An Accenture study:
http://www.informationweek.com/research/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196800921
quantifies how much time middle managers in enterprises waste seeking out information, and comes out at two hours a day i.e. a quarter of an average working day. When they find it, half of the information turns out to be of no use. This sounds about right to me, and ilustrates just how far BI really has yet to go in being genuinely useful, and also shows just how bad the true state of information is in large companies.
The issue is not only that technologies are insufficiently intuitive. In my experience there are a number of factors that come into play:
- no culture of sharing information
- inconsistent data definitions
- poor data quality
- inability to locate appropriate data sources
- insufficient understanding of how to use BI tools effectively.
If you set out to produce a useful new report in some area and succeed in doing so, what incentive is there for you to make this easily shared around the company, and to help others find it? In most companies this would be pure altruism, and so people just keep the information on their hard disk, and indeed may gain kudos from the “information is power” syndrome. Overcoming such cultural barriers is hard, and few companies succeed. I should say that Accenture themselves do as good a job as anyone I have seen, where their consultants are actively tasked with documenting project lessons and storing these, with appropriate keywords, in an internal knowledge management system. However I have not seen this in other consultancies to anything like the same extent.
The other problems are all too familiar to people working in BI. Inconsistent data definitions and poor data quality are the heart of what MDM is all about, and we know how immature that is. Yet without fixing this then accurate and easy to obtain information is still elusive. A further problem which some technologies are starting to address is the sheer job of finding an existing report. Ironically there is an excellent chance that if yoiu want some partioular report, then someone else did too and has already built it. The troiuble is that may be in an Excel spreadsheet on a hard drive, or sitting on a shared server but you simply have no easy way of finding that it is there. It is ironic that Google allows us to search the whole internet in moments, yet finding a report within our own company is a much tougher proposition. Enterprise search vendors like Fast and Apptus, as well as Google itself, are beginning to apply smart technology to the problem, but here it is still early days.
Finally, most end users either don’t have access to create a new report easily, or are not trained in making best use of BI tools, or simply don’t have time to learn. This is why Excel is so popular; it is familiar and ubiquitous, and so people would rather get data into Excel and play with it there than learn a new BI tool.
I believe that these are mostly quite intractable problems, only some of which lend themselves to new and better technology. So anyone with a magic bullet e.g. “the answer is SOA” is talking nonsense. It is only by addressing the organisational, cultural and data ownership issues in combination iwth enterprise search and better tool training that a company can improve that two hours a day per person. It will be long, hard slog, and buying the latest trendy tool is not enough, whatever the salesman tells you.
7 comments so far
I am a software salesman and I resemble the above slight to salesmen. I have sold hundreds of BI packages and seen the vast majority of theses packages adorn a client’s shelf somewhere and the client continuing just as before. I can not agree more about an enterprises getting their organizational, cultural and data ownership issues in order prior to taking on a BI, KM or BDM projects. Unfortunately most enterprises will not; no software will make a dysfunctional organization functional.
SOA is neither a magic bullet nor is it snake oil, but it is next step to pulling together disparate systems and breaking down information silos. Making the it work will come down to management vision and organizational discipline. Often technology is just like a gym membership; it makes us feel like we are working on a problem, when in fact we are not changing at all except being £70 poorer every month.
I do wish that every client I have sold BI, MDM or CRM would have implemented and benefited from the technology. I am absolutely convinced that their business would be healthier and stronger for it. Just as my wife can get me to go to the gym I pay for, I can not make them use it.
Andy, great points. I believe that the key to delivering useful MDM and information quality is to make tools that allow them to be included as an afterthought, an item on the checklist of a project manager or business analyst. It shouldn’t require any type of meeting, any specialized personnel, or any requests of any time to an overburdened governance organization.
IMHO, an ideal tool would allow a project of any size to be able to define, cleanse, and monitor their data for less than 10% of the cost of the entire project, in hours, dollars, and mindshare. It should be able to be implemented by the most cost effective knowlege worker on the project (probably a business analyst) and should reflect the semantics and needs of that specific project.
The reason why existing tools fail is because they expect an organization to meet the needs of the tool, not the other way around.
Also, clearly you are a man of taste and distinction, especially in your choice of blog subjects and wordpress themes ;-) Seriously, while our sites aren’t identical, they are similar enough to be a bit spooky on first glance. Since yours has been around more than a year longer, and you have a ton more industry experience and exposure, I will have to be the imitator.
Andy – interesting assessment but the moment I finished, something in my head screamed: “If ever there was a case for corporate blog/wiki, then this is it.” You may well have the problem of history to overcome but by putting those kinds of question out in the open, you’re developing a discovery mechanism at…what cost?? Rod Boothby estimates
[...] What a mess? It’s an issue to which I can relate because try as I might, much of the information I really want is still hard to find. And that’s coming from someone who spends all day searching for stories. Andy’s incisive commentary argues: The issue is not only that technologies are insufficiently intuitive. In my experience there are a number of factors that come into play: [...]
[...] Andy Hayler often writes interesting articles about cultural clash issues within organisations. This time around it has been like living in one of those articles. The new comers move at consultancy speed with lots of well dressed, bright eyed, recently graduated, and for the most part technically competent people holding meetings and producing documents by the dozen. They are working within the usual tight time frames, with constant pressure to serve up deliverables, and very proactive enforcement of project scope. [...]
I think some of answers can be found in a displicine called Enterprise architecture. Big cos such as SUN DELL Cocacola, federal government, Hartford Insurance etc are pursuing it for exact same reason
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