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

Medicare Section 111

I’ve recently been working to help two clients comply with new Medicare reporting regulations. The regulation, MMSEA Section 111 – Medicare Secondary Payer Mandatory Reporting, requires anyone who pays for medical costs to report those payments to the federal government. The government will then compare the list of payees to their list of folks who receive Medicare payments. If there is an overlap, the government will look for refunds of the Medicare payments.

While you might think that this regulation only affects health insurers, the truth is that the scope is far larger. Our clients are not health insurers. One of them is a medical malpractice and workers compensation insurer. The other, believe it or not, is an auto manufacturer. The insurer is subject to this regulation because a portion of their settlements frequently covers the medical costs of the claimants. The auto manufacturer’s situation is more interesting. They are subject because, sometimes, when they pay out a product liability settlement, part of the amount paid is intended to cover the claimant’s medical costs.

Once you see how many companies are affected by this legislation you can get a sense of the total cost that its implementation will entail. Millions upon millions of dollars are being spent to make sure that affected companies are not subject to large penalties for noncompliance. In addition, it seems that many subject companies don’t yet realize that they are required to comply. For those who are subject, compliance is mandatory by Q1 of 2010 – so get to work!

How does Section 111 reporting relate to data warehousing? Well, in a couple of significant ways. First, complying with the regulation entails integrating data from a number of claims and payment systems into a single place from which it can be submitted to the government – just like a data warehouse integrates data from multiple sources. Second, if you already have a data warehouse, your compliance tasks may be much easier. One of our clients has a data warehouse in place that contains a lot of their claims data. We can, therefore, source this data from the warehouse and skip many of the integration and access issues we would otherwise encounter.

Are you under the gun for Section 111 compliance? Give me a call – we’ve got some cost effective ways to get you into compliance – quickly.

– Ben
734.761.5962 x503