sascom voices - The sascom magazine blog

I’ll admit I am particularly fond of a saying, “Begin at the beginning.” All too often we get ahead of ourselves when trying to tackle a problem. And without a clear understanding of the full scope of a problem, there’s always the risk of making it worse.

Something like this is happening in the area of business analytics. In the search for a single version of the truth, it is necessary to corral data from any number of data sources throughout an organization. Typically the process also involves effectively cleansing and prepping this data for relevant analysis – all with the overall goal of preparing useful reports that provide business insight that aids in fact-based decision making.

It’s never a problem getting people excited about the super-cool, fact-based decision making part. But often those same people are less concerned about how you get to that end result. Suffice to say the “plumbing” of data integration and data quality (to borrow the fixture analogy of my esteemed colleague, Ken Hausman) is perceived as less sexy.

And yet, the data integration/data quality part is undeniably the beginning of a business analytics project.

In February 2009, Computerworld released a SAS-sponsored report entitled, Defining Business Analytics and Its Impact on Organizational Decision-Making. It is an insightful report asking responders to define the term “business analytics” and the technologies associate with that term. Notably, 73 percent of responders view business analytics as a function of both IT and business departments – the evolving relationship between these two groups is a fav subject I’ve written about previously.

The results also indicate a consistent trend I’ve seen in a number of research reports from the past few years, including:

• The SAS report, Business Intelligence Maturity and the Quest for Better Performance found that “close to 80 percent of organizations have not fully implemented practices to ensure data quality, integrate their data across the business or create standard data definitions – fundamental elements of maximizing business information.”
• In another Computerworld project, Information Management Initiatives at Midsize and Large Organizations, a combined 55% of responders listed either “integrating disparate systems, standardizing data management processes, data quality or data access” as the key barrier to their information management efforts.
• In the current Computerworld report, 59 percent of responders named “data integration with multiple source systems” and 56 percent named “data quality” as the key technology or business challenge to business analytics implementations.

See a pattern?

This trend is fleshed out even more when I talk to folks about their various business analytics implementations. From the outset, they don’t necessarily have a strong sense of where the most important data lives within their organizations or how many versions of that data exist. They typically underestimate how much time and ingenuity it may take access that data. And almost without fail, data quality issues threaten to consume the project. And we all know the adage - garbage in, garbage out.

Data integration is the oversight. Yet it continues to surface as the proverbial thorn in the collective side. Data quality issues haunt the professionals responsible for building the systems and the executives who want so desperately to rely on the reports those systems generate.

So how does something so basic, so fundamental, get overlooked? Planning how data is extracted from multiple sources and how that data is deduped, standardized, profiled, etc. – it would seem that is the beginning isn’t it? But we know that it is all too commonly skipped or rushed… and sooner or later, revisited.

Do you have a story about data integration/data quality gone-awry? Thoughts on why some are so averse to investing the time up front to make sure the data is as solid as possible before analysis and reporting? I’d love to hear your opinions.

In a previous post, I described the ever-elusive goal of achieving alignment between Business and IT. On the one hand, we see some struggle between these groups, and on the other hand, we see that the lines between Business and IT are increasingly blurred. In fact, my conversations with CIOs and senior executive IT professionals also unearthed interesting strategies to address the colliding worlds of Business and IT.

There is a trend toward staffing IT departments with non-technical employees or “hybrids” (e.g., MBAs with some tech background). More and more, the pervasive thought of CIOs seems to be “I can teach the technology. But getting staff who understand business drivers and speak the same language as the business side of the house is harder to come by.”

One executive actually put it to the test. His team was responsible for technical requirements and for interfacing with the various business units within his organization. For multiple projects, he assigned two different types from his team (one IT and one MBA/business-oriented) to meet with the same business unit head.

This executive said that, invariably, his tech representatives would default to technical jargon in meetings with the business heads. By contrast, the business-oriented professionals were less sophisticated about the technology, but were successful in communicating with the business heads. The business guys glazed over when “Tech-ese” is being spoken. The result? The exec pulled the IT guys from those projects and has actively sought to staff his team with that rare, but highly-sought-after creature – MBAs with some background in technology.

For a more traditional approach – one CIO told me that his organization spends a lot of time training his IT team to think in terms of how they can further their organization’s business objectives.

This emphasis on the importance of being able to speak the language of business is understandable. However, I wonder about the flip side. If technology can be taught to MBAs, is business acumen somehow inherently out-of-reach for technologists? Of course that can’t be universally true. But the conventional wisdom seems to be that it is more difficult to get technologists to think like the business side. You can teach some of the business-speak, but ultimately, technologists fall back into the jargon where they are most comfortable.

So if you’re replacing the technologists with those hybrid business types, isn’t it logical to expect an IT backlash? I mean someone has to get down and dirty with the technology to make it all work. At some point more than a cursory knowledge is required, and no amount of business savvy can replace that.

If not outright replaced, what of the resentments of having business acumen prized over technology abilities? Perhaps it plays out that the technologists are there, but they are led by those trained in business. In my experience, technologists – the same as any group of specialized professionals – are resentful when their direct managers have little knowledge of the field in which they work.

Are we at an impasse? Is IT motivated to adapt to the business or die? Or, is this just a trend of the moment, and yet another point as to why IT and Business will remain separate and distinct – destined to continue a symbiotic, yet slightly dysfunctional relationship.

I’m keenly interested to hear the voice of technologists here. Is this a trend you recognize in your day-to-day world or is this a non-issue? Is the point about IT being out of touch with business overstated? What say you?

Having recently attended a string of conferences including the TDWI Executive Summit, the CIO 100 Symposium and Awards, and Computerworld’s Business Intelligence Perspectives – I made a point of talking to several IT senior executives. As a marketer, I read a lot about this audience and I receive many research reports marking all sorts of trends. But nothing beats a good ol’ face-to-face chat to find out what’s really on their minds.

IT and Business alignment remains a key issue. CIOs and other IT execs tell me the subject has been discussed ad nauseam, but the goal of true alignment has never been achieved. After further discussion, it appears that the IT/Business alignment issue is a bit more nuanced.

One CIO of a financial institution made a fascinating statement to me. “Our IT organization is aligned with the business. But [and this is a big but] we are not considered a partner.” This CIO went on to explain that despite the fact that he himself has an MBA, the technical side of the organization lacks a true seat at the table when business strategy and direction are developed.

During a roundtable discussion with mostly IT executives, there were numerous complaints about business executives giving unclear direction and having no answer to the question “what business problems can IT help you solve?” These assertions were met with resounding agreement and head-nodding.

The surprise was that a significant percentage of the room agreed that IT’s hands were tied in this situation.

See the dichotomy here? If the complaint is that IT isn’t considered a valued partner to work hand-in-hand to develop business strategy, then should IT wait to receive direction from the business side? It seems that this is the opportunity to insert IT into the business planning process, to be proactive and help drive the business direction.

Or is that these are simply the rules of the game – and IT really is hamstrung if the business folks can’t provide direction? Is it ultimately true that the IT skill set is designed to compliment business strategy, not drive it?

I am not sure what the answer is, but I pushed this point in a few conversations and arrived at this conclusion: like most things, there is no clear cut answer. Some IT people want to take the bull by the horns and help to define the most pressing business problems as well as employ technology to solve them. Others really don’t buy that as IT’s role.

Where do you sit on this issue? I’m interested in hearing more opinions to help further define this trend.

These days you can’t get very far without bumping into some variation of the term “networking.” Sure, there’s the area of computer networking, which is oh-so-important for those of us who must stay attuned to the IT world. But the concepts and opportunities for social networking are so prolific; it’s hard to keep up. Of course, there is social networking in a live setting, but Web 2.0 has brought a whole host of additional social networking options. (BTW, if you happen to need a primer on the topic, Web 2.0 can help with that too – check out Common Craft's Social Networking in Plain English.)

Is anyone else starting to crack under all the pressure to network?

Newsflash! While making personal connections and developing alliances comes naturally to some, there are actually a lot of people who are challenged by networking. For some, even the very notion sparks a paralyzing fear. Read on to learn about the networking events we've hosted recently that help people get past that fear.

Last week, I attended the TDWI World Conference in San Diego, a gathering rife with networking opportunities. As a field marketing specialist, hosting hospitality events is a large component of the company presence and a large part of my role at the conference. SAS and Teradata jointly hosted a highly interactive event called Tech Quest, a high tech hunt that is essentially a cross between scavenger hunt and geocaching, but uses iPod touches instead of GPS units.

The hospitality event attendees are divided into teams identified by colored bandanas, given an attaché case with a rule book, an iPod touch pre loaded with multimedia clues to solve, and off they go - in search of “caches” who are actually SAS and Teradata employees standing at pre-designated areas. The teams who find the caches exchange passwords for info packets that are basically numeric codes used to decipher the final clue once they return to the hospitality suite.

Sound complicated? Nearly everyone has that reaction…initially. But here’s what I’ve learned.

These days, “silo” has become a dirty word within organizations – full of negative connotations about curmudgeonly individuals or teams not playing well with others.

But at the How to Compete on Analytics: Apply It event in San Francisco on June 4th, SAS speaker Bob Messier advised the audience to cast aside the tabooed silo label in favor of the slightly more euphemistic term, “Cylinders of Excellence.”

That’s right folks, shun that label – do recognize that eliminating the actual silo might actually take a bit more time and effort – and consider the new nomenclature the first step toward establishing your centralized analytical competency center!

Hey, it’s a start, right?

Turns out, “a start” is exactly what a significant number of these event attendees were seeking.

Quite a few attendees remarked on being in the nascent stages of their analytical development. Some of the questions during Q&A honed in on exact next steps to begin the effort, what pitfalls should a new analytical team avoid, and how to plan for a scalable analytical operation.

It‘s safe to say there are many approaches to establishing an analytical arm to boost your existing BI strategy or to start from scratch. A few of those approaches will work. A number will flat out fail.

But there was some consistent advice given from featured speakers, Jeanne Harris, co-author of the acclaimed book, Competing on Analytics, John Blackwell, associate director of business intelligence and analytics at The Nature Conservancy and the aforementioned, Bob Messier, SAS contributor to new business vernacular.

• The experts advised planning for the long term but focusing for now. Focus on manageable projects and do those well. There is time to scale to meet the needs of the enterprise, but you may never get started if you wait for the perfect circumstances.
• Another recurring theme was patience. Elusive for many, I know, but necessary. One specific example described a process that tested the business-as-usual, experienced approach to direct marketing efforts vs. using an analytically optimized marketing list. The test went on for twelve (count ‘em, 12) months. And at the end of that period the optimized list clearly outperformed the status quo list. But most importantly, at the end of that year, the test converted the naysayers through irrefutable performance. People are reluctant to give up the gut feel and intuition and it is unlikely you’ll convince them through talking – take the time to show and prove the point.
• There is a risk of throwing out the baby with bathwater – Jeanne Harris repeatedly pointed out that analytics and an experienced “gut” are not mutually exclusive. Both have a place in truly innovative organizations. We often hear that analytic testing confirms a professional hunch. It’s as it should be. What good is all that experience if you haven’t learned a thing or two along the way? The goal should be to achieve a bolder culture that embraces analytics rather than shying away from the data. If your gut is telling you something, put it to the test. At the very least, you’ve given your organization that much of an edge in learning. At the most, you get to say (very loudly), I TOLD YOU SO!

Attention Chicagoans! You have the opportunity to attend this event, get answers to your questions and hear the experts firsthand. The next event is June 24th in the Windy City.