I participated on a DM Radio panel a few weeks ago – they’re always fun, informal, and a great way to share and debate insightful ideas. One of the participants was Marko Muellner, who is VP Marketing at WebTrends. I mention this because he highlighted a common phenomenon in the context of reporting and marketing departments; a frantic need to engineer and share positive performance metrics.
However, it’s far from just a marketing thing. Selective analytics, and only sharing “up and to the right” metrics that suggest a job well done, is a perilous yet common tactic in some companies. And I think we can all see and recognize the pressures that lead to this behaviour. However, failures, unexpected results and fluctuations are just as important to track, and then learn from. There is an answer to everything. And once you have the answer, it’s a lot easier to face colleagues with metrics that are less than optimal.
Here are some pointers when working with real-world charts, KPIs and other data points:
Just as with any “white lie”, the truth eventually surfaces. So a note of caution to those of you who are committed to this “up and to the right” model. Data in today’s enterprise environment is so accessible and intertwined, that if your numbers don’t mesh with someone else’s numbers and analysis, questions will pop up. And this is a good thing. At the end of the day, don’t you too want to know why the charts you’re not sharing (yes, those that also go to the right, but down) are trending this way?
Who knows, sharing these volatile real-world charts now, might help your future charts to truly all trend up and to the right!
Good luck, and don’t fake it. You’ll be found out.
An entertaining, informally produced presentation by Microsoft BI about the past, present and future of "decision making". Well worth the 10 minutes out of your day! Enjoy.
But are users any closer to better decisions?
Today IDC released two reports pointing to SAP's Business Objects portfolio as the business intelligence (BI) leader by revenue and market-share with figures around $1.5B and 20% respectively. This gorilla continues bulking up through acquisitions such as the $5.8 billion deal for Sybase approved today by the EU.
More interesting is the fact that IDC confirmed the continued growth of the BI market in an otherwise lackluster IT spending environment. There's still quite an appetite for the clarity of analysis and reporting promised by BI software on top of the scarily complex SAP Business Suite.
Big systems, like SAP, are so complex that an entire industry of system integrators and trainers has appeared to help make sense of it all. Ironically, the same is true for BI software. The high skill levels required for wrestling, crunching, and analyzing data has created BI trainers and consultants who help your people understand their own BI software.
Therein lies the value of Klipfolio Dashboard to the enterprise. Most of your people aren't SAP gurus. Very few of your people are BI professionals. They're important but they could all sit around one boardroom table. What about the other 95% of your workforce that makes operational decisions all day? Even if you could afford to train them all, not everyone is able or willing to plumb the depths of SAP.
Instead, Klipfolio Dashboard presents a streamlined view of operational KPIs to 95% of your organization without any need for training. It acts as the operational bridge to get information out of the complex reporting environment of SAP using Open Hub and J2EE web services.
As the tag-line goes, SAP will run your business. And BI will let power users crunch it and query it once it’s in order. But when these systems and experts succeed in producing actionable KPIs, the way to get them out of the lab and into the hands of people who can use them is with Klipfolio Dashboard.
ROI calculations make for compelling sales tools, and an important way for the vendor to truly understand the value their product delivers. Here’s the catch though: these calculations are almost always focused only on cost-savings, as opposed to demonstrating revenue increase. In other words, the more challenging question is how do you accurately attribute revenue growth back to your dashboard or BI deployment?
Naturally, at Klipfolio, we are interested in understanding the two sides of an ROI scenario better. Here’s what we’ve done so far, and where we need your help.
It’s relatively straightforward to calculate the costs (investment) of your dashboard project, taking the licensing, support, and labor – and if necessary, hardware and vendor services such as integration and training – and adding these up for Year 1, and then through to Year N. OK, so far so good.
Now, we can tackle the less ambiguous of the benefit aspects: cost savings. For Klipfolio Dashboard, the greatest cost savings will be on labor. For example, a reduction in the time your users require on a daily basis to search for, consolidate, and digest critical data; or how much manual time and effort can be saved for your BI analysts whose job it is to produce reports. This calculation is a fairly simple [number of users benefiting] X [time savings] X [average salary equivalent].
There may be additional cost savings, such as bandwidth reduction (although even substantial bandwidth reduction has been found not to have much of a cost impact), and some one-time savings, such as being able to cancel current software.
OK, so there we have the easy stuff. You can now understand your investment and cost-savings on a Year 1 and Year N basis. Of course, as with any ROI calculation, you want to run it through a sensitivity analysis, weighting success, and partial success and failure, so you have a range of worst case to best case.
This is where we need your help. Here is a quote from Gerard Banaghan, Director at Premier Stationary, who summed our thoughts up quite well: "Klipfolio gives us a minimum of an hour a day saved, but the more important benefits are harder to measure. They're to do with quality and efficiency."
Measuring productivity or revenue gain is difficult. And indeed, you’ll be hard-pressed to find good examples of this type of measurement. Klipfolio Dashboard delivers increased data visibility; it improves information awareness. Customers enthusiastically tell us Klipfolio Dashboard is performing to or above their expectations. For us, this is the missing ROI piece. Have you calculated ROI using performance or revenue gain? If so, how have you done it?
We’re looking forward to hearing from you. Based on these discussions, we will work with Lyndsay Wise at Wise Analytics to expand our understanding, survey all of our customers regarding the ROI that Klipfolio Dashboard is delivering, and then share the results with you.
If you’re like me, and subscribe to a number of BI and Dashboard-related newsletters and industry reports, you've probably noticed the increased discussion around Master Data Management (MDM).
For those of you still wondering, MDM is the name given to the collection of processes required to create and maintain consistent and accurate data. It's a recent term, defined in Wikipedia for only about two years now. And it describes what is an altogether daunting task for most organizations.
So why is it important? And why the discussion now?
Certainly the importance of an MDM initiative is clear—it's a wish list that almost every business intelligence analyst and CIO shares: If only all of our data and fields and naming conventions were consistent.
Lack of consistency is an ongoing challenge in a world of ever-increasing reporting, compliance and data governance requirements. And I believe the sudden increase in discussion has its roots in both the increase in SaaS adoption and generally tighter integration between most enterprise systems. BI and dashboards used to be single-source, homogenous reporting platforms. But that is changing, as customers want to consolidate and understand their data from a holistic end-to-end view. With this trend in mind, you can see where MDM comes into play.
Because MDM is most effective when applied enterprise wide, it’s not an easy task. And it can be very time consuming. It’s also fraught with future risk: How can you accurately predict what your future data and reporting requirements will mean for your fields and data-naming conventions?
Here's another interesting point, and possibly cause for some of the recent interest. Generally speaking, Extract Transform and Load (ETL) is a process that acknowledges and deals with the fact that various data warehouses and enterprise applications have different naming conventions and definitions. MDM, on the other hand, deals with the issue of data trust head-on, ensuring data that conforms right from the start. In other words, could MDM eliminate much of what ETL is doing today?
At the end of the day, we all just want “one version of the truth”. And to me, that’s buzz worthy.
A couple weeks ago there was a post about mashups and it triggered a discussion here at Klipfolio about the value of having access to business intelligence information from multiple sources in one location. It is more than just having everything at your fingertips without spending the time and bandwidth* for going to multiple places, although that is part of it.
Most enterprise applications come with some form of a dashboard. While there is some customization available, most of the time users keep the dashboards in the default configuration. And each application presents the data in a different way and style. Two dashboards presenting the same information might convey them in completely different ways using different visuals. Likewise, two dashboards from two different enterprise applications will almost certainly not have consistent user interfaces, let alone user manuals.
Two dashboards using different charts, colors, and threshold values
By pulling all the information into one location the opportunity exists to have a consistent user interface for all of the data that is being accessed. Not only is this is critical for ensuring that informed decision making is taking place, but it reduces time spent searching for the information, as well as learning the various systems.
Here is another example. How many times have you seen something formatted in a specific way that skews your perception of it? Think of a graph where the scale is extremely large or small. This can make the perception of the data much different than it really is.
Two graphs with the same information but very different scales skewing the perception
Dashboards in applications operate in the same way. If the data from different sources are not compared properly it will lead to assumptions and potentially false decision making. And even being aware of the differences, it takes effort to combine them into a consolidated source to provide a realistic view, not to mention the added complexity of performing additional analysis on the data once it has been formatted.
As you know, Klipfolio Dashboard is a platform that pulls data from different sources and gives it a consistent look and feel. More importantly it presents a consistent baseline so that a proper analysis can be performed. Instead of trying to understand the different colors and graphics used by multiple enterprise applications, dashboards, and other reporting software, it is simplicity and consistency that really helps users understand their KPIs.
* Look for an upcoming study on bandwidth consumption to compare receiving data with Klipfolio Dashboard to visiting individual sites to access the same information. Sneak peak: Klipfolio Dashboard uses about 4.9 times less bandwidth compared to typical web application page queries.
Recently we were asked to participate in the AMA (American Marketing Association) two-day Data and Dashboards workshop taking place in Atlanta starting at 8AM tomorrow (June 1). The workshop provides mid- to senior-level marketing manager with the knowledge to put data at the center of your marketing strategies.
The workshop presents a review of dashboard resources, use cases, and participant collaboration to provide actionable learning. They contacted dashboard vendors that offer best in the industry products and will provide reviews of them. We are very pleased to announce that Klipfolio Dashboard was one of the few chosen to be included.
Chances are you are familiar with Klipfolio Dashboard already and are aware of the platform design that allows you to pull data from multiple sources. For marketing this is very valuable as you can have something like Google Analytics klips to show website traffic and keyword data on the same dashboard as Salesforce.com showing the number of leads that have come in from various marketing campaigns, and a host of others, such as Omniture, Webtrends, and Eloqua BI data on your desktop at all times.
Led by James Clark (Twitter: @jamesoclark ), co-founder of Room 214 and Ben Castelli (Twitter: @bencastelli ) agency director of Room 214, a leading social media agency and developers of customer marketing dashboards, this intensive two-day seminar will dive into the how to gather, filter, curate and visualize the data that matters most for assessing ROI.
If you are in the Atlanta area it sounds like an interesting workshop to check out.
BusinessWeek declared 2007 as the year of the mashup. But that year came and went and then some, so looking at 2010 the question is “What is a mashup and are people interested in using them?”
Last week, Allan Wille joined industry leaders to discuss the idea of The Last Mile: Data Visualization in a Mashed-Up World. An MP3 of their discussion can be found on the DM Radio website.
According to Wikipedia, a mashup is an “…application that uses or combines data or functionality from two or many more external sources to create a new service”. However, that definition could be used for nearly everything. And the term becomes a bit more grey when you consider what can be constituted as part of a mashup – must it be totally dissimilar data, or can it also include historical data to put things into context?
Technically any location where data is co-located can be considered a mashup. You iGoogle page is a mashup of RSS feeds from different sources. A website that includes a company’s twitter feed and a calendar to display upcoming events could be considered a mashup.
In business intelligence (BI) terms, a mashup is something that combines information – enhancing context – to provide understanding. As with any BI system everything needs to be placed into context. Mashing up sales revenue and temperature would not provide relevant data, unless you were running an ice cream store. But mashing up something like revenue and hours of overtime can provide some very relevant contextual information.
Mashups have traditionally promised two benefits. The first is to provide accessibility, which has been achieved through introduction of visualization. The idea is that more users can take advantage of the data because they can understand what is being portrayed through the graphics. The second point, and one that mashups have only had limited success at delivering upon, is ease of implementation. This is the idea that any non-technical user could create their own mashup. Today, however, this is mostly limited to RSS feeds which a user can set up, such as an iGoogle page.
While people are not necessarily using the term “mashup” many are implementing the concept whether they realize it or not. More companies are combining data from not only their own data sources, but also 3rd party systems, especially as more SaaS systems are deployed.
There are dangers associated with mashups. As more data is available, it can be overwhelming to determine what information, and from what source, is relevant to the key performance indicators (KPIs) that a company should track. The idea is to really think about what matters as opposed to what can be mashed together. Data quality can also be a concern as information is pulled from multiple sources, which may or may not be qualified and cleansed. The final issue to consider is when drawing relationships. Is the data correlated, as in the case of sales and temperature, or causal, which means that there is an actual relationship between the data points.
The future of mashups will include adding more relationships in clearly displayed formats. The new relationships will include things like sentiment and social data to understand the impact of these activities. And improved visualization will enable more users to benefit from BI without a technical background or in depth understanding of how it works.
There was a pretty even split (42% of respondents saying “Yes”) between those who 
said their company would be willing to pay a small per-message fee to receive Short Message Service (SMS) alerts from Klipfolio Dashboard on their mobile phone. While this is not an overwhelming acknowledgment, neither is it an overwhelming disavowal. Estimates from CTIA claim that 740 billion text messages were sent during the first half of 2009, which equates to 4.1 billion messages sent daily.
SMS is gaining popularity in business applications, as well as for social purposes. Mobile devices make it easier to write and send messages, especially with the inclusion of physical and virtual qwerty keyboards as opposed to E.161 keypads. The ability to send messages from PCs to mobile devices also helps to increase the ease of use. Some companies are using SMS to build brand awareness, send discounts and coupons, or even get feedback from clients by including surveys or asking questions which can be responded to with the push of a button.
Receiving SMS alerts is something that companies have already set up, and it is a feature that Klipfolio is investigating and it lends itself perfectly to Klipfolio Dashboard. SMS is a relatively cheap method to use to be notified of when something happens. And it never fails – the moment you are not at your desk monitoring the KPIs is when the threshold or event occurs. SMS provides real-time information so that corrections can be made while there is still time to have an impact. A KPI is only useful if it is important enough to be tracked (otherwise it would not be a KPI, it would just be a PI), and the best KPIs are ones that need to be monitored constantly because they make such an impact on your organization – so why not ensure that you are notified when the KPIs are in jeopardy?
A little while ago we posted a survey asking about your views on Software as a Service (SaaS). We’ve compiled the results and want to share some highlights, as well as our interpretation of them.
Not surprisingly, 57% of respondents are currently using SaaS in some form, and almost all respondents plan to adopt more in the future. Over the past few years SaaS has been growing in popularity as a way to let people use software without having a “CD hardcopy”. In many cases SaaS makes sense, and it follows along with the responses of the top reasons for why companies use the services.
First, there is less involvement from the IT team. As the user is accessing something that is not installed on their computers, they do not have to get someone from IT to install the program. And this theory extends from a single user to multiple thousands of users.
As well, there is less maintenance and support. Updates are performed by the provider, and can be rolled out quickly and efficiently to ensure that issues are resolved, again without IT involvement. Behind the scenes improvements and instant deployment of the updates, reduces the likelihood and visibility of problems; in theory, resulting in a better user experience.
The third top reason for using SaaS is the lower initial cost and commitment. Most services use a subscription model which helps to make it cheaper on a per-user basis in the near term. However, as the subscription is renewed periodically, over time the total cost of ownership could be higher than a one-time purchase price, which, interestingly, is the top concern for SaaS solutions cited by almost one-third of survey respondents.
Overall, users are satisfied with their SaaS experience. The software is performing the task that it was designed for, but without being invested in the product, many users do not really sit back and consider how well it works. Reliability captured top marks being the only criteria being considered very satisfactory. However, users considered performance and usability unsatisfactory. This is likely due to the fact that there is less customization available when adopting SaaS solutions as you do not own it and are less able to make modifications to it.
One interesting thing was that security concerns where next to minimal, where only a few years ago these seemed to top everyone’s lists regarding SaaS.
Also of interest, was the fact that although one of the benefits of adopting a SaaS solution was less IT involvement, about three quarters of the respondents indicated that administration of such a solution should be a shared responsibility between Business and IT, but with an IT lead.
This is no shortage of information on SaaS. One recent white paper is titled “An IT Manager’s Survival Guide in a World of SaaS” and can be downloaded from Spiceworks community. It provides an interesting look at the change of an IT manager’s success, placing emphasis on ROI and the increased demand to produce more results with fewer resources. It lists 10 tips for managing your career, many of which are also useful for a successful SaaS implementation
