Business Intelligence Radar: Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Britain

What is business intelligence?  It’s the set of tools, abilities, and data required to create a picture of the world and how your organization operates in that world.  In building your business intelligence capabilities, you can learn a lot by looking at a historical precedent, the rise of radar, and applying it to your problems of getting to your data.

The Battle of Britain

The fate of the western world was largely determined by the actions of a few people in Britain in the late summer and early fall of 1940.  Poland had fallen, Belgium had fallen, France had fallen.  Great Britain was next.  Prime Minister Winston Churchill lobbied President Franklin Roosevelt for help.  But, Roosevelt was reluctant to fully support a Britain that looked doomed to defeat.

Air power had come into its own and the Nazis planned to use it to clear the way.  Key to their plan was destroying Britain’s air force.  Once it was gone, a seaborne attack would follow.

Winston Churchill knew what was coming and famously announced to Parliament, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…”

The air assault started in July with attacks on convoys in the English Channel.  Shortly thereafter, relentless attacks on the airfields.  The British airmen were outnumbered and exhausted.

Eventually, they were also victorious.  The Nazis gave up their plans for invading Britain and focused their attention on Russia.

A number of  factors led to Britain’s success.  One especially important asset was radar.  Britain was an early innovator in Radar and early warning technologies.  But, as we shall soon see, radar alone wouldn’t win battles.

7 December 1941 – Pearl Harbor

Around 7 am on the 7th of December, 1941 the Japanese arrived.  In a brilliant piece of seamanship and aviation skill they sneaked  up on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  A few hours later the US fleet lay in shambles.  While a few US fighters managed to take off and tangle with the attackers, their effect was negligible.

After the attack, US President Franklin Roosevelt gave a stirring speech that contained the following, memorable line, “Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

It was over a year since America’s ally, Britain, had prevailed in the Battle of Britain.   The Americans also had radar.  In fact, American radar detected the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.   So, why was America so soundly defeated at Pearl Harbor?

The answer lies not in radar but in the military’s ability to take the data from radar, assemble it into a meaningful picture, and then act on the result.  The British had developed an entire information network that gathered data from radar, and other sources, assembled it at a central point, and then distributed it, as necessary to commanders in the field.  Each member of the team knew their job and knew how to use the information delivered to them.

At Pearl Harbor, on the other hand, the Americans hadn’t built the information infrastructure.  They captured the raw data but didn’t have the mechanisms for rapidly assembling that data into a coherent picture.  And, they certainly didn’t have the plans for how to act on that picture.

Business Intelligence

This brings us to the concept of business intelligence (BI).  What makes for effective BI?  It’s the ability to gather the  relevant data, integrate it into a coherent picture of reality, and the processes necessary to execute based on what that picture shows.

In large part, organizations already have the data – they have the radar.  Where?  In their operational systems.  In the ERP, sales, manufacturing, legal, HR, and other systems that run the business on a day to day basis.  Each entry, each transaction provides a pixel in the overall picture.

But, most organizations are more like the Americans in 1941 than the British in 1940 – they don’t have an integrated view of that data and they don’t have business processes to take advantage of it.

Which leaves me with a question for you… 1940 Britain or 1941 America, where are you?

Next post… Using the Data From Business Intelligence Radar

Business Process Driven BI – An Example

A quick example of how BI & BP (business process) should go hand in hand…

Working with statisticians from Central Michigan University, we’ve jointly developed PVForecaster, a product that allows hospital administrators to forecast their patient volumes on an hour-by-hour, specialty-by-specialty basis.  Tactically, the result is better control over scheduling and costs.  Strategically, PVForecaster helps administrators forecast changes in demand and react accordingly (e.g. build more capacity, etc.)

The PVForecaster  business process design is a good example of how BI (and predictive analytics) applications should integrate with business processes.  In our case, rather than just accepting data and ’spitting’ out forecasts, users drive the system as follows:

1) A planner uses PVForecaster to develop a number of forecast scenaria for the hospital.  For example, what is expected to happen if we increase our advertising budget?  What if we reduce it?  What if our operating territory’s population increases by 2%?  Stays flat?  Decreases?

2) The planner uses the BI tool to  review these scenaria with hospital executives.  Together they decide which scenario will be the one that the entire hospital will work from.  They use a routine in the BI application to designate this as the ‘working assumption.’

3) Department managers from across the hospital are given access to the ‘working assumption’ forecast in the BI tool.  They can use the tool to slice and dice through this forecast along all the relevant dimensions (e.g. date, specialty, time of day, etc.).

4) Using this information, the department managers can plan accordingly.

Yes, we could analyze data and build forecasts without implementing this business process.  But, the tools may not ever get used.  They may become the unused toy of some isolated planner.  On the other hand, implement a business process wherein all the relevant parties have, and need, access to the BI tool to do their jobs and you’ve developed a powerful tool that will get used and will provide enormous value.

Do you have any other good examples of business process / business intelligence synergy?  Put them in your comments.  Thanks!

– Ben

Dataspace Profiled in “New” Newspaper

Last month Ann Arbor’s long established newspaper, the Ann Arbor News, shut down.  But, it was replaced with a web / twice weekly hard copy publication.  Little did I know that Dataspace would be one of the first companies profiled in the new business section.  To see what they have to say, click here.

I, also, wanted to add a little ’subjective’, business intelligence quiz here.  The answer is really open to interpretation so it will be interesting to see what people think.  The question is: What was the first business intelligence tool?  Why?

Feel free to add your opinion as a comment.

Thanks for following us!

– Ben

Tying the BI tool to the user

Yes, a 747 and a Cessna can both be used to transport you from point A to point B but, isn’t the 747 a bit of overkill for the pilot who just wants to fly himself to the next airport for a $100 hamburger?  Well, in Business Intelligence (BI), many organizations buy a fleet of 747s when all they need is a few Cessnas – they buy tools that are powerful but overkill for most of their users.  A great example of this is when a company buys 7,000 licenses of an expensive, powerful OLAP tool, intending to outfit their entire staff with OLAP.  Is there a need for advanced online analytical processing (OLAP) in the company?  Almost certainly.  Are there 7,000 users who are going to slice and dice through their data?  Almost certainly not.

You can think about BI needs as a pyramid, small at the top and large at the bottom.  At the very top are a few analysts who use data mining tools to identify unexpected relationships and build predictive models by looking at huge data sets (Can you remember when the data mining companies were looking to put mining on every desktop?  Mining on every desktop?  Really?).

Just below the data miners is another, slightly larger, layer of folks who need to slice and dice through their data – the OLAP users.  These folks are looking for things like what products are selling well, in what regions and by which salespeople.

Next is the bulk of the pyramid – the folks in the field who are just trying to get their jobs done.  The folks who need BI to execute specific business processes: to see which customers receivables are over 30 days old; to see where maintenance crews have been assigned for the week; to do the actual day-to-day work of the company.  Do these folks need to slice and dice through huge quantities of data?  No.  These folks generally need a set of predefined reports which have a few flexible parameters for users to complete to specify exactly what data to report on.

While the major BI tool vendors sell their tools as allowing users to create their own reports and to slice and dice their data, the bulk of the pyramid never uses this capability.  Instead, when these tools are released to users they are released with libraries of pre-configured reports.  Most users never do more than use these reports or, occasionally, request new ones.

Once you understand this reality, you start to look at the concept of BI tool standards quite differently.  More on this in a future post.

Think you’re overbuying in BI?  Drop me a line.

– Ben

The Most Important 2% of Your Day

When you look at how Business Intelligence tools are marketed, you’d think that the secret to a wildly successful operation is to simply have executives sit at their desks looking at beautifully laid out dashboards, clicking here and there on charts, graphs, and gauges, drilling down, rolling up, and slicing and dicing their data. After all, that’s what the vendors of Business Intelligence systems portray in their marketing communications (and we’re guilty of using eye candy in our own materials, too).

I’m the CEO of a Business Intelligence consultancy. Organizing and presenting data in ways that enable business decisions is all that we’ve done for the 15 years since I founded Dataspace. Before that, I did it at MicroStrategy.  I’ve, even, co-authored three books on the topic.  Of all people, you might expect me to be sitting at my desk, slicing and dicing to my heart’s content. But you know what? I have a business to run. I’ve got to spend my time on attracting new clients, ensuring my team delivers flawlessly, and conduct a variety of back office functions from tracking payables and receivables to minimizing my overhead. And while we have implemented Business Intelligence tools at Dataspace to help me manage my operation, with the data collected, integrated and presented in a manner specific to my needs, I find I actually spend very little time using these systems. And typically for only two purposes: 1) to investigate a particular problem; 2) to check in once a week or so to see whether things are on track. I recently estimated how much time I spend using on these systems, and found I don’t spend more than an hour a week in them.

Do successful managers spend their days clicking around in BI systems?  I don’t think so.  Successful managers spend their time managing: making decisions and interacting with people – customers, employees, partners, suppliers, etc.  Well-designed BI systems quickly give managers a view of what’s going on – of what decisions they need to make and what conversations they need to have.  Well-designed BI systems get the answer across quickly and then get out of the way.

I’m proud that I use my system less than 2% of the time. After all, well-designed BI systems enable use of that 2% to identify the decisions that need to be made, and the conversations that need to be had with the other 98%.

Want to discuss?  Feel free to contact me at btaub@dataspace.com.– Ben

QlikView: Check it Out!

If you check out the message boards and recent Gartner Magic Quadrants you’ll see that QlikView is the next hot thing in business intelligence. Some of our clients are using the tool and they are ecstatic. Applications are created far faster than with traditional BI tools and executive users eat it up. I can’t think of many other BI implementations where executives are eager to get on the computer.

In a stodgy BI space that is plagued by incremental upgrades and poor customer support, QlikView is BI’s battle of Midway – a point of inflection that changes the game. If you haven’t seen the tool, I urge you to check it out at www.qlikview.com. Run the demos, they give a good idea of what it can do.

So, what’s so good about QlikView? Well, once you see the tool in action you realize that it’s not about producing the next generation of pretty green bar reports. It is about giving users easy tools for rapidly slicing through data. The difference between QlikView and traditional BI tools can be summed up as follows: Traditional BI tools are for people who need reports, QlikView is for people who need answers.

In future posts I’ll talk more about what’s so great about the tool, about how it crushes the traditional BI – DW development methodology, why most companies will still need a data warehouse and why, in the end, QlikView is complementary to, not a replacement for, current BI technologies.

Want more info before then? Drop me a line at btaub@dataspace.com.

Business Objects Insights from Dataspace – December 2008

TIP: USING THE USER RESPONSE AND REPLACE FUNCTIONS TO FORMAT YOUR REPORT

When you include prompts in your Web Intelligence report, you are making your report dynamic so that each time it is run, you can retrieve the data you need to see at that time without modifying the query. Did you know that you can use the User Response function to capture the value(s) you select and then include that in a report title so that you can easily know what data the report includes?

View the User Response and Replace Function example >>