Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

Metrics That TRULY Matter: Combat Analytics

The recent passing of the iconic Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara brought to mind an article  I read by Tom Davenport in a Harvard Business Publishing blog about analytics in the combat theater in Afghanistan.

Mr. Davenport summarizes an approach called "Combat Analytics" that is being used to assess progress toward the American military's objectives in Afghanistan, and how difficult it is to identify metrics about counterinsurgency activities that are directly reflective of the situation on the ground.  It's a fascinating summary of the issue, and it focused on the frequent disconnect between broad measures (e.g., at a national level) and the very specific things commanders need to measure "how the civilian population is faring at a local level."

I'll leave aside the obvious enterprise vs department vs individual metrics corporate analogy for now, and state for the record my surprise at the degree to which the architect of these combat analytics uses "economic and political/social indicators to see if [the commanders'] strategy is working in their regions."  A fascinating read, and a great reminder of how valuable meaningful metrics, presented well, can be life-changing (or life-saving).

Lagniappe:  An interesting supplemental report on the topic, "The Uncertain Metrics of Afghanistan (and Iraq)" can be found here.

Office 2010 -- First Impressions

At last week's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, I learned a bunch of things, to wit:

• Microsoft has a HUGE wave of technologies poised to hit the market over the next 12 months (Windows 7, Office 2010, and many others)

• Microsoft LOVES to compete with the likes of Google, VMWare, Cisco, Apple, etc.

Notwithstanding these big, obvious themes, I was pleased to get my first look at Microsoft Office 2010.  Here are a couple of first impressions, formed via Chris Caposella's value keynote, some executive roundtable meetings, and a hands-on lab session with Office 2010 at WPC:

Outlook:

  The ribbon finally shows up in Outlook 2010, eating up some valuable screen real estate but also providing access to some interesting new features.  One is a "conversation view" that allows the user to group messages by conversation, and expand or compress conversations, very easily. 

My favorite new Outlook feature is a "Clean Up/Ignore" function that allows the user to quickly and systematically re-direct or delete messages in a thread -- it's also known as the message "mute button."  For example, once a thread gets unwieldy (5 reply-all's, 5 "please remove me from this thread" messages, 3 "me too" messages, etc.), a user can systematically trim out the chaff, keeping only the messages where a decision was made or action required. I remain curious, however, how this feature will handle branching of messages outward from a thread, and look forward to testing this feature in more depth.  

Another useful feature is the addition of a small, relevant snippet of a calendar view added to meeting requests so that the user can see his/her calendar from within the meeting request.

Excel: 

I'll likely write more about this in the future, but the addition of sparklines and a feature called "slicers" add more BI and data visualization capability to Excel, and the keynote demonstrations included a user easily working with a data set containing 1.5 million rows of data in a workbook via the SQL Server 2010/Excel 2010 integration previously code-named "Project Gemini."  

Word: 

One exceptional thing I saw demonstrated in Word actually applies to several of the Office products:  the ability for multiple authors to concurrently author the same document.  This is a frequently requested capability, and I look forward to demonstrating this when the SharePoint beta is set up in our lab environment.  For now, you can see this process via the demo in this video (note: fast-forward to the 54-minute mark).

 
[BP0VK] The Business Productivity Opportunity: The Next Wave, Your Customers, and You

PowerPoint:  

Other than the co-editing capabilities which I saw only in the context of Word but which I expect to be most valuable in PowerPoint, the most interesting new features I saw related to new tools for editing of pictures and videos from within PowerPoint.

In all of the Office products, the "Backstage" view replaces the combination of the Office button and the Document Information Panel as the place to see and manage metadata and other document properties.

There were several new features in Office applications like Access, One Note, etc., that I saw in demos but have yet to take for a test-drive.  KMA has the bits installed in our lab, so watch this space for more updates as we continue our testing and learning.  Meanwhile, check out this excellent image gallery that shows off the new user interface and other key features in Office 2010, and this overview [Download OfficeOverviewFS].

SharePoint Workflow via K2 blackpoint

As a firm with deep investments in .NET development at more of a "foundation" level (e.g., Windows Workflow Foundation), KMA has been somewhat hesitant to invest aggressively in third-party workflow solutions for SharePoint such as Nintex, AgilePoint, and K2.  In the meantime, we've invested in developing a thorough understanding of three key approaches to SharePoint workflow:

1. effectively using SharePoint's native workflows
2. creating SharePoint workflows with SharePoint Designer (now a free download from MSFT) 
3. creating custom workflows in .NET with Workflow Foundation.

In fact, a few years ago, we created a white paper about these different approaches, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of each.  At the time, we consciously chose not to include ISV (Independent Software Vendor, or third-party developer) solutions because it would expand the scope of the white paper too broadly.

Meanwhile, we've monitored the marketplace for ISV workflow solutions.  This week, I attended the monthly New England SharePoint User Group meeting, including a featured speaker from K2, a leading workflow ISV.  K2 has had a presence in the workflow market for many years with their K2.NET and blackpearl workflow engines for the enterprise.  blackpearl is K2's current enterprise offering, and it contains some capabilities for SharePoint-specific workflow development.

In this week's session, we were shown key differences between K2's new blackpoint offering and the richer blackpearl as follows:

• blackpoint has business-user-oriented user interfaces for workflow design that blackpearl does not have in its current version: 
  1. blackpoint Studio, a standalone Integrated Development Environment for creating workflows
  2. blackpoint Web designer, a SilverLight-based tool for visually designing workflows from within SharePoint
• blackpoint has reduced complexity (read: reduced functionality) to make it easier for business analysts and business users to develop SharePoint workflows without writing .NET code.
• blackpoint is priced much more aggressively than blackpearl, its enterprise-class cousin.  blackpoint pricing spans from $5,000 to $15,000 per server; blackpearl is orders of magnitude higher.

Given the aggressive pricing for blackpoint and K2's reputation in the Microsoft community, I look forward to our firm's being able to see more and test blackpoint, as many of our clients are approaching business process automation as a key initiative in their "sophomore year" with SharePoint 2007.

BI for the Masses: An Update

Some recent announcements from Microsoft about their Business Intelligence strategy are worth noting, especially as we're seeing Business Performance Management initiatives (dashboards, scorecards, KPIs, reporting portals, etc.) being included as part of Phase 2 or Phase 3 of many clients' SharePoint rollouts.

The most notable changes announced were regarding PerformancePoint Server, Microsoft's BI product suite offering:

• Monitoring (formerly Business Scorecard Manager),
• Analysis (formerly the Proclarity suite of analysis tools), and 
• Planning (an all-new financial planning and analysis tool, incorporating Excel and SQL Server).

Microsoft announced [note: video link, slow and choppy for me] that the Monitoring and Analysis components are being rolled into the Enterprise version of SharePoint Server, while the Planning module is being retired after some final updates/improvements to it in Service Pack 3, due out Summer 2009. 

Part of the challenge I've always found (perhaps because of my own background in the Microsoft Business Solutions channel) in reading the tea leaves from Microsoft regarding business intelligence is the fact that there are multiple voices emanating from multiple product groups within Microsoft.  Customers seeking planning capabilities still have the following options:

From the Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) side of the house:

• FRx
• Forecaster
• Enterprise Reporting, and
• Management Reporter. 

Each of these products has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the salient point, as announced at  Microsoft's recent Convergence conference, is that all the other products will be subsumed into Management Reporter within the next five years according to Microsoft's roadmap:

 

A few notes:

1. These solutions focus on Microsoft Dynamics as the line-of-business data stores against which these performance management tools are reporting. 
2. I am very interested, but not particularly clear on, the intended integration between Management Reporter and Office (Excel client?  SharePoint hooks?  etc.). 
3. I also am a bit surprised that Enterprise Reporting, although it shows up on the roadmap and is arguably the most sophisticated FP&A (financial planning and analysis) tool in Microsoft's arsenal now that PerformancePoint Planning was retired, has not had an update to its main web page, as of this writing, since 14 September 2004.

From the Application Platform and Business Productivity groups, the options center around: 

• SQL Server
• SharePoint Server (including Reporting Services web parts and Excel Services), and
• Office (including Excel on the client).

Note the focus on tools/platform, rather than end-to-end solutions, which tend to be built out by ISV partners for a particular industry, etc., and the relative independence from line-of-business applications, compared to the MBS solutions above. 

Additionally, something to watch for, based on Microsoft's announcement at their Business Intelligence Conference in late 2008, is a hint about how they intend to bring BI "to the masses." In their initiative code-named "Project Gemini," they are offering a way to more efficiently analyze data from Excel: 

"Tapping into in-memory capabilities built into Analysis Services with the aid of an add-in to the Excel client, users will reportedly be able to slice, dice and filter vast data sets (into the millions of rows) without aggregations or prebuilt cubes developed by IT."  [source: Intelligence Enterprise]

In Intelligence Enterprise, Tom Casey, Microsoft's General Manager for SQL Server Business Intelligence,  pointed to how Microsoft envisions SharePoint, SQL Server, and Office working together:

"When people share their documents via SharePoint, Analysis Services ensures the management and storage of the data and the models implicitly created. That eliminates the problem of having a bunch of spreadsheets running wild because it ensures that users are interacting with common, centralized data."

Not due until the first half of calendar 2010, and based on the next release of SQL Server (Analysis Services) and Excel, it's a fair way off, but if this initiative lives up to its early billing, it could indeed be a game-changer for letting users perform analysis of large data sets "on the fly" with minimal assistance from IT.  Watch the Microsoft BI Blog for news on this initiative.

So, the announcement of PerformancePoint being subsumed into SharePoint is not seismic, but here are a few salient details, per a recent SharePoint User Group presentation on the BI Roadmap:

• PerformancePoint will not be available for sales after 1 April 2009.
• If you own the SharePoint Enterprise Client Access License (eCAL) with software assurance, you will automatically accrue rights to the Monitoring and Analysis web parts.
• PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analytics web parts will debut with Office 14.

As your SharePoint initiative matures and you seek to drive more value out of the asset you've built, pay close attention to the investments that Microsoft continues to make in this space.

Are You Measuring the Right Things?

I had a lively dialogue with a customer this week, joking that I had been relegated to "3rd or 4th favorite person at KMA" status.  She responded with a screenshot of her Xobni analytics, a little dashboard showing e-mail history, and that I was indeed the third most responsive person on our team to her e-mails (I hate it when my own geek-boy tools are being used against me. Her table, with names redacted to protect the innocent, is below).

It was clear:  my colleagues had been more responsive to her e-mails, but her e-mails to me required a different level of responsiveness: Covey's "Quadrant 2" (important but not urgent) kind of stuff.  

In my defense, I noted my timely response to instant messages and phone calls, along with my helping her with relevant learning opportunities, taking her golfing, etc.

In the course of our conversation, we surfaced a few important lessons about performance measurement: 

1.  Make sure that your feedback mechanisms (e.g., reports, dashboards, scorecards, etc.) measure the right things, what really matters, rather than just what's easy to measure.  Often, qualitative elements of performance are the real story, and they may or may not be supported by quantitative analysis focused on one or a few key performance indicators. 

2.  Make sure that you understand what matters most to your customers.  Although I had five or so data points that made my case, if my customer values e-mail communication very highly because that's how she prefers to work, her perception is the one that matters.  Assigning weights to various key performance indicators to arrive at an overall performance index is a useful technique for this, so long as the weighting is examined from time to time.

"Dogfooding" PerformancePoint Server at Microsoft

Jeff Sargent, Director of Financial Planning & Analysis at Microsoft was in Boston this week to present at the MIT CFO Summit, and he was able to take some time to meet with selected Microsoft partners at the MTC in Waltham to review how Microsoft has deployed and is using their new product for performance management, PerformancePoint Server.

The presentation/discussion was informative. I probably wasn't the only person surprised to learn that Microsoft has 80K employees and another 60K in contractors (wow!).

In their initial implementation, Microsoft focused their efforts on some key processes, namely the budgeting and planning processes, rather than mounting a "full frontal attack"; and implementing PerformancePoint Server for end-to-end usage throughout the planning, monitoring, and analyzing workloads. Their effort was split 60/40 between design and build, and they used a more iterative process than they would expect most customers to use, mainly because they were using a beta (aka CTP, or Community Technology Preview) version of the software and would frequently run into limitations of the software or instances where it didn't behave the way they expected it to.

Key strengths of PerformancePoint Server for purpose of Microsoft implementation:

• The capabilities of PerformancePoint fit the needs: an integrated, multi-tier application, easily migrated from existing XLS models, it provides provides agility (modelers can design on the fly w/o waiting for IT/Dev resources).
• The product will provide, in their estimation, a long-term reduction in overall maint/mgmt cost, although the $ in question are still soft because of the newness of the software (look elsewhere for a good ROI discussion -- the software is free @ Microsoft).
• The product's foundation of Microsoft technology made it a good proving ground, and helped the OBA team see real-world applications of Office integrations.

Key challenges of PerformancePoint Server for purposes of Microsoft's implementation:

• It required business process redesign (a challenge in a results-oriented culture like that of Microsoft)
• It was difficult to integrate into existing infrastructure -- PerformancePoint Server not deployed end-to-end, and there are literally thousands of XLS scorecards in use at Microsoft, none of which were replaced by this initiative.
• Limited window to deploy (planning cycle) -- this is a common lament where I used to spend my days, doing ERP implementations, and requires that Microsoft get the project done in about a 90-day window or else it will likely have to be deferred until the following fiscal year.
• Limited product knowledge: 12 modelers, 20 IT people internally comprised the project team. As has been well-documented elsewhere, there is a short-term problem of "plenty of demand, too few skilled resources to do all the work." As Jeff stated, "You don't need an army to deploy PerformancePoint Server, but you need the right types of people," people who understand data relationships, tools, and financial business processes from end to end, and these are rare and valuable right now.
• Roles and responsibilities: The project saw fundamental shift of power from IT to business units by providing tools that business users can configure, freeing them from previous dependencies on IT. Interestingly, this "cultural change" theme mirrors what we see customers as they implement SharePoint technologies, putting more power into the hands of content owners.
• Limitations of product (disclaimer -- they implemented CTP version prior to final release, actually starting on an alpha version): will it scale? auditing capabilities "not there yet," lack of a business-friendly UI for calculated KPIs (no custom MDX syntax generator "possible?").

Overall, it was refreshing to hear a business person from Microsoft talk so passionately about the importance of process ("New tool + bad process = Shiny bad process"), and to see and understand some of the challenges faced by the earliest of the early adopters of PerformancePoint Server.

SAP Buys Business Objects

I was out of the country for a few days last week, almost totally disconnected (yes, it felt good), and almost missed the weekend announcement that is sure to have long-lasting effects on the Business Intelligence world:  SAP's acquisition of Business Objects.

Now, after Oracle has snapped up Hyperion, SAP buys Business Objects, leaving Microsoft and Cognos looking at each other like the last lonely boy and girl standing on opposite sides of the floor at a junior high dance...

Data Visualization: When Mendeleev met Tufte

File under: Mendeleev meets Tufte.

I recently read in BusinessWeek about a great tool for people who perform data visualization, actually kind of a "meta-tool" (a tool about tools). It's the output of a project put together for several universities to help promote "visual literacy," or teaching students how to visually represent concepts.

This project created what looks like a periodic table of the elements, but each cell in the table relates to a graphical way to present data. When a user hovers over each cell, a pop-up illustration of that cell appears on-screen. It serves as a useful reference tool for knowledge workers.

The table can be found at: http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html. Image below.

BI and Web 2.0

I browsed a good article by Colin White in the August 2007 issue of DM Review magazine. It summarizes some prominent Web 2.0 technologies and their impact on Business Intelligence, and underscores the point that BI is decreasingly about analyzing only structured data that resides within an organization – it increasingly will involve user-defined taxonomies (via tagging) of what White calls "unstructured, unmanaged" data that sits on the Web.

BI Secret Weapon – The Spreadsheet (no, really!)

A recent research brief from Forrester Research provides some very rich analysis on:

• Why spreadsheets remain a valuable BI tool in enterprises (e.g., flexibility, ease of use, etc.)
• Some of the key challenge to the use of spreadsheets in this role (security, integrity, etc.)
• How IT can facilitate the effective use of spreadsheets, instead of fighting them (the battle is over – the spreadsheets won)
• How Microsoft is positioned relative to use of spreadsheets as BI tools
• What alternative spreadsheet tools (e.g., web-based, centrally managed spreadsheets – Google Apps says hi) are on enterprise radar screens

FYI - The term "Excel Web Services" was only tangentially mentioned, and Forrester's prognosis for the pace of adoption of such tools is not rosy.

Give it a read – quite enlightening!