Dresner’s Point: Don’t Overlook the Zigzagging of Collaboration & Text Analytics

Missed the boat. Didn’t gather enough steam. All that glitters isn’t gold. These pronouncements are often the verdict when technology evolves quickly and some functionalities or features don’t grab a strong enough hold quickly enough in the market. But applying that verdict to collaboration BI as well as social media and text analytics would be a mistake, even though they haven’t met expectations.

Collaboration BI

At one of my weekly #BIWisdom tweetchats this month, collaboration, social media and text analytics turned up in a discussion about 2013 BI predictions that didn’t pan out. The tweets started with one of the tribe commenting that “every year we hear collaboration BI will take off — but has it?”

I commented to the group that our annual Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study revealed in 2013 that collaboration in BI is hotter than ever, but it declined somewhat in favor of email as the preferred collaboration tool.

That was quickly followed up with a participant’s tweet that she saw two new BI products this month that offer collaboration as their core feature.

Then came a bunch of opinions from the group on why collaborative BI is difficult to adopt. Here’s their collective viewpoint:

• “Collaboration must have a foundation in the business; it’s not something that can be pushed from a BI tool.”
• “Collaboration is a business issue, not a BI issue. Technology is a facilitator, not the solution.”
• “True BI equals transparency. It tends to let the skeletons out of the closet.”
• “Many adoption issues are related a cultural shift. The technology highlights how poor change management is in many organizations. Prior to implementing the collaboration technology, the lack of change management was hidden below the surface.”

I agree! In fact I wrote a book about the Achilles heel in BI performance: success requires change management, not just technology.

Text analytics and social media

These two aspects of BI products have bagged some successes, yet our 2013 Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study indicated a failing interest in both social media and text analytics. I asked the #BIWisdom tribe of buyers, vendors and consultants for their opinions on the factors behind this finding.

Here’s their real-world wisdom:

The value

• “Analysts have said there is more to be gained in ‘dark data’ around the enterprise than in social media data/sentiment.”
• “But what analysts say and what business wants sometimes differs. It’s a question of perspectives and relative value.”

The technology

• “I’m not sure the state-of-the-art technology is good enough yet.”
• “Text analysis and social media require extra effort, which increases the time to value. Vendors need to automate and decrease that effort.”
• “I tested a social analytics tool; I was less than impressed. It was keyboard based and turned up a lot of false positives.”
• “This needs more machine learning algorithms than most tools use today. Social analytics that lack natural language and sentiment analysis are of very limited value. Keywords won’t cut it.”
• “In text analytics the ability to combine analysis of text + numbers is key.”
• “Point-in-time relevance is an important component of using text and social media data. The data gets stale too quickly. Need speed.”

The demand

• “We keep hearing from clients that they want it!”
• “Companies want it but aren’t really sure what they need. I think it will be like CRM in the 1990s, a distracting shiny object until it’s better understood.”
• “It’s not like ERP data analysis, but we find the interest is still there. The question is how to do it well.”

Bottom line: What can we conclude from the fact that adoption of BI collaboration, social media and text analytics fell short of expectations in 2013? Don’t count them out of the picture. Although their journey to greater adoption zigzagged over the past year, customers want these functionalities to help create greater value as they build on their prior business intelligence successes. In fact, text analytics had a strong showing in the #BIWisdom group’s plans and aspirations for 2014. These three functionalities in BI technology are not yet in the ninth inning. Look for an upswing in adoption.

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

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Dresner’s Point: Ready for the “2014ization” of Business Intelligence?

I don’t like making predictions, so rest assured this is not another of a myriad of predictions articles that hit the media annually. Instead, let’s kick start the year with some definite plans and aspirations of companies in the business intelligence sphere. A great place for an insightful, real-world view of BI trends is my weekly #BIWisdom tweetchats with BI customers, vendors and consultants.

What is your organization planning to try to achieve in 2014? When I recently asked the #BIWisdom tribe this question, their tweets made it immediately clear that their companies are gearing up for achieving even greater value from business intelligence than they have to date.

Plans Include:

• More mobile BI
• More BI demos with real-life applications
• Get more into mobile BI as it helps to reach the masses and get closer to “Information Democracy”
• Explore the sharing potential of BI and the power to integrate additional sources at any point in the BI stack
• BI methodology is big on our checklist for this year
• Get up to speed with some of the specialized tools in the BI stack; it’s hard to keep up with the toolsets released so far for data integration, data quality, data management and data security
• Migrating to current versions of BI software; for innovations in BI software you need the newest versions. Examples: user empowerment and the speed of getting answers (not just reports)
• There is a growing interest in data that tells stories; keep up with advances in storyboarding to package visual analytics that might fill some gaps in communication and collaboration
• Monitor rumblings about trend to shift data to secure storage outside the U.S. due to the NSA revelations
• Expand basic BI to more users (not just multi-page dashboards, but targeted BI); mobile BI will certainly drive the expansion
• Have BI super-users engage with others to expand the penetration of BI among users
• Increase use of self-service products to provide more value and increase adoption of BI tools

Aspirations:

• More predictive analytics to learn more about Big Data
• Expand more into embedded BI
• Do more with text analytics; there’s a lot to mine from text analysis

Location intelligence:

The group also tweeted about a new thrust in business intelligence functionality — location intelligence or location analytics. Will it have legs in 2014, I asked? Definitely, they responded.
One person tweeted: “I’m close to this topic and see activity and a lot of interest growing in this area.”
Another tweeted, “Through the use of location analytics organization can see new patterns in their data that graphs and charts don’t reveal.”

Mobile and location are intertwined — two sides of the same coin — so it should have legs this year. Here at Dresner Advisory Services we’ll publish a report on our first Wisdom of Crowds® Market Study on Location Intelligence in February 2014.

Bottom line:

The #BIWisdom tribe’s tweets aren’t mere hopes. These folks are not punching above their weight. They have experienced success with BI so far and are building on that success to mine for greater value.

Judging by their comments, we have new BI trends to monitor as we watch the “2014ization” of BI unfold. Which trends will rise to prominence?

I’d love to know what plans and aspirations your company has for 2014. Please post your comment.

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Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner’s Point: Why do Some BI Sprouts Lead to Failure?

Over the years of conducting our Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study on various aspects of BI the percentage of respondents that report success with their BI initiatives increases each time. Yet there are still some that report failures.

Success begets even more success, of course. What enables an outcome of “mission accomplished” and what causes failures? This has been a topic of debates several times in our Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats.
Our market studies consistently reveal that key contributors to success are management commitment, organizational stability, focused implementation and requisite skills. So it follows that the opposite characteristics would lead to failure: lack of management commitment, unstable organization and lack of skills.

But my #BIWisdom tweetchat participants have expanded that picture with their real-world experiences as users, vendors and consultants. In our debates, they swept past the key characteristics and honed in on a central issue — How do organizations decide that a BI implementation failed?

Is the deciding factor that the company does poorly, or that the users are dissatisfied, or is it a combination of both factors? And what constitutes a “user” in this aspect; is it only users with decision authority? Is the deciding factor among end users the fact that vendors say the technology answers problems all on its own and thus there is not enough emphasis on process, training, briefings, change management? Is it the lack of a long-term vision and commitment, which then causes the BI solution to go stale and subsequently be perceived as a failure?

Failure is a relevant term; in some organizations the IT department may say the BI initiative is a success but end users say it’s a failure because they can’t use the tool.

A participant tweeted that evaluating whether or not a BI implementation fails should be like a doctor’s evaluation, checking for various symptoms to determine whether the implementation is “healthy.” From their own experiences, the #BIWisdom participants came up with a list of “symptoms” criteria for evaluating success or failure.

Someone tweeted that user adoption is the only symptom that counts. Someone else stated that it isn’t the only criterion, but it’s the most important one. Another participant disagreed, saying that it’s important that the users adopt a tool that delivers correct data and information.

Another tweeted that early adoption is critical. And someone else countered that an influential stakeholder’s adoption is the most critical factor, adding that “one negative C-level opinion is all it takes for failure.” One person stated that success requires “adoption from the C-suite to the shop floor.”

Several #BIWisdom folks pointed out that each department head in an organization might have different success criteria —ease of use, governance, integration, for example. And several opined that revenue and growth are the most important success criteria.

Another tweeted opinion is that success with BI analytics tools requires corresponding transformation of business processes.

And there was this bit of tweeted wisdom: “Failure is any BI deliverable that doesn’t result in a changed process or decisions. Otherwise, what was the point of the initiative?”

So the discussion shifted to context and actionability as well as measurement of success.
“But how can you measure ‘understanding?’” asked one of the group. “And what if you can’t prove you improved?” Another participant added that some business processes don’t lend themselves to measurement. So it’s “a bit like a scientist’s problem of mere observation impacting results of an experiment,” he added.
I think this tweet sums up the final opinions of the group: “It’s fair to say that evaluation of success or failure is a measurement of whether the BI initiative enabled change. After all, if it just proves your organization is perfect, the expense of evaluating the outcome isn’t justified.”

Bottom line: Of course failures also are learning experiences. But my experience and observation is that in successful organizations business intelligence is how people stay aligned with the mission and strategy.
Therefore, if BI is that crucial to an organization’s success, it begs the question: Does the BI industry do enough to ensure initial customer success with BI tools and solutions?

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Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner’s Point: Does BI Need a Seducing Effect?

I guess Black Friday, January sales and constant reminders of how many shopping days are left before Christmas weren’t enough enough to entice shoppers to hit the stores early and often enough in the holiday season. Now we even have Pre-Black Friday and Green Monday. These seductive tactics to entice people with something “special” reminded me of a discussion we had at one my Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats.

When I asked my Twitter group of BI enthusiasts what would help to rein in more users, it was apparent that they thought more self-service functionality is needed in BI apps. They agreed that vendors have made great strides in self-service BI (SSBI) but also agreed that vendors need to extend SSBI to advanced analytics.
The weekly #BIWisdom tweetchat is my favorite forum for BI discussions because it brings out varying perspectives among users, vendors and consultants and thus usually bubbles up effective real-world ideas. In the following tweets you can see how they painted decision making for improving the SSBI environment:
Should we “dummy down” advanced analytics for end users?

• No matter how good the information is, if a tool is too complex for end users, they won’t use it. They’ll take the path of least resistance. The more BI practitioners hide the complexity, the more users will think it’s easy.
• Complexity can be hidden behind well-designed semantic layers.
• Users want things simple and want what they’re accustomed to daily: Twitter, Google, Apple. And Twitter encourages over-simplification.

Should we train and educate the users better?

• Some tools require near-zero training to use. Pain comes from not understanding the data.
• Assuring data understanding is tough. Even with better visualization, it’s still a difficult problem to solve.
• I just saw a 3D map that could be rotated in a BI app. But does anyone really need that?
• Should it be a zero training approach or contextual help?
• Training in the abstract is tough, but training with live data is close to zero.
• Users have varying needs. They will care about data and information if it’s relevant to their roles. Training is easier if it’s personalized to their role.

Two of the group tweeted a viewpoint that buttonholed the real issue — “It’s funny how BI is becoming part of consumer apps and the app world is showing the IT world that the focus needs to be on UX / IX design; yet BI vendors struggle with adoption.”

The #BIWisdom group agreed this is a critical distinction, especially since a large part of the population is being raised, or switching to, a ‘mobile-first’ approach. The remaining discussion centered on the vendors’ responsibility for SSBI and BI adoption. As you can see, their opinions varied:

• Tools need to be simple and fast, but it’s not all the responsibility of the vendors.
• BI users aren’t always the right people to ask about UX design. Take me, for example: Give me a big table of numbers, and I’m set.
• Letting analysts design the UI results in a poor design.
• A BICC (BI Center of Competency) should include an expert in UX / UI design.

As the tweetchat wound down, they agreed on two aspects.

First, vendors that don’t focus on UX / IX design and self-service functionality risk becoming irrelevant. “That’s the price of entry,” someone commented. Most agreed that vendors aren’t focusing on design and SSBI in their sales pitch.

Second, you can have the best data or information in the world, but “pretty” matters because pretty and easy beat complete and complicated every day of the week. “Develop an ugly dashboard and see what happens to usage,” tweeted one participant. Someone else added, “Even the placement and color of KPIs impacts usability.”

Bottom line: I recognize the validity of all their comments. But I also recognize that problems are often perception more than reality. I believe the issue around self-service BI is an education issue first and a technology issue second.

I believe organizations need more education (and change management), especially focusing on meaningful BI experiences. And I like the community-based approach to developing solutions and UX / IX design; this can make for more durable and more value-producing software. What could be more seductive than higher value and return on investment?


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Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner’s Point: How to Move the Needle in User Adoption

The topic of how to increase user adoption of business intelligence technologies generated a lot of opinions in a recent Friday #BIWisdom tweetchat.

The tweets started with opinions about what hampers user adoption. Some tweeted that the tangling of BI into the Big Data space causes confusion, it’s a mistake to try to get end users to adopt “analyst tools” and we must stop force-feeding generic analysis tools to end users even if they are “simple” to use. Someone tweeted that some organizations make the mistake of working only with power users who may have a vested interest in not expanding adoption to others. Many agreed that trying to change a user’s adoption of and interaction with BI tools on a daily basis is difficult; one tweet compared it to trying to change someone’s religion or belief system.

The conversation turned when a #BIWisdom tribe member stated that “BI encompasses people, process and technology; but most implementations focus on the technology and forget the people and process.” Others then chimed in with:

• BI should just be intuitive and just a part of other apps; users don’t want to think about doing BI
• Predictive analytics adds a lot of value; but it needs to be a part of users’ current desktop app, not a separate app
• Analytics should be placed inside business processes and link to actions rather than making users go to another system
• BI solutions should not be approached from a one-size-fits-all mindset

A participant tweeted that “Vendors need to push toward true self-service functionalities and super-easy user interfaces; self-service lies not in making generic tools simpler to use but in custom interfaces for specific tasks.” This tweet sparked comments comparing BI apps to mobile apps, as apps on smart phones and apps are very task oriented, enticing and focus on the end user. Mobile apps have the characteristics that “good BI” should have: agile, visual, interactive and intuitive. Unfortunately this seldom occurs.
Some tweeted that perhaps we should apply the mobile app model to business intelligence. Another participant added that “Every hour of training needed for BI technology cuts user adoption by at least 50 percent — compare that to the quick adoption of iPads and other tablets, which need no manual or training course.”

In the end, the group concluded that there is not enough focus on incentives. They agreed that bad analysis often goes unpunished and good analysis often goes unrewarded. “People who use BI technology well should be made into organizational heroes in internal communications and should be rewarded,” tweeted a tribe member. Organizations should praise people who demonstrate transparency and accountability as both are essential in an effective BI environment.

Along that line, someone added that organizations should also “identify employees who are against the necessary change management necessary to build a corporate culture that embraces fact-based analysis and accountability and then communicate to them the value/benefits of leveraging BI. That aligns with my own observation over the years that, without top-down strategic change management, an organization will not widely adopt BI.

Bottom line: A lot has changed, and the way we use technology today is vastly different from 20 years ago or even a decade ago. But one thing has not changed: technology adoption must be driven top down. If the CEO and other CxOs don’t believe in the technology, nobody else will either. My observance is that CxOs must embrace the technology; when they believe it is critical to their personal success, everyone else will get on board too. As soon as there is a hint that maybe the technology is not strategically important, people will treat it with denial and neglect.

There are some things that can be done to “move the needle” in BI user adoption, but nothing is as impactful as getting the CEO on board.


Click Here to Purchase Your Copy of the 2013 Wisdom of Crowds ® Mobile Computing & Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner’s Point: Collaborative Technology Won’t Make You Collaborative

At one of our recent Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats, we talked about the findings in our 2013 Wisdom of Crowds® Collaborative Business Intelligence Market Study, which led to an insightful conversation about why some organizations haven’t adopted collaborative BI technologies and why some adopted it but failed to achieve the anticipated value.

 We started with the group coming to an agreement as to what collaborative BI is. I tweeted that, at a minimum, it’s the ability to annotate, share and co-author in the context of the BI solution.

 Others tweeted that it:

 • Requires that people interact with other users, not just with visuals and data

• Is good for driving toward consensus and documenting the process

• Is important for distributed organizations where it’s difficult to have face-to-face meetings

 • Enables collaborating with people one has never met

• Is good for addressing information that doesn’t lend itself to being captured nonverbally

 We agreed that collaborative BI is a good mechanism for sharing explicit knowledge but face-to-face meetings are still the best way to share implicit knowledge. Facial expressions are an extremely important part of the context in sharing implicit knowledge.

 If it’s so effective, why aren’t organizations jumping on the collaborative BI bandwagon and why have some not seen the anticipated ROI?

The #BIWisdom tribe had several observations:

 • Some companies are not progressing fast enough on a BI maturity model.

 • The technology is in an early stage and perhaps is not good enough yet to gain acceptance with an audience broader than early adopters.

 • Mobile BI has so many collaborative features that people don’t realize collaborative BI technologies are different from mobile BI.

 • It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg phenomenon: Some organizations may have the right technology but lack a collaborative culture, yet others may have a collaborative culture but may not have implemented the right technology.

 But what resonated most strongly with the tribe was the conclusion that adoption of collaborative BI technologies is a generational issue. Organizations that have a younger board tend to have younger collaborative business processes across the organization. Where top leadership is older, the organization often lacks top-down encouragement for a collaborative culture and incorporating feedback into the way it operates.

 Short of the threat of ouster, embracing collaborative tech tools requires strong change management to build a culture change that understands the value added proposition leveraging collaboration. The group provided two examples of rigid organizational changes to implement a collaborative culture.

 The first example was a failure. A large multinational telecommunication company undertook a strategy to change its culture. After 10 years the change has not been accomplished. The big learning is that the strategy was flawed from the beginning because they failed to identify all the actors and their differing stances.

 The second example was an organization with 5,000 employees; five percent of them were involved in the change. This successful BI initiative was built on Yammer. The main ingredient it required was curiosity and a desire to improve. It took six months to really gear up, and it reached critical mass when everyone realized that they were solving problems collaboratively that they could not have solved in isolation.

 Bottom line: Our Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats are actually a good example of collaboration. Participants (BI users, vendors and consultants) are remote, collaborate with no boundaries and leverage a chance to think “big picture.” Too often organizations throw technology at an underlying cultural issue. But collaborative BI technology is only an enabler for a culture that is already collaborative. The deployment of any business strategy needs to include a solid change management process, plan, strategy and enforcement/modeling from top management; this is especially true with collaborative BI. Collaborative technology will not make an organization collaborative.

2013 Wisdom of Crowds Collaborative Business Intelligence Market Study with Buyers’ Guide

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Mobile Business Intelligence - What are your views?

What are your views on Mobile Business Intelligence?

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