Why a personal brand? A brand lets other people identify themselves with what we sell or service, in particular a personal brand lets other people identify who we are, what we do and more importantly get insight our track record. No matter if you are in the industry or you are consultant helping other organizations implement a BI solution, your personal brand is the enabler for your continuous growth as a professional. Business Intelligence – a 10+billion USD market – is surprisingly a small community after all. Independently of the vertical (retail, life sciences, telecommunication, etc) that your company is currently doing business at, or the technology stack that you are using, most people who enter this field will remain associated with it throughout their careers. The key questions remain, how do you build a personal brand, does it depend on you an individual, on your firm, or how well the projects that you participate in are perceived? The answer is all of the above. So, if Business Intelligence bolts some of the higher failure rates for projects, the reasons been discussed on previous (and future) blogs, how can you build your personal brand in what it looks to be a highly dangerous professional mine field?
Throughout my professional career I have been associated with many organizations. While as a person I have never significantly change when I transition organizations, I have noticed that the perception of the people in the market (especially those who have not worked with me in the past) does change, sometimes quite drastically, depending on the organization that I was joining to. This is by no means bad, but it might be a challenge that you need to understand and be ready for it. It is always easier and safer to choose to associate yourself with an organization that has already a brand built, this will certainly make things easier and you will be able to do well in projects just by calling the CIO and reminding him/her of the history of the organization. However, this easiness comes at a price, you are piggybacking on the brand of the organization that you joined, which will bring you instant “fame” at the cost of sacrificing your creativity, freedom and potentially your professional values (as you will have to follow the rules of the new organization). Compared this to a situation where you join an organization with no brand, which nobody has heard of. The potential is much more: you will need all your energy, imagination and resources to propel the organization up, you will have much more control of the situation but the effort that you will have to put in will probably be orders of magnitude higher.
While the firm’s brand will certainly define you, this blog proposes that you need to change the equation so your personal brand can influence and define the firm’s. This is easier said than done; at the end of the day no single individual is responsible for the success or failure of any initiative. Granted, you can be a big influencer (either positive or negative) but at the end of the day is team work. Your personal brand is guided and defined by your leadership style. A personal brand leadership does not need to be at CXO levels to matter, but rather is connected to everything that happens in the project: an architect providing technical leadership to a development team, an analyst providing direction to the application builder, a QA lead establishing the parameters that the application will be used to be tested. All these are examples of leadership that define and shape your personal brand.
A personal brand is like a bank account, every success increments the balance, every failure is literally paid. If this is indeed the case, what is your balance today?
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
The LEGO effect: Re-inventing a BI organization one brick at a time
Who does not remember the iconic LEGO toys? If you have kids (or a kids’s hearth) you probably have some of these toys lying around in the house. When I first got introduce to LEGOs I was fascinated (and somehow intimated) by the infinite possibilities of what could be built with the bricks. The bricks came in different colors, shapes, sizes and forms and yet all of them were required to build a master piece.
I consider a BI organization to be also a master piece within a company; the BI organization is directly responsible for transforming information assets into competitive advantage touching every single business process and operation, with the ability to improve performance by measuring and showcasing light into how things are done. 15 years ago there were no BI organizations as such, this function was carried by a combination of IT and business people who were beginning to explore the potential of relational models in a mainframe dominated world. Today, all Fortune 1000 companies have a group that identifies themselves as “Business Intelligence” and consulting companies have responded accordingly by aligning Information/Transformation management services in a similar fashion. However as companies grow and mature there comes a need for these companies to reinvent themselves; in particular the BI organizations play a key role before, during and after this transformation process.
Discussing this topic with industry experts who have been in the field for a while, we came to shocking yet not surprising revelation: When management is looking at how to re-invent the company they see the existing BI organization not as a uniform entity with a well defined purpose, but rather as a collection of individual bricks that have unique properties in and on themselves: Business Analyst, Data Integration, Reporting, Analytics, Corporate Performance management, Database Management, etc. When you start rationalizing a BI organization like this, it is very easy to get lost in the details. Using the LEGO analogy, when you a look at a finalized LEGO figure (e.g. a Building) you don’t see it or appreciate it from an individual brick perspective, but rather you need to look at all the bricks together to appreciate the end result.
Things get even more complex when you want to create some new shape using the existing blocks. There are different approaches one can take, you could completely disassembled the existing shape, examine each brick independently and then chose the ones you need for the new shape. The problem with this approach is that looking at each brick individually without having the vision for the new shape is not very useful. Each brick is only as good as it enables you to build the new shape you have in mind, if there is no vision, then you cannot possibly build anything other than an amorphous shape that will not survive as it has no purpose. The same is true when a company is trying to re-invent the BI organization. If management starts looking at each components of the group and deciding who they like and who they don’t like without having a firm vision for what the new organization will need to achieve, this will be a very disruptive process which at the end will provide no value to the company, or any of the individuals (bricks) involved.
In Business Intelligence, as in the LEGO world, a brick is just a brick until it is combined with other bricks to create something. It is up to management (aka the organizational architect) to define the vision of what the group needs to achieve, set the goals and strategy and have the organization aligned into that direction. The final design is beyond a simple consolidation of bricks, as it has a reason to exist that transcends the nature of each of its elements to achieve PURPOSE.
I consider a BI organization to be also a master piece within a company; the BI organization is directly responsible for transforming information assets into competitive advantage touching every single business process and operation, with the ability to improve performance by measuring and showcasing light into how things are done. 15 years ago there were no BI organizations as such, this function was carried by a combination of IT and business people who were beginning to explore the potential of relational models in a mainframe dominated world. Today, all Fortune 1000 companies have a group that identifies themselves as “Business Intelligence” and consulting companies have responded accordingly by aligning Information/Transformation management services in a similar fashion. However as companies grow and mature there comes a need for these companies to reinvent themselves; in particular the BI organizations play a key role before, during and after this transformation process.
Discussing this topic with industry experts who have been in the field for a while, we came to shocking yet not surprising revelation: When management is looking at how to re-invent the company they see the existing BI organization not as a uniform entity with a well defined purpose, but rather as a collection of individual bricks that have unique properties in and on themselves: Business Analyst, Data Integration, Reporting, Analytics, Corporate Performance management, Database Management, etc. When you start rationalizing a BI organization like this, it is very easy to get lost in the details. Using the LEGO analogy, when you a look at a finalized LEGO figure (e.g. a Building) you don’t see it or appreciate it from an individual brick perspective, but rather you need to look at all the bricks together to appreciate the end result.
Things get even more complex when you want to create some new shape using the existing blocks. There are different approaches one can take, you could completely disassembled the existing shape, examine each brick independently and then chose the ones you need for the new shape. The problem with this approach is that looking at each brick individually without having the vision for the new shape is not very useful. Each brick is only as good as it enables you to build the new shape you have in mind, if there is no vision, then you cannot possibly build anything other than an amorphous shape that will not survive as it has no purpose. The same is true when a company is trying to re-invent the BI organization. If management starts looking at each components of the group and deciding who they like and who they don’t like without having a firm vision for what the new organization will need to achieve, this will be a very disruptive process which at the end will provide no value to the company, or any of the individuals (bricks) involved.
In Business Intelligence, as in the LEGO world, a brick is just a brick until it is combined with other bricks to create something. It is up to management (aka the organizational architect) to define the vision of what the group needs to achieve, set the goals and strategy and have the organization aligned into that direction. The final design is beyond a simple consolidation of bricks, as it has a reason to exist that transcends the nature of each of its elements to achieve PURPOSE.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Is real time, the right time?
With the advent of the smart phones, it seems that the next wave of BI will come from “mobilizing” the business applications and putting real time information at the ever reach of the executives and decision makers. However, experience dictates that having information available in real time is not always the best option. Early in my career, when we started experimenting with real time data loads, primarily to get around the limitation of fixed time load windows, I found out (the hard way) that sometimes real time data might give more trouble than benefits. I had the opportunity to witness over an upgrade from daily loads to 5 minute batches when I was working for a retailer early in my career. The new system enabled the data warehouse to be updated from all the stores 12 times an hour. From an IT perspective it was a huge success, being able to load data from more than 200 stores in less than 300 seconds from the POS to the Data Warehouse. However, our enthusiasm was short lived when we tried our business users to acknowledge the value of this data. The feedback started coming in that our users could not make any decisions as it was hard for them to tell exactly what was on the data as there were intermittent delays in some of the stores (links/servers down, etc) that prevented from them knowing exactly what they were looking at, and because the data changed every 5 minutes, it became a very troubling exercise to catch if there were any data errors (either introduced at the source or as part of the loading process). It got so bad, that our users asked us to remove the capability and give them access only to the audited data (as of close of business yesterday). For me this was a very valuable lesson that not always faster is better. Our brains are designed to process information when we understand what we are looking at; after analyzing the data you might want to run different slices of analysis which at the end of the day you want to amount to the whole pie.
Imagine that you are driving a next generation vehicle where everything is electronic and it can communicate with your Smartphone in real time. It can give information to the second on gas levels, air pressure, oil life, etc. If the car was sending information to you every 5 minutes with the different metrics speed, avg. fuel consumption, miles left to empty,etc, you would probably start ignoring the data because it becomes non-relevant after a while. However, with this comes the added risk that if you have enough fuel for 2 miles, you will probably miss this tidbit of information among all the other data elements. You would have run out of gas and not for lack of information, but rather excess of it.
Compare this situation with the concept of right time: you get only key notifications with the right amount of notice so you can act on it, for example the car will only SMS you when there are 2 gallons of fuel left, giving you enough time to locate a gas station and refuel. As we witnessed the next mobile evolution (or revolution) in BI, we need to able to separate the fads from long term trends. If you are caught on the real time frenzied, take a deep breath and ask yourself: “Is real time the right time?“
Imagine that you are driving a next generation vehicle where everything is electronic and it can communicate with your Smartphone in real time. It can give information to the second on gas levels, air pressure, oil life, etc. If the car was sending information to you every 5 minutes with the different metrics speed, avg. fuel consumption, miles left to empty,etc, you would probably start ignoring the data because it becomes non-relevant after a while. However, with this comes the added risk that if you have enough fuel for 2 miles, you will probably miss this tidbit of information among all the other data elements. You would have run out of gas and not for lack of information, but rather excess of it.
Compare this situation with the concept of right time: you get only key notifications with the right amount of notice so you can act on it, for example the car will only SMS you when there are 2 gallons of fuel left, giving you enough time to locate a gas station and refuel. As we witnessed the next mobile evolution (or revolution) in BI, we need to able to separate the fads from long term trends. If you are caught on the real time frenzied, take a deep breath and ask yourself: “Is real time the right time?“
The power of organizational politics in BI
Let us face it, how many times have you read that failure rates in BI projects are sky high and that you have a better chance of getting an upgrade in your next flight than for your BI project to succeed? Reality is that in my professional career I have found this to be a true statement, albeit not for the reasons that most people think. When you think of a failed BI project, most of us conjure an image of a developer who has no clue what he/she is doing and the computer displaying the now legendary blue screen. However, I have never seen a project being shelved because of technical issues. Granted many technical implementations are done by people who have little knowledge and thus typically fail the first time; never the less it is very “easy” to recover from a bad technical implementation: with the right team the project can be turned around in mere weeks. So, if technical glitches are not the reason for permanent failure, what is to blame? You probably guessed the answer by reading the title of this blog: politics. Politics are an inherent quality of the human race and they are always present when you have more than one individual, they permeate everything we do at home, school and work and balance the nature of our interactions with our family, friends and colleagues. So, if politics are everywhere, how come they affect BI projects more than other IT initiatives?
Business Intelligence projects have the potential to significantly upset the balance of power in the organization, both from a project and outcome perspective. Many blogs and white papers have addressed how the outcome of a BI initiative affects the balance of power; this blog however will attempt to prove how the project itself can be an agent of chance, independently of the outcome. In order to understand this hypothesis we need to take a step back and understand why the organization chooses to execute a BI project. BI projects are by nature information projects, organizations realize they need to invest in BI when they are looking for a competitive advantage that is inherent to the organization itself: Business Intelligence enables a company to use its own information (wherever this might be located) as a competitive advantage. They key is not in the what (information you have), but in the how (it will be used). Here, therefore, lies the crux to the situation, it is not the destination that matters (the organization will end up having more or less the same information), but the journey (how this information will be visualized, interpreted and acted upon) which will define success. The process of establishing these new organizational processes will be critical to how the organization will evolve, and more importantly what will it become. Thus, the person that is appointed to lead the project is not only being a project lead, in fact, depending on the scope of the BI initiative, he/she is being effectively designated as the organization architect who will build the foundation layer for a new operating model.
It is not surprising then, that politics start to play well before a BI project gets underway, with every coalition of power in the organization proposing/backing their candidate(s) who will lead the initiative, in a similar fashion to political parties determining who will be the official candidate to run for an election. In addition, given the technical complexity and magnitude of the task, the organization will also likely chose a partner that will supplement/complement the internal staff. The selection of the partner is equally complex, with many variables to be considered, including the quality of the vendor, price, reputation and brand equity. However, the successful criteria for selecting the vendor will always boil down to a matter of trust; do I trust this partner to help me achieve the organizational objectives? Not different from a political candidate choosing their second in command, Barack Obama choosing Joe Biden and John McCain choosing Sarah Paling, in the USA 2008 presidential election. While all the candidates want to win the election, it is important to recognize that the foundation for change is seeded in the campaign, not in the victory. Similarly the foundation for organizational change is established by the project team, as the project executes. The success or failure will not be in the deployment to production, but on how the project team established a clear link between the people who are running the company and the new way of visualizing, interpreting and acting on the information that the project enabled. A successful BI project will empower the people to make effective decisions thus creating a new era in, you guessed right, organizational politics.
Business Intelligence projects have the potential to significantly upset the balance of power in the organization, both from a project and outcome perspective. Many blogs and white papers have addressed how the outcome of a BI initiative affects the balance of power; this blog however will attempt to prove how the project itself can be an agent of chance, independently of the outcome. In order to understand this hypothesis we need to take a step back and understand why the organization chooses to execute a BI project. BI projects are by nature information projects, organizations realize they need to invest in BI when they are looking for a competitive advantage that is inherent to the organization itself: Business Intelligence enables a company to use its own information (wherever this might be located) as a competitive advantage. They key is not in the what (information you have), but in the how (it will be used). Here, therefore, lies the crux to the situation, it is not the destination that matters (the organization will end up having more or less the same information), but the journey (how this information will be visualized, interpreted and acted upon) which will define success. The process of establishing these new organizational processes will be critical to how the organization will evolve, and more importantly what will it become. Thus, the person that is appointed to lead the project is not only being a project lead, in fact, depending on the scope of the BI initiative, he/she is being effectively designated as the organization architect who will build the foundation layer for a new operating model.
It is not surprising then, that politics start to play well before a BI project gets underway, with every coalition of power in the organization proposing/backing their candidate(s) who will lead the initiative, in a similar fashion to political parties determining who will be the official candidate to run for an election. In addition, given the technical complexity and magnitude of the task, the organization will also likely chose a partner that will supplement/complement the internal staff. The selection of the partner is equally complex, with many variables to be considered, including the quality of the vendor, price, reputation and brand equity. However, the successful criteria for selecting the vendor will always boil down to a matter of trust; do I trust this partner to help me achieve the organizational objectives? Not different from a political candidate choosing their second in command, Barack Obama choosing Joe Biden and John McCain choosing Sarah Paling, in the USA 2008 presidential election. While all the candidates want to win the election, it is important to recognize that the foundation for change is seeded in the campaign, not in the victory. Similarly the foundation for organizational change is established by the project team, as the project executes. The success or failure will not be in the deployment to production, but on how the project team established a clear link between the people who are running the company and the new way of visualizing, interpreting and acting on the information that the project enabled. A successful BI project will empower the people to make effective decisions thus creating a new era in, you guessed right, organizational politics.
Friday, February 4, 2011
What happens in Vegas…
I guess I should finish the title as “stays in Vegas”, but recently I came back from Microstrategy World 2011 where the key themes were dashboards and mobility for BI. The key note sessions went as far as to imply that laptops were a thing of the past and that smart phones and tablets will become the standard for accessing the internet and performing all of our transactions. The CEO of Microstrategy commented he ran the entire company from an iPhone/iPad application enabling him to keep control of the company from any location. In the back of mind, I was thinking that these themes were not new to me, two years ago working for a large CPG manufacturer we discussed the next generation on BI applications on an Iphone, the idea was truly ahead as of time, as nobody saw the device as a business tool but rather as nice “expensive toy. Going further back 10 years, when I was working for a top 10 retailer in San Antonio, we discussed how to enable the field managers by sending information to their mobile devices (back then we were experimenting with SMS and found different incompatibilities across carriers). I was thinking throughout the conference that I was not witnessing a BI vendor trying to change the market but I was seeing a BI vendor truly understanding how the market was shaping and capitalizing on a wave that is yet to reach its full potential. Granted the technology has evolved to the point that you can consume content on a Smartphone or tablet better than you can in paper, the kindle started the trend with text and the iPad popularized electronic/color versions of magazines and newspapers with Android and Apple paving the way for the next generation of consumer & business devices. We are living in exciting and connected times where the key differentiator will not be if you are receiving all the information you can, but rather only receiving the information you need when you need it in the format that is most easily consumable. So going back to the title of this post, let me finish it as follows “What happens in Vegas, came from outside of Vegas and will definitively extend beyond Vegas”
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The Kindle effect in BI
With the popularity of eBooks in multiple formats, offered by multiple vendors, we find ourselves in a world where libraries are literally becoming obsolete. When you can access and read any book that has been published from your tablet device, there is no reason to ever open a paper book again, is there? As this blogger discovered, sometimes either newer books or older books (whose rights are still retained by the authors) are not available in digital format yet. If you browse through the bookseller s review section, you will find that many times when a new book is released and there is no “eBook” version, people will rate the item poorly, independently of how good the book might or not be. While this is heavily criticized by many of the book loyal followers, I found it true that it disrupts the reading experience.
In business, as in our professional lives, it is amazing to notice that what we take for granted today did not even exist a few years back, but once the new technology is introduced it becomes permanent part of our lives to the point that we no longer enjoy the experience of flipping pages in a book and start complaining about the dead weight of paper and its effects in the environment. We can rationalize it anyway we want, but when you really like look at it is all about convenience, what do we get for the effort we put in. As an international road warrior it becomes a matter of practical survival, how many 800 pages books can you carry on a flight from Frankfurt to Bangalore and still make it practical to move all that weight around?
I found out that the Business Intelligence world behaves in a very similar fashion; the user experience often dictates how much value the business users derive out of the information. The more intuitive and responsive the user interface becomes the more that I find people using their reports and analytical applications as part of their daily routine. Think about it, how many reports can a manager print and still find the relevant data points that he/she needs to make a business decision? In fact, the kindle effect is becoming so prevalent in BI that many Fortune 500 organizations have invested heavily in mobile applications that enable their mangers real time access to the information through the blackberries, iPhones, iPads and other smart devices. The key, again, becomes simplicity and speed to analyze all the organizational information you need in a few seconds. However, If you company is thinking about implementing similar functionality, just be careful, make sure that once you embark in the journey you travel all the way through the most remote destination (or useful piece of data in the organization). Remember there is nothing more frustrating that having a mobile platform that cannot be used to analyze the latest release of the data, it will just irritate your users, like a publisher with a no kindle version.
In business, as in our professional lives, it is amazing to notice that what we take for granted today did not even exist a few years back, but once the new technology is introduced it becomes permanent part of our lives to the point that we no longer enjoy the experience of flipping pages in a book and start complaining about the dead weight of paper and its effects in the environment. We can rationalize it anyway we want, but when you really like look at it is all about convenience, what do we get for the effort we put in. As an international road warrior it becomes a matter of practical survival, how many 800 pages books can you carry on a flight from Frankfurt to Bangalore and still make it practical to move all that weight around?
I found out that the Business Intelligence world behaves in a very similar fashion; the user experience often dictates how much value the business users derive out of the information. The more intuitive and responsive the user interface becomes the more that I find people using their reports and analytical applications as part of their daily routine. Think about it, how many reports can a manager print and still find the relevant data points that he/she needs to make a business decision? In fact, the kindle effect is becoming so prevalent in BI that many Fortune 500 organizations have invested heavily in mobile applications that enable their mangers real time access to the information through the blackberries, iPhones, iPads and other smart devices. The key, again, becomes simplicity and speed to analyze all the organizational information you need in a few seconds. However, If you company is thinking about implementing similar functionality, just be careful, make sure that once you embark in the journey you travel all the way through the most remote destination (or useful piece of data in the organization). Remember there is nothing more frustrating that having a mobile platform that cannot be used to analyze the latest release of the data, it will just irritate your users, like a publisher with a no kindle version.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
How to leverage off-shore effectively in BI assignments
If you are reading this blog, you or your company are probably considering leveraging off-shore for your BI projects and you are still trying to decide if this is a good idea or not. You probably have heard several horror stories of companies who tried and failed miserably. However, did you know that for every horror story there is out there, there is an equal success story that balances things out. So, if leveraging off-shore is as likely to sink a project as it is to save it, what are the things that we need to do differently to ensure success?
I am sure there are consultants out there making a living on this. In fact a few weeks back a friend of mine asked me to co-author a book on this subject. Having spent over a decade on both sides of the fence, I can honestly said that while all vendors have similar technical capabilities the difference lies on the operating model and how you interact with your account team.
Let us take a deep dive in the subject and explore what is an operating model and why it is important. An operating model is how the service provider will organize its people to provide specific capabilities to a client. For example: While the vendor team might be internally organized in technology capabilities, geographic location or business domains, the service provider might decide to propose creating a single team seeded with people from different internal COEs to address the requirements of a particular project. The most important aspect of an operating model is to define how people will join, participate and transition out of a project; without the right structure, a client might spend weeks with a particular set of consultants getting them up to speed in their applications just to see them leave at the end of a project because of a short gap in getting the next project approved. Also important is the time it takes to secure resources once a project is approved, if the vendor does not have a pool of resources committed to your account, it will probably take a longer timeframe to identify the right talent, thus impacting the project timelines and potential commitments to the business.
So, if we define the right operating model why do we even need to bother about who the account team is and how we interact with them? At the end of day, independently of the vendor capabilities and how good (or bad) their power point presentations are, business is done among people. It boils to the fundamental question if you trust the people who are across the table and believe that they can partner with you to help you achieve your goals. Never underestimate what a good client representative can do, he/she can exercise significant influence within their organization to represent your interests and more importantly he/she can align the organization resources to achieve your required outcome.
Last but not least, try to visit the outsourced team at their base location (whereever in the world this might be). I recently came from a trip where I had the opportunity to witness firsthand the impact that a CIO created when addressing the outsourced organization directly; after the CIO addressed the team they became energized and behaved passionately about their work as they understood the value the client placed on it and they knew who the client was.
I am sure there are consultants out there making a living on this. In fact a few weeks back a friend of mine asked me to co-author a book on this subject. Having spent over a decade on both sides of the fence, I can honestly said that while all vendors have similar technical capabilities the difference lies on the operating model and how you interact with your account team.
Let us take a deep dive in the subject and explore what is an operating model and why it is important. An operating model is how the service provider will organize its people to provide specific capabilities to a client. For example: While the vendor team might be internally organized in technology capabilities, geographic location or business domains, the service provider might decide to propose creating a single team seeded with people from different internal COEs to address the requirements of a particular project. The most important aspect of an operating model is to define how people will join, participate and transition out of a project; without the right structure, a client might spend weeks with a particular set of consultants getting them up to speed in their applications just to see them leave at the end of a project because of a short gap in getting the next project approved. Also important is the time it takes to secure resources once a project is approved, if the vendor does not have a pool of resources committed to your account, it will probably take a longer timeframe to identify the right talent, thus impacting the project timelines and potential commitments to the business.
So, if we define the right operating model why do we even need to bother about who the account team is and how we interact with them? At the end of day, independently of the vendor capabilities and how good (or bad) their power point presentations are, business is done among people. It boils to the fundamental question if you trust the people who are across the table and believe that they can partner with you to help you achieve your goals. Never underestimate what a good client representative can do, he/she can exercise significant influence within their organization to represent your interests and more importantly he/she can align the organization resources to achieve your required outcome.
Last but not least, try to visit the outsourced team at their base location (whereever in the world this might be). I recently came from a trip where I had the opportunity to witness firsthand the impact that a CIO created when addressing the outsourced organization directly; after the CIO addressed the team they became energized and behaved passionately about their work as they understood the value the client placed on it and they knew who the client was.
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