Coy Yonce's Blog

Someone that I follow on Twitter posted an interesting link yesterday.  The link itself is an article on http://www.wired.com and discusses a new series of MacBooks with Intel chips, but the interesting part is what happens when you copy part of the article text and paste it into another application. You can find the article here.  I copied the first paragraph from the article and pasted it directly into the editor for this blog.  The results are shown below.

Along with its much anticipated tablet (still in the rumor stage), Apple could announce an upgrade for its MacBook Pro notebooks featuring new Intel chips in a late January event.

Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/macbook-pros-with-new-core-i5-chips-could-arrive-soon/#ixzz0cblGCHSn

It’s nice because you can grab a relevant bit of text from the article, paste it into an email, and the receiver of your email would be able to head over to the source to read the entire article.  The technology used underneath is called Tynt Insight.  Not only does it allow for the source of the copied text to be known to the user, but it also allows for tracking the number of times that each bit of text on your pages is being copied. This presents an entirely new way to determine which of your content is the most engaging.

This would be extremely useful within the context of business intelligence.  For example, SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence & Crystal Reports allows  allows you to copy parts of a report (like a table of text or a line chart) and paste it into another application (like Outlook or Gmail).  When this copy action happens we could use some technology like Tynt Insight to grab the full link to the report in an online portal and put that under the report part when it is pasted into an email.

Read More: http://sales.intra.efashion.com/businessobjects/enterprise115/openDocument.jsp?sType=wid&sDocName=SalesReport&iDocID=2010

This type of technology could also work well when copying a specific data point in order to retain the context in which the data point existed. For example, if a user were to copy the total sales revenue for 2004 from the report shown above and paste it into Outlook, we could bring over other data points about the report where the revenue total exists.  The screenshots below show some potential examples.

Source Report: Total Revenue

Source Report: Total Revenue; Last Updated: Oct 4 2009

Source Report: Total Revenue; Data Source: eFashion EDW; Last Load: Jan 1 2010

Previous Year Revenue: 3,400,129

This presents some interesting possibilities for embedding and integrating BI applications within other applications and information portals.

Being able to tell a story with Business Intelligence content is a must for any organization.  It is this story telling ability that allows the organization to realize new insights and then put the appropriate context around the information to improve processes or decision making abilities.  It is also an iterative process.  I may gain an insight from an analysis session and present this as a story to several departments within my organization.  Those departments will then take my story, do their own analysis on the information within their own contexts, and tell their own story.  The end result is that the organization is unifying around stories that attempt to understand what their data is telling them and then collaborating on improvements to achieve more efficient business processes.

I would argue that this level of collaboration can only be achieved if Business Intelligence is provided to everyone within the organization.  Only then will employees have the power to determine these insights on their own without waiting for the problem to get bigger or for someone else to realize the problem exists.  As Business Intelligence vendors we have been saying for years, we want to make our products ubiquitous…but how?

Cindi Howson posted an article in February of 2008 talking about how we should achieve ubiquitous, or pervasive, BI. She found that, at the time, only 25% of workers were using BI.  I would venture to say that this number is not much higher today.  I’m sure that there has been some increase due to the focus on government audits and a larger understanding of the importance of data, but overall, the number probably has not moved much.  The reasons are ultimately still the same as Cindi points out in her article: companies need to realize the value of the data they have, they need to deploy the tools to more than just analysts and power users, and they need to provide the rights tools to the right workers.  So, why haven’t companies made more progress towards these goals already?  Largely because the products they are using do not make it easy.  As BI vendors we need to do more in order to make BI easier to adopt for all users within an organization.

Within the next three posts, I will focus on the following ideas with regards to ubiquitous BI:

• Creating simpler, interoperable products that start with basic functionality and expose advanced functionality when needed
• Ensuring that our products are enjoyable to use by taking advantage of collaborative techniques and our community of users
• Focusing on making our products embeddable

The goal of these posts will be to explain how BI vendors can further enhance their existing features along these lines and learn from other software that utilize these ideas to create easy to use and easy to deploy products.

The objective of Business Intelligence is to improve the decision making process. This is true whether it is a large organization or government institutions being transparent with the public. The many different vendors that provide Business Intelligence software assist in this effort by making it easier to discover, analyze, consolidate, and share information.

For example, SAP BusinessObjects, my employer, has recently launched a product called SAP BusinessObjects Explorer which is used to discover information.   We also have Web Intelligence which is a product used to analyze information and Xcelsius which is used to consolidate information.  IBM Cognos also has the ability to do analysis and QlikTech provides information consolidation.

When organizations utilize Business Intelligence to gain insight from information, they are typically doing so via reports, visualizations, and dashboards.  Unfortunately, the developers of these types of information displays typically do not design them with a story in mind.  Sure, they present information that can be monitored and through which insights can be derived, but it doesn’t truly tell a story.

For example, take a look at this dashboard.  Aside from utilizing unnecessary three dimensional graphics and lacking information necessary to make decisions, the information that does exist is really just there to be monitored.  You could derive minimal insights from the display; however, you can’t really tell a story.

Image First Seen on Stephen Few's Blog

The ways that people usually tell stories with data is either by presenting it in the form of an interactive visualization, a presentation, via documents, or on websites.  In this way, they are able to mix the graphics with explanatory text to add context to the information being display. For example, using an example from earlier post, why is it bad that customer satisfaction is down to 82.31%? What does this mean to the organization? There is no way to tell from the speedometers presented below.

It is important to ensure that your Business Intelligence content not only benefits the organization in how they monitor business processes and performance, but also provides the ability to tell a story when an individual or multiple individuals derive previously unrealized insights.

Why is storytelling important?

If I work in HR for a company and I notice a trend that our turnover rate has increased over the past three quarters, then I have discovered an insight.  I would obviously want to take this to the next step and analyze the information to determine the root cause behind the turnover.  I could discover through my analysis that the turnover started increasing when a new training program launched within the company.  Now, I need to perform further analysis to see if there is really a relationship or if this is just a coincidence.  If there is a relationship, then I need the ability to tell my story about how the modifications in the training program are causing employee satisfaction to decrease and thus impacting company productivity through turnover.

Based on the example above, I have followed, what I feel to be, the typical scenario for an end user within an organization.

1. I discovered something interesting – an insight
2. I analyzed information available to me
3. I came to a conclusion
4. I wanted to share this with those within the comany that could change a broken process

In addition, I think it is important to include another important aspect to this scenario – collaboration.  Once a user has derived insight and they start to analyze more information, they may need help from another user that has access to different information or they may want to run their hypothesis by other members of their department.  In this way, they are collaborating with others to build a story.

Now, can you imagine an employee in your HR department performing this analysis and storytelling through your currently implemented BI software? It is probably difficult to envision as it is not easy to do with most of the BI suites available.

Those of us that work in BI need to start thinking about how we provide our end users the ability to tell a story.  These stories are the real way to shine a light on ineffective processes and complicated cause and effect issues.