 'shtick' from the website:

"Your customers constantly use groundswell technologies like social, mobile, and video to connect and share information. The only way your organization can support these empowered customers is by empowering your workforce with the same technologies.

In their book, Empowered, Forrester's own Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler provide real-world examples of how innovative leaders — and their teams — have harnessed the groundswell to solve the problems of empowered customers."

I haven't read the book yet, but Ted's contribution to the seminar was pretty impressive. The micro-site around the book also features a blog that I recommend. That brings me to the seminar itself, and I would like some feedback if possible.

So what were my impressions? The analysts are smart guys - Forrester is full of them - so their research set my expectations high. I did gain insights around the need to empower employees so they can better meet empowered customers. So the day was well spent and I appreciated hearing from the four analysts. But if we are talking about empowering, as a customer of Forrester I felt/feel a little frustrated that I wasn't more empowered. Why? Well it comes down to expectations. The seminar cost a couple of thousand dollars, and yet the Empowered book itself (US$18.45 on Amazon) was not included, and only 2 of the presentations were down-loadable after the event.

So tell me, am I being petty and unreasonable? I can live with 'whiny', so please drop me a line with your comments! I will be interested to see if Forrester is also listening to their empowered customer ...

IBM's Collective Intelligence Roadshow

I have just attended part of this annual event, mainly to hear Karl Kruszelnicki speak on Collective Intelligence.

In 2011 The Collective Intelligence Event opened with a panel discussion led by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki on the key issue of productivity growth, or more specifically on Addressing Australia's Productivity Deficit. Very entertaining but perhaps not as original as in past presentations. The highlight was his presentation of a statistical analysis of grandmother death rates and students sitting exams.

After this I attended the Businessphere track - featuring presentations on key CHRO (Chief Human Resource Officer) workforce imperatives, how you can combine business intelligence with social software, and productivity success stories from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Department of Justice and the Land and Property Management Authority.

So here's how the sessions played out.

Panel Session: Addressing Australia's Productivity Deficit

Moderator: Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki

Panelists were IBMers: Iggy Pintado, Director of Marketing, Sustainability & Innovation at UXC Connect, Heidi Ambler, IBM Program Director, Social Software and Mac McIntosh, Associate Partner, Strategy - Collaborative Networks.

The panel was very 'marketing' oriented but the live polling of the audience (live and online with a simulwebcast) was interesting. The majority of time was spent talking about social business / media. Sounds like we should all be looking at how ants organize themselves. There was little said in relation to productivity declines in Australia (-2.7% in recent years) except to say that the fact that Australia avoided the worst of the GFC has slowed the adoption of social business practices. The implication being that the social tools unlock productivity gains. This sounds right, but no evidence was presented to back the assertion. Of course the counter argument could be that Australia is avoiding the high cost of early adoption?

"Forget the content, context is king" was advocated by panelist Iggy Pintado. In my opinion, this is simply wrong as any casual reader of bloggers and tweeters today knows. Yes context enriches content enormously but garbage remains garbage. Take a look at what is being blogged and tweeted out there.

The old example of the 3M company was given. This is where research staff in the US are allowed to spend 17% of their time on their 'own' projects. Products originated from these 'private' projects now generates 50% of their revenue.

2010 IBM Global CHRO Study

Presented insights into what Chief Human Resource Officer leaders in Australia & across the globe say are their most important workforce imperative. Presented by Mac McIntosh, IBM Associate Partner, Strategy - Collaborative Networks

The study was conducted last year, polling 707 executives globally. Two goals emerged as overtaking today's top goal of improving operational efficiency:

• New product development
• Moving into new markets.

Another message was that leaders (defined by financial outperformance) are 64% more likely to be using advanced supply/demand analytics. The most damming statistic was that 78% of respondents were ineffective at fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing. A close second was that only 21% have recently increased investments in these areas.

The study goes on to look at leadership development, creativity and collaboration. The study is available online here (registration required) in a variety of languages including Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

Creating an Exceptional Work Experience

ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) - Steve Wellington, Assistant Director of Internet Services

 
"Whether it's enabling employees to interact in self-forming, distributed teams from peers through to customers and constituents - anytime, anywhere any place. ABS demonstrated how they're reducing the friction of work to increase productivity".

The ABS invested in LotusLive and Lotus Connections software to help their staff work towards an integrated collaboration workspace 'where staff don't need to think about tools and can just be productive'.

There followed some insights into collaboration in ABS:

• Recently they have found that being focused on having all key staff based in Canberra is no longer sustainable. Virtual teams are a reality as more key staff are based regionally. This is driven by the low unemployment rates making for a very competitive market for graduates.
• Team based email for vital teams leads to siloing of information. People work in multiple work groups and the challenge has been to make information more accessible and how to link into external partners. ABS turned to social software. The main source of resistance was by people saying "why? We already have lotus notes." the result is 'coupling' notes with social software.
• Content is crucial to kick-starting social collaboration. People already blogging, etc.
• Two examples:
  • A senior manager based in Hobart blogging, etc.
  • To most of their team in Canberra Communities of practice such as java developers.

Externally, ABS is also:

• Collaborating with international partners (other statistics organisations) using the cloud but sticking with the same tools. This led to using LotusLive. The cloud is lower cost and also (statistics organisation)  independent.
• The core data (census) is not in the cloud.

Results so far are that about 50% have accessed social computing A blurring between internal and external Social Analytics is only just emerging. Processing other big data sets is still in it's infancy Because graduates know how the social tools work so training has moved from 'how' to 'why'. This has led to a "better quality learning outcome".

Conclusions

Interesting discussions and a useful update on local practices and a networking opportunity. More annoyingly, I wonder how IBM can hold an event on social business and not provide free wifi? Luckily the iPad has 3G but half the links from the event homepage gave errors!

Hopefully I have not been too negative in this post. Kudos to IBM for holding the event. It was worth participating, professionally done and there should be more events like it.

Due to other commitments I did leave before the last sessions:

Creating an Exceptional Web Experience - Land and Property Management Authority

"Creating a Web presence that engages customers and constituents with your brand, will assist in driving brand awareness, preference & revenue growth".  

Forrester Report: CMO Must Connect the dots of online brand

Social Analytics - Connecting People and Information Together "Utilising the power of Business Intelligence and Social software helps groups streamline and improve decision-making by providing capabilities for forming communities, capturing annotations and opinions, and sharing insights with others around the information itself".

Crowdsourced Insight

I have just been reading David Cameron's blog where he talks about an interesting hack from India. You can read the story here but in short it is about Arun Ganesh, a student at the National Institute of Design in Bangalore, who was frustrated that the poor quality of the bus timetable for Chennai. With over 5,000 bus routes this was a real world problem for Chennai's 4 million residents. How did Arun solve this? He created his own map, crowd-sourced data from his fellow bus passengers and then published the new improved map along with an accompanying app BusRoutes.in for interactive route planning. The maps use OpenStreetMap - a free editable map of the whole world. In 3 days he had crowd-sourced enough data to kick-start everything. An impressive solution to an everyday data problem.

I know that corporate crowdsourcing for R&D is nothing new and prediction markets are gaining some traction. Take a look also at InnoCentive for some very serious idea outsourcing of industrial problems and Brand Tag for insight into what people really think of your brand.

I wonder if it is possible to apply similar ingenuity for information management problems within the corporation? What problems am I talking about? For me today in my role they include:

• Creating a single business glossary across a conglomerate of businesses
• Building a knowledge portal to collect information useful to management report writers and users
• Identifying solutions to complex analytic problems such as:
  • predicting propensities to substitute physical products with digital ones
  • measures of copyright protected revenues.

My initial thoughts are to invest in the following capabilities:

• Business Glossary - set-up an intranet portal (probably using SharePoint because that's what we use internally) to publish glossary term definitions and link these to discussion forums where anyone who is interested can discuss, provide feedback and mediate agreement on standard terms and definitions
• Knowledge Portal - another portal linked directly into our reporting platforms (SAP, Oracle, TM1, etc.) so that our:
  • Decision makers have access to use and can contribute to wiki's, FAQ's, known issues and documentation (tutorials, reporting guidelines, etc.) about our information assets and related business processes.
  • Project Staff and Analysts have access to the scope, structure and lineage of data from the report semantic layer back through the data marts and warehouses and into the source systems where data is created.
• Analytic Solutions - you guessed it: YAP (yet-another-portal) that lets people publish data sets that have either been purchased from 3rd parties (such as market research) or contain discovered insight that may be useful to others.

My hope is that these investments will deliver not just better support to our decision makers but also better engagement with the information they use. Give them a sense that they not only own their management reporting but also feel empowered to improve the information asset without relying on IT experts.

This may not be as innovative as people like Arun have achieved, but in the my corporate world these are sufficient wins. Maybe we will even create more super users in the organisation? Sounds good to me.

Looking again out into the rest of the world and taking a lateral step from directly involving your users, kaggle is a site that aims to facilitate better predictions by providing a platform for data mining, forecasting and bioinformatics competitions. As a side note, it is interesting to see that 'kagglers' favourite software is R, with SAS now a fairly distant 3rd in popularity. SPSS is even further away with only a quarter of the users that R has.

If you want to learn more about open innovation I suggest you start at Open Innovators website.

The Data-Driven Life

The New York Times will publish an interesting article in their Sunday Magazine on May 2nd. The author is Gary Wolf and in 'The Data-Driven Life' he takes an interesting line of thought about data and using it to give us very personal insights into our lives.

Geeky, certainly, but it offers a glimpse into something deeper and more intimate than social networking. There are some unique individuals discussed and they take extreme measures to gather personal data. For me what was interesting is how this is creating a wide range of insights and leading to commercial applications, devices and services that are already becoming mainstream.

A lot of the article also delves into health issues and mental wellbeing which you can take or leave depending on how you feel about such things. The article as a whole however is well worth the time. Read it here.

Mining Social Media

 The finest example of social media mining that I have found to-date is the superb site Please Robe Me.

In case you can't guess, it mines the twitter stream in realtime to republish anyone who is telling the world that they are not at home. Who would want to know this? Take a guess.

 So all you Twitter, Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz, etc. users - keep that good info coming!

Check out my new site I'm-bored-and-broke-so-who-can-I-rob?.com. We feature full integration with Google Maps and their latest realtime street stealview technology^TM© - so you can watch your place being robbed as it happens via our iPhone app (a bargain at $599)!

Mining The Gartner Symposium

Gartner's biggest annual get-together (Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2009) is on in Orlando and although I generally don't think too much about it, it does (claim to) bring together over 1,600 CIO's and I was wondering what knowledge I could mine by looking at what people are tweeting, blogging and in other ways posting online.

Here's what I have found. I include some interesting snippets and also a sprinkling of 'stating the obvious'. Gartner remains a fascinating mix of deep insight and banality. I can't resist it, but you can judge the value yourself:

@lgreski: #gartnersym keynote: 75% of leaders surveyed say bad data constrains business. Too much info managed in spreadsheets.

@andreagoulet: Avg team size for big brand twitter team? 4. @jetblue :12 @wholefoods :11 @ford :6 @starbucks :2 Most common 1-2 people "on duty" #ims09

“Just as your business counterparts use fact-based business intelligence data to make decisions regarding investments and resource prioritization to achieve their goals, IT needs to gather and analyze relevant data to run the business of IT,” said the Gartner analysts. By Mike Hill, Gartner

The most blogged news of the conference comes from Gartner Analysts Carl Claunch and David Cearley’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010:

1. Cloud Computing
2. Advanced Analytics
3. Client Computing
4. IT for Green
5. Reshaping the Data Center
6. Social Computing
7. Security – Activity Monitoring
8. Flash Memory
9. Virtualization for Availability
10. Mobile Applications

Most made me yawn, but these stand-out (from a Gartner post):

#1: Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. Cloud-based services can be exploited in a variety of ways to develop an application or a solution. Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others. In addition, consuming cloud services enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners.

#2 Advanced Analytics. Optimization and simulation is using analytical tools and models to maximize business process and decision effectiveness by examining alternative outcomes and scenarios, before, during and after process implementation and execution. This can be viewed as a third step in supporting operational business decisions. Fixed rules and prepared policies gave way to more informed decisions powered by the right information delivered at the right time, whether through customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other applications. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. The new step looks into the future, predicting what can or will happen.

#6 Social Computing. Workers do not want two distinct environments to support their work – one for their own work products (whether personal or group) and another for accessing “external” information. Enterprises must focus both on use of social software and social media in the enterprise and participation and integration with externally facing enterprise-sponsored and public communities. Do not ignore the role of the social profile to bring communities together.

#7 Security – Activity Monitoring. Traditionally, security has focused on putting up a perimeter fence to keep others out, but it has evolved to monitoring activities and identifying patterns that would have been missed before. Information security professionals face the challenge of detecting malicious activity in a constant stream of discrete events that are usually associated with an authorized user and are generated from multiple network, system and application sources. At the same time, security departments are facing increasing demands for ever-greater log analysis and reporting to support audit requirements. A variety of complimentary (and sometimes overlapping) monitoring and analysis tools help enterprises better detect and investigate suspicious activity – often with real-time alerting or transaction intervention. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, enterprises can better understand how to use them to defend the enterprise and meet audit requirements.

From a presentation by Gartner Senior Analyst Eric Knipp on “Citizen Developers: When End Users Surpass the IT Department in Delivering Business Applications”:

"as much as 25 percent of business applications will be built by “citizen developers” – users outside of the scope of formal enterprise IT – by 2014."

“Future citizen-developed applications will leverage the IT investments beneath the surface,” he said. “Mashups will enable IT to focus on deeper architectural concerns, while end users will focus on wiring together services into business processes and workflows. Furthermore, citizen development introduces the opportunity for end users to address projects that IT has never had time to get to — the vast expanse of departmental and situational projects found beneath the surface.”

A recent report published by Gartner entitled Introducing Pattern-Based Strategy states: “We live in a world of patterns — competitive advantage and survival are about recognizing and acting on patterns before others. Previous strategic planning models were strained to seek changes, predict outcomes, adequately guide decisions and assist leaders in defining governance models that embrace change. Through a focus on pattern-based strategy organizations will move from being ‘reactive’ to being ‘proactive.’” The research note goes on to say, “The environment emerging from the recession demands an increased focus on detecting leading indicators of change, and on identifying and quantifying risk emerging from new patterns, rather than obsessing over lagging indicators of performance. In this way, we move from a world of ’sense and respond’ to one focused on ’seek and act.’”

"Introducing Pattern-Based Strategy," Gartner, 7 August 2009.

A cut-down version of the Gartner roadshow comes to Sydney 17-19 November 2009.

The Business Case For Social Media

I have been meaning to post a short video that I found a few months ago when I was building a new media strategy for a company. If you can get over the overly intense soundtrack it is packed full of useful information about the size and nature of social networking. If you are building a business case then this should provide some useful data to back you up.

The original was found on YouTube (where else?).

Social Networking and BI

I was sent a link to a presentation on social media and BI by US/Indian company erada. They specialize in developing solutions that work in a SAP environment.

In the presentation they quote Gartner and their recent (February 2009) survey of 1,400 CEO's who reported that they did not achieve BVA (Business Value Attainment) in their BI investments  What's really interesting is that less than 9 % reached their desired BVA when they went live. BVA is broadly a measure for stakeholders of whether-or-not a good investment has been made.

What is not clear from the Gartner analysis that I have seen is why you would expect to see instant return on your investment. If you buy a truck for your company you expect it to earn a solid return for you over the future years - not instantly the day you buy it. Isn't this the same for BI (and any other software) investment. Or am I missing something?

I suspect Gartner is trying to measure the perception that CEOs have of what they are getting at launch versus what they expected to get (based on promises) when the BI investment decision was made.

This is an important point and I myself go to great lengths not to over promise to stakeholders. It's also not necessary to do so as the benefits of the BI investments (at least where I have worked) are simply massive. The trick is to use language your stakeholders understand. Delivering value also helps ...

Here is a copy of the presentation. Persist with the way the slides are built as there is some good information to learn:

Social Network BI-Outside In_sept09

I like the slide pictured above as they make a good point that just churning out reports each day does not deliver insight.

I also like the sound of their SmartCube product that (according to their website blurb) "helps in redesigning the SAP InfoCube to reduce query time, load time and footprint on BIA." Anything that helps InfoCube work faster gets my vote!.