If only BI was as efficient as Facebook

BI, Facebook and Decision Loops

I  was at an analysts briefing event with IBM last week who were sharing their thinking on Social Business and what I believe is the inspired and innovative pairing of Connections Collaboration and Cognos Business Intelligence. IBM’s Social Business Leader for Northern Europe, Jon Mell shared a slide that compared the number of operations it takes to share a photo and gather feedback with friends on facebook and  the number of operations it takes to do the same on email.

This set my mind racing. If there are efficiency gains on something simple like sharing and getting feedback on a photo, imagine the productivity gains on sharing critical business information through Business Intelligence reports.

Why do I say this? Because sharing a photo is typically a single ‘sharing loop’ process. Someone publishes the photo, others contribute with their clever and witty observations. Done. A single loop. Count ‘em. One. (A quote from Muppet Treasure Island, btw)

The out-dated view of BI is that it is shared this way too. That it’s published and the job is done. This just doesn’t hold true any more and I am not sure it ever did. BI requires many sharing loops. Ten, distinct loops to be precise;

1. Meaning Loop. Gain and assign agreement on the meaning of the information
2. Implication Loop. Decide if the implication is neutral or if there is a problem or opportunity
3. Investigation Loop. If there is an issue then it will be rare that the one piece of business intelligence will provide the full story. This loops is about investigating the problem or opportunity is in more detail.
4. Solution Loop. Determine possible solutions to exploit the problem or resolve the problem
5. Decision Loop. To decide on the best possible solution
6. Action Loop. Once the solution is determined it will be broken down into tasks and assigned to individuals to be actioned.
7. Progress Loop. Providing feedback on the progress of the solution
8. Monitoring Loop. To determine if the solution has been successful or if the group need to return to refine the tasks or redo some loops.
9. Conclusion Loop. Closure. Establish agreement that that there are no further actions and that the problem or opportunity is resolved.
10. Celebration Loop. Acknowledge the support and contributions of those involved

That’s ten loops which means that if sharing a photograph on Facebook is more efficient than sharing it in the office using email, the productivity benefits of doing ‘real’ business are tenfold.

There are those that are sceptical about Facebook styled social platforms in the office because they may waste time. The opposite is true. Organisations need social platforms, particularly for collaborative decision making. Without them, they are wasting time.

Information Disconnection

Organisational Decision Making

Organisational decision making is my current preoccupation. After all, as BI practitioners, this is at the heart of the value we bring to an organisation. If we aren’t improving decisions then I am not sure what we’re for.

Reach

In an earlier post, I talked about trashcan theory. This is the theory that describes organisations as a collection of people aware of problems, people that are aware of solutions but unaware of the problems and people that control the allocation of money and resources but are unaware of both the problems and the solutions. Good decisions are made when problems, solutions and effort are all aligned but if these things are jumbled up (like in a trashcan) then decisions might not only be poor but they can appear to be random. This provokes those that didn’t make the decision to ask “Why did they do that?”

Good Decisions also need Information

But good decision making needs information. Decisions without information can still be systematic. They can also be thorough with all possible outcomes discovered, debated and properly considered. Without information though, they are uninformed. In many situations experience, assumption and instinct can make a reasonable proxy for information but would you invest your own money this way? Given the choice of a well researched stock or one that a mate has a good feeling about where would you place a sum (large enough that it would hurt) of money?

Business Intelligence isn’t reaching decision makers

This is a bold statement but there is a worrying amount of evidence to support it. Depending on the survey BI is deployed to round 8% of the organisation. Knowledge workers make up between 30% and 45% of the labour force in developed economies, more depending on the definition. Not all knowledge workers need all information, of course, but the gap is significant. The ‘intelligence gap’ isn’t going to get better either. The volume of available data is growing exponentially. Last year we all generated 1.2 zettabytes (remember when ‘tera’ equalled ‘big’?) so as we congratulate ourselves on a job well done we also have to think about what we actually need to know from all of that stuff²¹.

Easier not to know?

Even more worrying is that decision makers are telling us that they know they are making decisions without information. In one study (Accenture, Competing Through Analytics) the suggestion is that 40% of major business decision are being made without reference to information from analytics applications. As a BI Practitioner it’s difficult to feel good about that number.

It’s all in there

In many cases, the information is actually available. In an earlier post, I used the UK retailer Boots (a business I have an immense amount of respect for) as an example. They launched what turned out to be hugely unprofitable ‘Wellbeing’ services because they had detected a slowdown in their core business. When they abandoned Wellbeing in favour of a return to their base beauty business they did so on the basis that their base beauty business was still growing. They absolutely, positively had that data all along. It was just disconnected from the decision.

Just disconnected

To say ‘just’ disconnected is to diminish the importance though. The emerging use of social business tools in organisations is going to make it possible, for the first time, to join up the decision making process and the information that informed it. It’s a tiny connection that can have a profound impact on the quality of decisions. That one single connection will make the decision more transparent, more open and more accountable in a way that the decision makers may need to think again and possibly even make a better decision.

There it is. Better decisions.