Here’s a little predictive analytics:

About a year ago, I took a swipe at the “$80 million supercomputer to analyze NYC student achievement.” It smelled more like a super sales job than a super useful analytical tool.

At the time I had said:

Teachers are underpaid, hardly appreciated, and overworked. I can only wonder what the half-life is of a system that asks teachers to log on to get information delivered by the “chief accountability officer.”

Well, it appears that things haven’t gone that smoothly with the supercomputer. Today, I received a link from Leonie Haimson, a NYC education advocate, to a story entitled SCHOOLS COMPUTER AN $80M ‘DISASTER’.

Not only has the supercomputer struggled to gain much traction with users (“The school system’s new $80 million computer super system to track student performance has been a super debacle, teachers and principals say”), it has coincided with severe budget cuts.

We see these data warehousing problems all the time with our clients, and the NYC supercomputer displays all the hallmarks:

• Delivery delays: Nearly six months after the Department of Education unveiled the “first of its kind” data-management system, the city’s 80,000 teachers have yet to log on because of glitches and delays.


• Bad user experience: Many principals have complained that it runs slowly, lacks vital information, and is often too frustrating to use.


• Complicated training and set-up: School officials were hoping to have everyone hooked up and trained within months… delays in creating IDs and passwords for teachers
• Trying to do too much, delivering too little: The principal added that she preferred to get student information from a combination of old data systems “rather than wait for ARIS to churn and churn and churn and maybe give me half the report I need.”
• Massive cost: Complaints about the expensive system—on which nearly $35 million has been spent so far—have gotten louder since the city unceremoniously chopped $100 million from individual school budgets last month.
• And yet, few success anecdotes to justify the investment: ARIS had already enabled her data team to analyze the performance trends of the school’s many English-language learners.

It does offer one thing that I haven’t seen before: a Chief Accountability Officer.

We don’t tend to agree with Microsoft when it comes to data analysis and presentations. In fact, we’ve even been critical of them for misrepresenting data, excessive visual “flair”, missed opportunities to improve Excel, forgetting their power users, subpar presentation tools, and wasteful slide masters.

With all these past differences, I was a little surprised to find that we do share some common ground. Check out the comments (from an article in Internet News) by Peter Klein, CFO for Microsoft’s Business Division in describing the world of business intelligence:

“I’ve talked to a lot of customers about business intelligence and the one thing that they tell me is it’s really hard to use,” said Peter Klein, during at the Credit Suisse conference.

“‘I’m not getting the value out of the investment that I made,’” Klein said customers had complained. “‘I have invested a lot in my back-end systems, and today 10 percent or less of my employees actually touch it, or get access to the data. I’ve got six different BI solutions across multiple different departments, none of which talk to each other. And they’re hard to use, so I’ve got to send people to training for two weeks to learn how to use it.

Finally, we are speaking the same language. Now, I’m curious to see what they are going to do about it.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who put things into two categories and those who don’t. Maybe this isn’t the best representation of the complexities of the human race, but it does give me a cheap lead-in to compare two types of problem solutions: “high tech,” focused on tools, and “high touch,” focused on interpersonal communications.

I was reminded of these two approaches by a recent interesting article in Wired that expresses an opinion about why America’s performance in Iraq has been disappointing. The basic premise of this article is that America has entered into this engagement in a “technology networked” fashion, drowning it in technology; the more, the better.

The article suggests that the US forces would make more progress if they were to spend more time on a “socially networked” approach. For instance, instead of remote controlling a drone from 100 miles away, spend more time drinking chai with local leaders. Not the absence of technology, but the incorporation of technology into a socially based environment.

“If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can’t connect with the local population.” This was a quote from one division commander. Change a couple of words and you end up with a statement that many of us would find all too familiar:

“If I know where the inefficiency is, I can fix it. My problem is I can’t connect with my data.”

Aren’t we witnessing this in spades right now in the BI space? There’s no lack of number of tools and number of features in these tools. The challenge is figuring out who the real insurgents are and how you deal with them. If you’ve been reading the Juice blog for very long, you have a pretty good feeling for how we approach what we believe is a social problem (high touch) and not a technical one (high tech).

The good news is that the US forces are changing their approach to socialize more with the Iraqi people—hopefully leading to a better Iraq. Is there good news for the BI space? We’d like to hear from you on how you’re making sure you focus enough on the social “high touch” aspects of our space. What’s your insurgent data? How can you get to know it better?

“The last mile” is a term that oftenis applied in the telecom industry in reference to “the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer.” It is an expensive and complex step due to the challenge of pushing information from centralized, high capacity channels to many diverse end-points where information is ultimately used.

We think there is a “last mile” problem in business intelligence too. This critical bridge between data warehouses and communication of insights to decision-makers is often weak or missing. Your investments and meticulous efforts to create a central infrastructure can become worthless without effective delivery to end-users. “But how about my reporting interface?” you wonder. That’s a creaky and narrow bridge to rely on for the last mile of business intelligence.

Listening to our clients, we are confident the last mile is a real problem. The ultimate source of this failure is less clear. Here are a few of theories:

1. The engineers who built the data warehouse build the interface. No offense to the talented individuals who can push around, clean, normalize, and integrate data—but they may not be ideally suited to designing a user interface for non-technical users. A designer wouldn’t create charts that look like this (our favorite example of chart-based encryption):

In the worst case, developers are dismissive of user experience. I’ve met with IT folks who felt confident that providing a massive data table would provide a suitable solution for delivering information to users. “Hey, they’re getting their data. Is there a problem?”

2. Reporting is considered the fundamental mechanism for working with data. Here’s a framework we’ve started to consider in thinking through the multiple approaches for getting value from data:

• Reporting lets you monitor things that are well-understood and relatively predictable.
• Exporation or analysis helps you understand new processes and erratic and shifting behaviors.
• Presentation is about communicating insights and understanding, often building on both reporting and analysis.

Many people assume that a reporting tool is sufficient to do in-depth analysis and communicate results. That’s like trying to build a deck with a screwdriver.

3. Poor fundamentals in information display. Despite the efforts of folks like Edward Tufte and Stephen Few, general literacy in this area is still low. Shiny, 3D pie charts are still acceptable, even desirable in some places. Particularly disturbing is the persistence and pervasiveness of this problem in Excel where there still remains some confusion as to why this is bad information display:

You don’t have to go any further than the Dashboard Spy to find examples of the visual muck that is commonplace.

Today's post is brought to you by Andrew White of Gartner from an article in their 2007 CRM conference brochure:

What's the single biggest benefit of practicing MDM?

There are multiple drivers that help enterprises decide to embark on an MDM [1] program. Implementing a CDI-focused [2] MDM program will help implementations of CRM [3] achieve a higher return by enabling better cross-marketing and selling.

Implementing PIM [4] within MDM will help supply chains fulfill orders more timely [sic] and introduce new products more quickly. Embedding MDM in an SOA [5] environment contributes to business (process) agility through support of more rapidly developed composite applications; and others help cut costs by supporting better procurement practices.

Way to cut though to the heart of the issue, guys. Let's see if we can decode what they're saying:

Knowing more about your customers will help you find more products that existing customers want. It will help develop those products too. And let's not forget your web apps. They'll be easier to develop and easier for other companies to integrate with if you have your data well organized.

It's nice to be able to decode this, but semantically, there's nothing there. This response amounts to "Trust us, it's great!"

[1] Master Data Management is another salvo in the eternal battle between centralization and decentralization in organizations. The wheel turns; today it's MDM, in 5 years it will be called Centralized Metadata Integration.

[2] Customer Data Integration means centralizing how you track customer-related information

[3] Customer Relationship Management systems track interactions with your customers

[4] Product Information Management is CDI for products--see how easy this is getting?

[5] Service Oriented Architecture is a way of building computer services as little pieces rather than big integrated applications