Oz Analytics

The Business Case Just Gets Better

I'm not blogging as much as I used to as Doclens is taking up much of my time, and when it's not Doclens then it is my consulting activities which have now gone global. So the best way of keeping up with my comings and goings is to subscribe for free to Doclens.

Despite this, I will blog every now and again and today is one of those days ...

A couple of years ago, Bain published an infographic called 'The Who, Why And How Of Big Data'. The gist of the message being communicated was that Financial Services companies that spend big on big data were twice as likely to be outperforming their peers in just about every metric that matters: speed, quality, and financial return.

My consulting activities and running Six Degrees of Data have thrown-up a lot more data on this and it has become pretty clear to me that the Bain infographic remains true - but the business case is even stronger today. Investing in big data and analytics returns a healthy 2 - 5 times. Of course, there is still one critical qualification to this: you've got to be in an organization that really 'gets' data and analytics. Brain dead companies defending their incumbent market share still waste huge amounts pretending to invest in data. Those few projects that they succeed at are still unlikely to be transformative.

That's the sad truth and it is hard to conclude otherwise. Take a look at the many articles on Doclens for the stats to back this up.

Here is the Bain infographic from 2013:

You can read more of my original analysis on Doclens.

Are People Really Overloaded With Information?

Well I am and that's the whole reason I started Six Degrees of Data - so I really hope that people are overloaded ...

Luckily, just about everyone I talk too agrees with me but I have now finally had the chance to do some original research into this assertion.

 But first a little context. I decided to invite 1,300 people on my LinkedIn network to answer a set of questions about their reading habits, needs and strategies. I quickly received over 120 completed responses and the results were (I think) very interesting. Detailed survey results appear below but the headlines are:

• Professionals are still reading a lot of documents with more than 40% reading 50 or more a week
• 87% are required to consume large amounts of information in order to be able to do their job well
• 65% can't read everything that they should
• Computers deliver the majority of these documents to 87% of us
• But 80% of us don't have any special software to help us read and understand
• 92% believe that intelligent summaries and analysis would help.

Here are the answers to all 21 questions:

If you would like to keep in touch as any further research we do is published or simply want to be kept up to date as we launch our first products, then go to our web site at www.6ddbridger.com or drop me a line at [email protected] and I will add you to our (no-spam) mailing list.

Google+ and Bridger

A surprising (for me) outcome of our work creating Bridger has been how often I use it in conjunction with my social media interactions.

I guess that I shouldn't be surprised as Bridger is a universal document and web content analyser and we want to have it play nice with as many file types, applications and platforms as is possible. This includes Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like.

My use of Google+ has been growing over the last year and I now find myself relying on it to keep me informed in a number of areas - both professionally and privately. It's also our platform of choice to hold Six Degrees Of Data meetings and chats.

So Google+ has ingratiated itself into my work habits and the following short video shows you how Bridger enhances the value of social media by analyzing the documents that your communities share in Google+:

You can also check out our other videos on YouTube and Bridger is now in Public Beta so you can try it out for yourself. It's free to use and there is nothing to install.

Changing Tack

My 2 regular readers (thanks mum and dad!) may have noticed that the frequency of my posts has dropped dramatically since 2012. There was a reason for this - beyond my strongly held opinion that those who have nothing sensible to say should simply shut-up. That reason was/is that I have been starting a new venture and the 'stealth mode' has lasted a lot longer than I expected.

In 2012 I suffered an information crisis and I suspected that I was not alone. The crisis arrived because I was being increasingly overwhelmed with information and most of the information swamping me was not on the web. Instead it was in the form of documents and email. I pride myself as being pretty well organised with effective email filters in place and an organised corpus of professional and personal knowledge approaching 1,000,000 objects. Mostly documents of one sort or another.

I was quietly proud of my knowledge management skills but after pride cometh the fall - and in 2012 that's what happened. Let me explain how it happened and I hope the story will resonate with you.

 As a serial entrepreneur and corporate analyst, I have a broad range of professional interests. These range from all aspects of analytics and information management, and broaden out into general management and IT. I am also a bit of a pack rat and if I come across some information that looks useful I store it. For those interested, my tools of choice are Mac OSX, HoudahSpot, DevonAgent and Devonthink.

So over the last 20 years I have built up a very useful corpus of knowledge. By 2011 however I was becoming increasingly frustrated by my inability to effectively use this corpus in my daily work. Each day I need to deal with the usually pile of emails and read/respond to/create multiple documents. This presented the following problems:

1. Identifying and dealing with those emails and documents that I had to.
2. Ignoring the rest.
3. Locating past knowledge/information that would help me to deal effectively with the day's emails and documents.

So the problems were pretty much at the core of what I do.

If only there was a way for me to more efficiently decide whether-or-not a long email or document was worth me reading. Then, when I needed to make a decision or give advice, how could I tap into my corpus of knowledge?

These are the problems solved by my new venture Six Degrees Of Data.

Six Degrees Of Data is building Apps and web services that we hope turn the web on its head. Our first product will launch later this year. It is called Bridger and is an App and Web Service that intelligently evaluates, summarizes and links your documents to trusted sources on the web.

Bridger is a research assistant for busy people suffering from information overload.

We are trying to release the value currently locked inside documents because despite the phenomenal growth of the internet, 80% of the new information created each year is still unstructured – in other words it is text, graphics and video contained in things like documents, emails, Facebook shares, web pages and tweets, etc. This unstructured information is poorly integrated with the world wide web. Even if they are published to a web site, they have remained isolated islands of information – until now.

Within the last five years, the size of the average web page has more than tripled, and the number of external objects has more than doubled. The average web page is now 1 MB and growing at over 20% each year. Today the average web page has about 10 links and 600 words. So it is reasonable to say that less than 2% of the content is hyperlinked to something else.

Your documents often contain only a single link (or less) and many more words than a web page.

If you are lucky, there is a single bridge (hyperlink) from the web to your document. Think of your documents as information that is connected to the web superhighway only via an off-ramp. You can find published documents easily enough because published documents are indexed by the likes of Google and Bing. But what you can’t do is start from your document and get easily back onto the web in an intelligent way.

That’s why we see the current web-document world as a one-way off-ramp.

Bridger builds you an internet on-ramp for all of your documents – whether they are published on the web or not. This is how we can release the untapped value of the 80%.

How do we do this? Well, it’s pretty complicated technically but the good news is that you really don’t have to know about this if you don’t want to. All you need to understand is that Bridger takes your isolated documents, emails, etc. and automatically links them to over 50 billion trusted additional sources of information on the world wide web.

Drop a document on to the Bridger app and it will instantly tell you what the document is about and give you concise profiles of all the relevant people, organizations, places, technologies and more.

Your document is magically transformed into a fully integrated web body of knowledge.

And Bridger is the first of a stream of new products we re planning. Future areas that we will concentrate on are enriching our personal corpus' of knowledge, collaboration and sharing.

So my posts may remain sporadic but I hope to share more about Bridger and our journey as Six Degrees Of Data gets up and running over the coming months.

In the meantime, if you have a passion for the Semantic Web, Linked Open Data, URI's, sparkle and tuples, then give me a call.

 

Not Dead (Yet)

Surviving information management.

Over recent months this blog has taken a back seat and I have been off doing other things. The holiday is over and I'm back.

My first post-sabbatical contribution is a presentation to IAPA (the Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia) that I delivered last week. It's all about what it is that I do as an information manager in a large corporation. It's also more of a personal 'survival guide' than deep insight but the feedback from the audience seemed to be good.

  Open the 2012 Analytics Survival Guide

Let me know what you think - especially anything about your personal information management strategy. Does anyone out there use OpenCalais?

I also recommend that you check-out IAPA (if you haven't already). They are doing good things for the profession and their meetings attract good, engaged crowds.

Day 5 Week 3 of the CORTEX MBAnalytics

You've almost made it to the end of week 3 - part of the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX.

The CORTEX

Master of Business Analytics

Week 3, Day 5

Theme: Communication & Collaboration

Week 3, Friday

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

READ      Today's task:  Rethinking knowledge Work    300KB

30 minutes

McKinsey Quarterly 'Rethinking knowledge work: A strategic approach', Tom Davenport, president’s chair in information technology and management at Babson College, February 2011. Online here (registration required).

Key takeout: I have always found that striking the correct balance between freedom and control is one of the persistent tensions inherent when managing analysts in a corporate environment. Maybe this is also true in other analytic environments. In any event, this is the subject of Davenport's latest article - and once again he goes to the heart of the issue. He describes this tension and makes plain our choices. By necessity, this is only a high level discussion but for me it has delivered a strategic framework within which I have developed an actionable model of knowledge working that adapts to a wide range of analytic situations. I'm in danger of becoming a Davenport fanboy - and I'm nobody's groupie. So read it and let me know if I'm wrong.

Well, that's it for week 3. Have a good weekend and next week we checkout something a little different.

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 3 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 3

Theme: Communication & Collaboration

Week 3, Wednesday

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

READ       Today's task:  Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers    3.3Mb

30 minutes

'Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers' by  Eric Matson, McKinsey

Consultant and Laurence Prusak, from the University of Southern California

Marshall School of Business, McKinsey Quarterly September 2010.

Key takeout: This considered piece concentrates on knowledge worker

interaction. To my surprise this is what knowledge workers do 50% of

their time and the central thesis of this article is that managers can best

concentrate their efforts "by identifying targeted productivity improvement

efforts to increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of the interactions

between workers".

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 1 Week 3 of the CORTEX MBAnalytics

Congratulations for reaching week 3 - part of the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX.

The CORTEX

Master of Business Analytics

Week 3, Day 1

Theme: Communication & Collaboration

Week 3, Monday

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

WATCH    Today's task:   Google's Effects on Memory     80Mb

5 minutes. You can also stream it here.

PBS NewsHour 'Google's Effects on Memory' Psychologist Betsy Sparrow

interviewed by Hari Sreenivasan in 2011

Key takeout: The ability to retrieve information from the net has already

allowed us to move more of the 'burden' of memory from our brains and this

is reducing our ability to recall information without the net. It hadn't occurred

to me before reading this research but this is an important step towards the

singularity. 

READ       For extra credit:  Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips 

  300KB, 15 minutes

'Google Effects on Memory Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at

Our Fingertips', by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner,

Science Express report, July 2011.

Key takeout: How does this impact the design of our collaboration, analytic and

business intelligence portals, etc.?

 

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 5 Week 1 of the CORTEX MBAnalytics

Part of the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX.

The CORTEX

Master of Business Analytics

Week 1, Day 5

Week 1, Friday

 LISTEN   Podcast:   Keeping_knowledge_workers_focused     6Mb

8 minutes

McKinsey Global Institute, 'Interview with Tom Davenport', by Frank Comis,

editor at McKinsey Publishing, January 2011.

Online (after free registration) here where you can stream the audio rather

than downloading it.

READ       For extra credit:   Rethinking Knowledge Work    150KB

30 minutes

McKinsey Quarterly, 'Rethinking Knowledge Work: A Strategic Approach,'

article by Tom Davenport, Babson College, January 2011.

Online here.

 
 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.

See you on Monday for the start of week 2.