Finding your shining star

Dear readers, happy New Year 2013! I hope you have a prosperous year and all your Business Intelligence implementations are wildly successful. For my first blog of the year, I truly debated what to write about, many thoughts came to mind including wishes, resolutions and stars. Before you write off this blog as another piece of internet fallacy, let me connect the dots, you will be glad that you gave it a chance.

If you remember my last entry, it talked about achieving success and chartering your next endeavor by truly defining yourself. As my good friend Sigmund would say:  “one cannot define oneself in isolation, as we exist in relation to others”. Have you ever wondered why Bill Gates left Microsoft to focus on his charity work? History proves that there is only so much a person can achieve by amassing large amounts of money; at the end of the day we all feel the need to realize ourselves by helping others. True, this urge is mostly ignored and superseded by our daily routines but no human can achieve a full realization of the self without tending to it.

 Ok, I promised that this blog would lead to something and so I am getting to it. A successful BI implementation needs to focus on helping someone in the organization fulfill their needs. As simple as this conclusion reads, the great majority of Business Intelligence projects set out with a bang trying to install the latest platform, consolidate the most amount of data, demonstrate to the organization who has the information, etc. In other words, very self-centered goals around the project team or immediate sponsor.

In order for a project to be not only successful, but to transcend it must really fulfill a selfless destiny that will have a “social” impact. This impact would be felt within the organization helping a group/department to be leaner and more productive. More importantly, the project should also create an impact outside of the organization delivering value: a better customer service, and/or better products & services for the customers. Then and only then the project will have accomplished its corporate and social missions, literally making the world a better place.

If you made it this far, you definitively gave this blog a chance. I ask you to do the same with this philosophy, let the “shining start show you the way”. The next time you define a project, start with challenging the project team to look beyond the “corporate” goals and think how your project will impact team members, your internal clients, and your company customers. Establish a link between what you are delivering and the wellbeing of the larger group of stakeholders.  Once you have established this link you will realize that the team will approach the project with a different perspective, fully propelling each team member to give their best, knowing that by doing so it will make a tangible difference in the lives of people around them.

So you have achieved success, what is next?

After a long time, the BI project that you were leading is finally in production; to everybody’s surprise (including yours) things are working perfectly and customers are actually using the system. All the hard work seems to have paid off after all, with your boss congratulating you on how the project was deployed and the fact there were no priority one issues during the roll-out. In short, you have achieved success, you are no longer afraid of being part of the failed BI project statistics. After a week or so of babysitting the new system you start to wonder what is next? You start to realize that you have been so single mindedly driven to deliver the program that you have given little thought to what you will do after delivering. Many options start popping on your mind: should you take vacation, should you ask for afternoons off to play more golf, should you go to your boss and ask for a new project when you know that nothing in the pipeline is as good or as interesting as the project you were just on. Maybe you should leave the organization and find a company that has an even more challenging project where you can contribute immediately? With so many options, what is the right thing to do? What option will provide you the most happiness, what option will help you the most in your professional career?

If the situation above is familiar to you, you are not alone. According to industry statistics, most of the IT turnover happens immediately after the successful delivery of large programs. It seems that many successful Information Management professionals crave the excitement that comes with an impossible deadline: they need to feel that they are absolutely needed and nothing could be done well or on time without their expertise. In my opinion, this is part of the human nature, as individuals we tend to measure our worthiness by our contributions to society at work, at church, or even at home. It is almost impossible not to increase your ego when you are getting constant and immediate feedback on the effort you are providing and you are seeing the direct impact it has on achieving the goal. However as “human” as this reaction can be, it is one of the most fragile situations an individual can face.  During this quiet “period”, defined as the absence of constant feedback, the IT professional needs to be extremely careful of not to make any rash decisions just to get “back in the game”. It is almost funny to be in this paradox, many people spend their entire professional careers trying to achieve success, but as beauty, the definition of success is in the eye of the beholder and can change quickly depending on the perspective from which is being looked at. As many successful people have found out, it takes a significant amount of effort to achieve success, but it takes an even higher degree of discipline to maintain success.

So, as the title of this blog asks, what is next? In my experience what follows is a battle of the self, where a new equilibrium of the inner ego and outside person needs to be achieved before one can embark on the next big “adventure”. This battle of the self cannot be won using technology; it needs to be fought from within through self-discovery. The biggest break through will come the time that we realize that our worth is not defined by how many emails we get a day, or how many reports/dashboards we can deliver but on our capacity to learn and adapt to new environments, after all it is also part of the human nature the capacity to survive in the most inhospitable climates. More importantly you worth is not defined by what you have done, neither from what you will do but from the self. You are, you exist and you have the capacity to be happy regardless of what life alternative you decide to choose. After all, the world is vast and the possibilities are only limited by our imagination.

 

The power of the ONE

After reading the title you will probably be wondering what or who is the one, are we talking about one architecture, one tool stack, one service provider, etc. While it is indeed certain all these things are important in the context of a BI engagement, in this post I will explore the power of the one leading the program. If you have been in the BI industry for a while, you might have noticed that typically success or failure is always the responsibility of a project team or is seen as a group effort, but rarely do we identify who is the one person in the organization that is driving the vision. The hypothesis of this post is that the leader is perhaps the most important success factor in a BI program, this person can single handedly take a program off-track or bring a derailed program back on the right path.
Many textbooks have been written about leadership, but surprisingly few, if any, discuss the traits of leadership required to successfully lead a BI team. This presents the opportunity for this blogger to explore unchartered territories. For context setting, let me draw a connection to one of my favorite leadership authors: Ken Blanchard. A few years back, I had the opportunity to attend a global leadership symposium where he was one of the speakers. What I remember the most out of his lecture is “Don’t be a duck, be an eagle”. While I won’t repeat the whole lecture in this post, I can summarize it by saying that he stated that leaders don’t complaint, they don’t make excuses, they put attention to detail and are really good pinning a single without losing context of the forest, and most importantly listen and lead by example.
I believe we can all relate to Ken’s vision of leadership, as nobody escapes having a boss, even the CEO of a company answers to the Board of directors and the share holders, and I am sure president Obama is keenly aware that the voters will determine his political future before the end of the year. So, coming back to our discussion, how can we prove/disprove the hypothesis that the leader is the most important success factor? While the team will face many challenges during the life of the program, technical, political, personal, etc. It is not the challenges that will set the team back, but how the “team” reacts to them. While it is certainly a group reaction, the individuals in this team will look at the leader for guidance, specifically for a model that given them a dimension of how big is the challenge and advise on how to proceed next. A good leader will make any team dynamics work in their favor, while a person who lacks the heart of leadership will struggle regardless of how the team might be.
I recently came upon a program where they had significant challenges migrating some reports from Cognos to Business Objects. The situation was rather unique as this client only had one technical expert in their ranks, and this expert was not familiar with how Business Objects worked. The situation got complicated as the team’s first design was less than optimal and this was a significant cause for concern because they had tight deadlines with CIO visibility. This technical situation rocked the boat so violently, that it almost put a stop in the whole program; it was not until the leader took control of the situation and started firmly directing the activities on the ground that the waters calmed down. I strongly believe that this leader demonstrated all the qualities described by Blanchard while avoiding the common pitfalls. In contrast there was organization who had a change in the Director of BI and the new leader did not take the time to listen to the team but just went ahead with his own personal agenda. Things did not work out, not because the leader or the team lacked the capacity to complete the program, but because people did not believe into what they needed to do. At the end, it became very evident that passion and commitment were far more important than technical or intellectual capabilities.
In summary, the evidence of leadership is irrefutable, it can provide a great influence for progress or it can set a team back into a dark age, truly while BI is a team effort, we cannot underestimate the power of the one.

Getting in shape to deal with Big Data

Big Data is a big term these days, everybody in the information management industry is talking about it; in fact, along with cloud and mobile, it has become one of the biggest items in 2011 for information professionals. But what makes Big Data so big? Are the numbers getting larger or the hard drives getting heavier? If you are thinking about getting in shape to be able to execute Big Data projects, you are not far from the truth. I am not talking about improving your muscular strength to lift heavier weights, but rethinking how we look at the availability of data for our Business Intelligence implementations. Let me explain, Big Data is a label applied to the collection of structured and un-structured data available on a particular topic, situation or subject. The implications of this are indeed big, think about a well-known company brand, such as Pepsi or Coke and picture the amount of data these companies create on a daily basis within their premises: thousands of sales, inventory, manufacturing and logistics transactions take place each day. This “internal” data might well amount to hundreds of megabytes, not a small amount by any means, but only a fraction of what you could find in blogs, review pages, discussion forums, or Facebook. In all likelihood the volume of data generated by their customers, distributors and consumers will probably be several orders of magnitude larger that the data generated within the company itself. Big Data is all about tapping into this data through all possible channels & means, but more importantly is about making sense out of it. Giving another example, if you are about to buy a product in Amazon, you will probably be tempted to read the reviews provided by previous buyers. While the primary purpose of reading these reviews is to make a buy / non-buy decision, through the reading of these reviews you will start getting a better understanding of the product, getting visibility into its strengths and weakness. This new understanding can (and will surely) shape your expectations on the item that you about to buy and help you to make better use on some features while avoiding others altogether, if you decide to buy it at all. There have been multiple technological efforts to harness Big Data, one of the most prominent, from the open source community, is Hadoop. Hadoop brings a map/reduce approach to the table through which one can explore/analyze multiple streams of data and bring them together to present a summarized result. Think about the US census where the objective is to get the country demographics. With a population of over 3 million it would take a single person a long time to visit everyone’s dwelling .The optimized approach is to break the problem in multiple units that can attack the problem in parallel so every city/county in the country will have a team to process the results for the local area, bringing them together to understand the entire population of the US. Hadoop has evolved into commercial distributions from different vendors that promise to bring a more user friendly approach to the installation and the execution of the technology. As valuable as these commercial distributions are, the real value for an organization will come from making sense out of this data, not in isolation but in combination with the data already within the organization. Getting back to our discussion of Pepsi and Coke, imagine the value that these two companies could drive (and potentially already are) from Big Data, linking what is happening in the organization with the data from the outside world to generate real time insights. While this might sound like a straightforward value proposition there are plenty of challenges on the way, and in order to successfully overcome these challenges we will need a fit, trained, mind that keeps us going without collapsing on the sheer weight of Big Data.

BI in an imperfect world: When organizations let us down

It is probably a well known fact that BI projects have the least successful completion rate in any organization: entire books, whitepapers and Blogs have been written on this topic alone with the hopes that many project teams will recognize, and more importantly avoid these issues. If you are reading this blog, chances are that you are very familiar with them, in fact you might have already experienced and (hopefully solved) some of them yourself. However there is probably one that you are not aware of, even though it maybe “hiding in plain sight”: what if the organization itself (all the way from top management) does not want you to succeed? Impossible, you might say, isn’t the organization paying for your salary and giving you a mandate to complete the program for its own benefit? Although, it might sound like a conspiracy theory, sometimes there are forces coming all the way from the top that have a mandate to protect the status quo at the expense of keeping everyone in the dark. Just recently I had the opportunity to have a good discussion on this topic with a long time friend who works for a top IT firm running a global BI program; he has been working over the last two years to gather performance scorecards on every major area in the organization. Through this process he has discovered things that are working extremely and identified areas that might be consider for improvement, some of them for significant improvement. The results were published and made accessible to all the top lever managers in the organization. You would expect that given the reputation of this global organization, they (management) would have taken the results very seriously and created specific programs to address the short comings or improvements identified in each area. Well, not only this did not happen, but my friend was called into the global CIOs office for a face-2-face meeting. During this meeting he was literally told that his scorecards were creating too much noise and making the company look bad, so he should go back to them and separate the real from other issues and more importantly fix the problems in a couple of days when the Global CIO was meeting with the CEO and the board. If you are still looking for the positive side to this story, the Global CIO offered him to take some sabbatical to evaluate his priorities. I cannot imagine how my friend must have felt after dedicating his efforts to improve the organization through Business Intelligence. I guess it must have been similar to when some people in the dark ages tried to prevent the usage of candles as it brought light to night activities that they would have preferred to keep hidden and people felt they were standing on the way of progress. Going back to our premise, the organization let down my friend, they (management) made the decision that they were better off behaving like an ostrich, hiding from their enemies rather than addressing them head on. However, I side with my friend that he did the right thing by shedding light into difficult situations rather than hiding the truth. My only advice in this situation is even if the organization is letting you down; you should never let your organization down: this is something that you might never forgive yourself as a professional true to Business Intelligence.

Are we prisoners of our own information potential?

When a baby is born all possibilities are there, as the baby matures and grows a series of decisions start limiting how the child, teenager, adult will interact with and perceive the world. If all the babies are born the same way, how is it that some become greater leaders while others struggle to get noticed, how is it that some grow to become rich and famous and others die in poverty? Is every human baby born with innate gifts that will determine who the person will become, or is it the environment that dictates how the baby will grow up? While the question of fate vs. making your own destiny has eluded the biggest minds for centuries, the same paradigm can be applied to Business Intelligence. When a company is incorporated all the possibilities are there, it can become anything: a large corporation, maybe a multinational or maybe just the best company in the block. As it starts maturing a set of decisions are made, contrary to their human counterparts, organizations do not have innate gifs, but rely on the people running them to navigate different alternatives. Once specific decisions are made, like type of product/services that will be offered, market of focus, etc the options start getting more focused, giving the possibility to the enterprise to blossom; data will be an ever present companion in this journey of growth and maturity and will enable the development of the organization from one level to the next. Sooner or later, the organization will face a situation where the analysis of this data will become key in walking the next step in the evolution of the company, at this time the company leadership might decide to foster an open culture that enables collaboration through information or revert to the human nature of relying on key individual’s instincts, thus limiting the information potential. A company, like a human being, can also build their own prison around itself protecting the gifts and weakness that were entrusted to it. While this might seem like the safest alternative, isolation typically leads to not achieving one’s full potential. Human’s personal gifts can then be compared to the information in an organization, both prosper when they are shared and they used to assist others. Breaking this self created information prison requires significant willpower and the ability to establish a vision that freeing the information will enable amazing things to happen. The future is not cast in stone, possibilities open every day before us; the question continues to be: am I responsible for my own decisions, or there is a bigger force driving each of us? The answer lies within each of us, but one thing is certain: we will be better equipped to answer this question if we have all the relevant facts (e.g information) available to us. While not all the babies will grow to be presidents, all companies with an open information culture will become places where ideas can be exchanged and options can be openly discussed, thus leading the way for the company to realize its full information potential.

The league of Information “Justice”

Summer is almost coming to an end, but not before multiple super/anti hero movies have made their way to the big screen this year, including the Green Hornet, Green Lantern, captain America and Thor, among others. At the end “good” defeated “evil” every single time; it seemed so easy that I could not resist applying some of the principles to a Business Intelligence Program. Before you stop reading and call the publisher, let me explain: if you have embarked on a business intelligence project, most likely you intended to do good as well, enlightening your organization by providing visibility they did not have… However along the way, technical limitations, organizational politics or simply unforeseen circumstances might have delayed or canceled your project altogether; If you have been in this situation, I am sure you felt that you were losing the battle against the dark forces of ignorance, your own evil nemesis.
Some battles just might be too big to win on our own, and here is where the concept of the Information justice league comes in. While at times it might seem that you are alone in your organization, and you are the only one “fighting” for the good of the program, I can assure you that there might be more allies in your organization than you realize. Independently they might also be actively fighting their own transformation battles to introduce transparency to the organization through information; in effect each individual becomes its own “vigilante” trying to bring change to their scope of control. Separately of the size and complexity of your organization, you will notice that change is difficult; regardless of the intention or the promised outcomes, the fear of the unknown might paralyze some key decision makers and prevent your project from being implemented, or even launched. On your own, you are a lone vigilante with a charter that even might be questionable from a public light; however, if you were going to join forces with other change agents within your organization, you could establish a league of “Information” justice that would gain immediate credibility given the collective experiences and track record within the company.
Together, this information league could accomplish many things, including facilitating the success of Information projects with the objectives of empowering line level manager to make well informed operational decisions, thus taking the company performance potential to the next level. While the obstacles/enemies would not have gone away, the combined “powers” of this information league would it make easier to defeat declared and subvert foes with the sword of truth and a shield of trust in the battle field of transparency, bringing enlightenment to an enterprise previously in the dark.
You might or might not feel a super hero for your organization, but if you can establish solid Business Intelligence processes and enlist the help of others along the way, you will have effectively created your own league of “Information” justice.