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  • How to deliver more than just a good project

    A few weeks ago, I had my road bike serviced by a mechanic who was highly recommended. And so I dropped off my bike. Went through a few basic questions and I asked for an opinion on a number of things. To my disappointment, the guy was pretty quiet and did not provide too much input. One week later I picked up my bike and was presented with the bill. No explanations. Just the bill. So, I payed. I was a bit disappointed. But He definitely did a good job and the price was ok. But something was missing and I promised myself not to go back to the mechanic in the future. So what was wrong? – Pretty much everything except for the results.

    SERVICES SHOULD BE EXPERIENCED

    Bicycle Repair Main
    Become a hero by delivering great service

    My former mechanic in San Francisco was different:

    • He always took the time to explain things to me.
    • He involved me in the decision making process (“Which cable do you prefer? I personally recommend this one for this and that reason.”).
    • He shared cool stuff and news with me (“Hey, check out this really cool new widget!”).
    • He kept his promises and provided me with clear estimates.

    It’s easy to summarize this: The great mechanic involved me in the process and he made me feel good about it. And that’s what it’s all about: good service is an experience. It’s not only about the qualification of the person delivering the service: When I compare the two mechanics, both were highly qualified. The difference was the communication. It didn’t cost the guy a single cent. His total time investment was less than 3 minutes. That’s it. But it made a world of difference to me and he earned my trust.

    BUSINESS ANALYTICS PROJECTS

    If you are a project manager, solution specialist or a consultant, think about your role for a minute. You are in essence delivering a service to the business. The business is your customer. And just like me and my bike, business people are usually passionate and have a lot to loose and to gain. And they are usually a bit nervous about the implementation. Unfortunately, too many project members and consultants think it’s just about getting the work done and to deliver results. Based on my experience, I would argue that just being smart and that just doing a good job won’t get you anywhere. Instead, we should all try to fully engage with our customers on the business side. We should try to be the good mechanic. Think about your recent projects. Have you done one or more of the following activities:

    • Keep the business informed about the progress, potential obstacles & opportunities? Do you do this frequently?
    • Have you taken the time to explain concepts & technology to the business? We should offer this up?
    • Have you involved the customer in certain decisions? Even small decisions can make the business feel appreciated.
    • Do you share good news or cool discoveries with the business? Why keep the good stuff for yourself?
    • When is the last time you tried to surprise the customer? Finish a deliverable a bit earlier, add something extra, do something unexpected. Those little things go a long way

    YOUR NEXT PROJECT

    Delivering a successful business analytics project requires all of us to deliver great customer service to the business. It’s not only about building a cool solution. The project won’t be a success until the business thinks it’s a success. And by delivering a great service experience during the implementation we can all set the foundation for success. Doing that will help alleviate concerns, increase the excitement and develop ownership. It has worked for me in the past and it is working for the great mechanic in San Francisco. The guy in Munich lost my business. Quality was fine, but I’d rather have fun while spending my hard earned dollars! What type of ‘mechanic’ are you?

  • Cognos Consumer Insight Helps Us Make Sense Of Social Media Discussions

    COGNOS CONSUMER INSIGHT & SOCIAL MEDIA

    Last week I decided to buy a new camera bag. Instead of heading out to one of the camera stores in Munich, I researched different styles and products on Google. The websites of most manufacturers were somewhat helpful. Once I had picked a few models, I starting drilling down by look at blogs, groups on Flickr and Twitter. And that was worth the effort – turned out that most people didn’t like the models I had initially picked. As a matter of fact, I ended up buying a bag that hadn’t caught my eye before. It got the best reviews. Long story short: Two blog entries along with a few comments in a Flickr group influenced my decision – not the manufacturer’s websites. Chances are that you have similar stories to tell.

    SOCIAL MEDIA IS EVERYWHERE

    Social MediaSocial Media are extremely influential. A Forrester report from 2009 stated that 78% of all consumers trust peer recommendations. Likewise, most consumers do not trust marketing messages any more. The implication for organizations is obvious: you have got to understand what customers are saying about you! But how do you best go about that? I remember sitting in my car ten years ago listening to a debate about the future of the internet. Somebody made the bold statement that companies would hire professional internet surfers in the future. These “analysts” were supposed to spend their days surfing the web and checking websites and forums for interesting things. Certainly an option. Hilarious.

    COGNOS CONSUMER INSIGHT

    Well, it doesn’t have to be manual. Earlier this year, IBM introduced a new solution called Cognos Consumer Insight and it allows organizations to analyze conversations in social media such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc.. To do that, the solution collects and processes data from the desired social media sites & categories. Text analytics are utilized to comb through the potentially massive amount of data and to identify sentiment and general trends. The output of all this can then be analyzed in the usual Cognos 10 environment.

    Cognos Consumer Insight
    Cognos Consumer Insight

    THE OUTPUT

    The output of Cognos Consumer Insight is very powerful. The potential is huge:

    • Identify discussions about quality issues. Act on the information before the issues turn into a serious social media disaster.
    • Which product attributes are really important to customers? Is it the color, is it the look?
    • Which social media channels are the important ones for us? Is it Twitter, are they key blogs, discussion forums?
    • etc..

    There are several different ways to look at the data. Apart from traditional reporting, you can perform a sentiment analysis, view evolving topic flows, identify affinities or simply look at specific tweets, statements and such (see the examples below).

    Sentiment Analysis
    Sentiment Analysis: Positive (green) vs negative (red)
    Evolving Topics
    Evolving Topics: Hot words

    COGNOS CONSUMER INSIGHT

    Understanding what people talk about and how they talk about your products and services is extremely important. IBM Cognos Consumer Insight helps you stay on top of this.

    There is a lot more to discuss about this great solution. If you happen to attend BAForum and IoD, make sure to sign up for the relevant sessions about this topic. There is a highly interesting Social media & Customer Analytics track this year. Hope to see you there!

    P.S.: Back to my camera bag: The discussion forums and blogs indicated that easy access to your camera is super important when selecting the right bag. A bunch of manufacturers had led me down a path of looking at maximum storage room. Their designs did not get any good reviews. Cognos Consumer Insight could help them improve their product design and messaging.

  • Starting a blog…..lessons learned

    STARTING A BLOG

    Wow. I cannot believe it. The Performance Ideas blog is one year old. It had developed as an idea but it seemed like a scary thing. I had heard too many critical voices: there are too many blogs, you won’t have time, you won’t get followers, etc.. All true concerns but at the end of the day, I wanted to have a blog to capture ideas from the various trips and customer meetings that I get to attend. There are so many interesting stories and lessons learned. Encouraged by my wife, family  and friends, I finally started the blog on October 9th of 2010. And it’s been fun! Many thanks to all of you for following along, for providing feedback and for adding content. Today I want to share a few lessons about starting a blog.

    Performance Ideas Blog
    The original logo on the old site. I took this photo in Turkey.

    LESSONS LEARNED

    Starting a blog is a lot of fun and there is a lot to learn. To be honest, I sometimes feel like I have only scratched the surface. And sure, there is a ton of material about blogging out there on the internet. But let me add some more ideas to that content:

    • Pick a platform: There are many blogging platforms out there. Pick one that you are comfortable with and stick with it. I tried out a few different ones in the weeks before the official launch. In the end, I chose wordpress.com for three reasons: the interface is really nice, there are plenty of customization options and it is relatively easy to move to a self hosted environment later on (which I ended up doing!).
    • Write, write, write: Getting started with something is easy. But after a few weeks the excitement often fizzles away. But blogs are like pets: you need to take care of them – daily. Creating content is difficult sometimes. And it takes time. After a few months, I realized that I was falling behind. So, I took a few days over the holidays to write 2-3 weeks ahead. It was a big effort. But it has paid off. Running the blog is less stressful now. So – get started and create content!
    • Engage in social media: Blogging without social media engagement is like writing about cars without having a drivers license. Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are fantastic tools to share your content but to also spark discussions. The coolest thing about running this blog has been the opportunity to meet new professionals in the area of business analytics. People RT your content, you reply, you probe etc.. It’s fun and very rewarding.
    • Ask for help: Why re-invent the wheel? There is a lot to learn about blogging. Reach out for help and ask people who have done it before. I was lucky to find a few friends who provided me with extremely valuable input along the way.
    • Guests are welcome: Reach out to colleagues, friends and other bloggers who have something to say. I have found that engaging with guest bloggers or conducting interviews is extremely rewarding. Not only do readers like this, but it also helps me expand my horizon. It’s fun to learn from others. And it is a nice way to increase site traffic. Many thanks to all the contributors for this blog!
    • Learn about SEO: It’s nice to invest time in content. But there is hardly any point in doing that if nobody can find it. After a few months, I realized that my entries were not being picked up by Google or Bing. Learning a few SEO basics helped. Before posting any article, I would spend 2-3 minutes researching relevant keywords. Also, I started getting pickier about headlines, permalinks etc.. Those tweaks made a huge difference and I saw a big jump in search related traffic.
    • Read, read, read: Read other blogs. In the past, I hardly ever read blogs. I didn’t like the interface of Google Reader and never got into the habit. But once I got started with blogging I ended up looking for other blogs as well. I bought an awesome blog reader for my iPad and now follow around 50 different blogs. The amount of information I have been able to get is enormous. Also, I have learned a ton from just observing other blogs and this frequently provides me with ideas.
    • Self-hosted: As much as I like wordpress.com, I felt that it was too limited after a while. The issue is that you have very little freedom in regards to which features and templates you can enable for your site. Just an example: most blogs have a Facebook Like button. wordpress.com only started offering this a few months ago. A self hosted wordpress.org environment provides a lot of flexibility. But it also requires a lot more work. You have to research, enable and install everything yourself. I have probably spent a solid 20-40 hrs on the configuration of the new environment. But it’s been worth the effort. Actually, it’s been fun.

    worpress blog

    Starting a blog has been extremely rewarding. But not everything is all that peachy: There were some frustrating times for sure. And I do wish I had more time to develop content. But my time is limited to just 1-3 hrs per week. That’s the way it is.

    Most importantly: Thanks for reading!

    P.S.: If you are thinking about starting a blog, please feel free to reach out to me if you have questions.


  • Part 2 – The IBM Cognos Mobile for iPad app

    Mobile BI is hot. No wonder that the new IBM Cognos iPad app has been getting a lot attention. My initial review from a few days ago was quite popular (Thanks for spreading the word!). The same is true for the quick report about Cognos 10 on the iPhone. It’s been pretty hectic since then, but I finally had some time to sit down and play with the app a bit more over the past two days. In particular, I wanted to check out the online capabilities. One of the great things about the app is that you can use it offline and online – truly a mobile BI solution.

    COGNOS iPAD APP ONLINE

    Connecting to my Cognos 10 server was straight forward. I just entered the regular server URL, user ID and password. The app connected without a glitch. All my folders were immediately accessible and I was able to browse through the content using the regular iOS gestures. Instead of browsing you can also perform a search: Click on the magnifying glass, enter a search term and the app will return the relevant objects.

    IBM Cognos ipad
    Browsing through your Cognos 10 content on the iPad

    DASHBOARDS IN ACTION

    The server I was working with is used to run the extremely popular IBM Business Analytics Experience workshop. I chose a bunch of reports and dashboards that were developed to run on a regular PC. The iPad app loaded them without hesitation and they looked just as beautiful if not better than on a regular laptop screen.

    IBM Cognos Dashboard
    A sample dashboard

    INTERACTION

    Reviewing the charts and tables is a lot of fun on the iPad. What I enjoyed best though, is the ability to interact: put your finger on a certain data point in a chart and the app will provide the according value in a small bubble. If you want some additional info, just click on the little i icon in the bubble and you will get additional context.

    IBM Cognos iPad App
    Can't touch this? Yes, you sure can.

    DRILL DOWN/ UP

    Drilling up and down is just as simple as well. Put your finger on a data point and select drill down/ up. It’s easy and intuitive. Much better than a mouse click.

    IBM Cognos Mobile - Cognos 10
    Where is my drill?

    SUMMARY

    Getting connected to the Cognos server was easy. All I need was the standard URL, user name and password. It didn’t take any time at all. My regular desktop content worked well on the iPad just like on the iPhone.  We did not have to do any kind of re-coding or re-formatting for the iPad (I ran 11 different dashboards). Navigation was intuitive and working with the mobile BI content is a lot of fun. There is something cool and magic about touching your data – a phenomenon that many of us have noticed – let’s call it the “iPad goggles”…

    If you have not had a chance to see the app, make sure to download it from the iTunes app store.

  • Visual Analytics – The new frontier? (Guest Post)

    WHAT IS VISUAL ANALYTICS – BY DR JOERN KOHLHAMMER

    Massive sets of data are collected and stored in many areas today. As the volumes of data available to business people or scientists increase, it becomes harder and harder to use the data effectively. Keeping up to date with the flood of data using standard tools for data management and analysis is far from easy. The field of visual analytics tries to provide people with better and more effective ways to understand and analyze these massive data sets, while helping them to follow up on their findings immediately, in real-time. Visual analytics integrates the analytic capabilities of the computer and the abilities of the human. This means, the human is empowered to take control of the analytical process; he or she is not just the final stage of a reporting process. Visual analytics sheds light on unexpected and hidden insights, which may lead to innovation and increase profits. For example, many key performance indicators are simply calculated using statistical models. But the true relations between data, models and business objectives often remain unclear. If visualization is included as an integral part of the analysis process then comprehension of the models as well as of the data is increased. Errors in the basic assumptions of the models can be recognized early on and newly discovered dependencies in the data can lead to new and possibly better reporting indices. (more…)

  • A Cognos 10 Dashboard

    Cognos 10 offers a huge library of charts. Several new types were added in the last release. There are now over 160 different charts available. Amongst the new additions, you will also find Stephen Few’s bullet charts. They nicely complement the existing sparklines that were already available in version 8.4. Cognos 10 also provides new and enhanced color palettes that help design beautiful reporting objects. Overall, Cognos 10 offers some really cool options for building effective dashboards.

    A SAMPLE DASHBOARD

    My colleague and friend Paul sat down last week to quickly create a sample dashboard in Cognos 10 using the new stuff. He took the new charts and also applied one of the palettes. Take a look – I love it! It’s simple but very effective. As a sales executive, I will immediately obtain an overview of my business.

    Cognos Sales Dashboard

    ACTIVE REPORT

    Bullet charts and sparklines are also available for Active Reports. You can therefore build awesome looking dashboards for online and offline use. Even better: they also work with the new iPad app.

    If you happen to attend BAForum in Las Vegas in a few weeks from now, make sure to look for some the sessions that discuss Cognos 10 and dashboarding techniques in detail.

     

     

  • Mobile BI – Cognos 10 on the iPhone

    The recent release of the new IBM Cognos Mobile for iPad app has created many excited discussions. I will post a more extensive review in a few days from now. Today I realized that most people have stopped talking about the iPhone. It seems that the iPad is getting all the attention these days. But to be fair, most people probably carry their iPhones with them more often than the iPad. But the good news is that Cognos 10 also runs on the iPhone. There is no dedicated app, but Cognos 10 runs in Safari. While waiting in the airline lounge to board another flight, I logged onto one of my servers to test the new 10.1.1 functionality.

    FIRST STEPS

    Logging into Cognos 10 is easy. I plugged in the regular server address, entered my user name and password. You can see that I was on the normal 3G network.

    Cognos 10 on iPhone

    After logging in, I was able to browse through my content. Everything was there that I expected and navigation follows the regular iPhone gestures: You swipe to scroll through your content and you point to access folders or reporting objects.

    Cognos 10 folders on iPhone

    REPORTS AND DASHBOARDS

    I selected a few of the reports and dashboards. Everything worked nicely – Business Insight dashboards as well as standard Report Studio content. The great thing about Cognos 10 is the principle of author once and consume anywhere: There is no re-coding required to make the content run on the iPhone. At this point I switched to the horizontal view as it was easier to review the dashboard below:

    Cognos iPhone Dashboard

    Of course, it is possible to zoom in and out using gestures. By pointing at data elements, you can bring up a small header that provides additional context (precise values, dimensions etc.). If available, you can also drill up/ down or through.

    Cognos 10 iPhone

    Response time on this dashboard was very decent given the 3G connection. The drill-down took less than 3-5 seconds.

    Cognos iPhone

    PROMPTS AND MORE

    Prompts work as well. It is also possible to build reports with location-awareness prompts that pull the data from the iPhone GPS coordinates. I was not able to test that – maybe in the near future. But the possibilities are awesome if you think about it. And there are some additional features such as the ability to set favorite reports, select a home screen dashboard etc..

    Cognos iPhone prompt

    SUMMARY

    Cognos 10 on the iPhone works pretty well. Dashboards and reports do look nice on the small screen. It is easy to review numbers & trends on the go. This is ideal for mobile workers wanting to stay connected with their business no matter where they are. However, the iPad and the laptop are definitely better suited for getting your tough work done. The screen is just not big enough on the iPhone. But that’s no surprise. The iPhone is a phone and not a full-fledged PC after all.

    If you want additional information about the updates for IBM Cognos Mobile in version 10.1.1 click here.

  • Open Pages and the convergence of Performance Management

    Part 2 of guest posts by Erwin Boeren

    Last year IBM acquired OpenPages as a strategic move into the area of Governance, Risk and Compliance. The latest announcement to acquire Algorithmics (quantative risk management) shows the serious commitment of IBM in the GRC market. GRC software will integrate into the IBM Business Analytics brand – the area where other critical acquisitions like Cognos, SPSS and Clarity reside.

    GRC AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

    Risk Management is getting more and more attention these days. Volatility and uncertainty is simply too high for organizations to ignore this area. Along with the increased focus on this discipline I have also seen more organizations moving towards an enterprise approach to risk management. And this is where I see the need for a convergence of risk management and performance management.

    Over my career I have seen many risk management implementations where a major portion of the time and budget was spent on essential things like risk reporting and dashboarding. In the past, companies struggled to collect the basic data and to create these reports and dashboards manually. Today, we experience an increased desire for self service reporting: Users not only want to create their own risk reports but they want to create them when they really need them. The enormous volatility in the markets does not allow risk managers to wait for several days or weeks to review the data in a suited format. No, they need the information almost in real-time. Any kind of delay can result in missed opportunities and sometimes even disaster.

    Open Pages GRC
    Risk Dashboard – Open Pages and Cognos

    PLANNING

    Apart from these reporting and dashboarding capabilities proper enterprise risk management also requires capabilities to align risks & controls to the strategic initiatives of an organization. Questions need to be asked: “What will prevent me from reaching my business goals?”, “How will we know that something is happening?”, “How can we prevent this?”, “What are effective controls?”. To obtain answers to these questions, one could resort to complex spreadsheets. But these are not suited for complex topics at the enterprise level. Instead, leading companies rely on solid models developed in planning software like IBM Cognos TM1. These models can then integrate into other plans such as strategic plans, annual budgets and forecasts. And that opens up a whole new opportunity: Now you can start looking at complex risk scenarios.

    PREDICTIVE

    Over the past decade, companies have collected a lot of data. Hidden in this data is a lot of information. More and more companies rely on predictive algorithms to crawl through this data to automatically detect patterns and relationships. IBM SPSS provides such capabilities, for example. Using these powerful tools, we can start looking at predicting certain events. Most importantly, the insights will enable us to gain a much better understanding of the critical risks and our control design.

    CONVERGENCE

    Effective GRC requires a lot more than just thinking and registering risks. No, we need to be able to analyze data, plan actions, run scenarios and leverage predictive capabilities. And that’s why I see a convergence of Risk Management and Performance Management. And let’s simply call this Business Analytics.

    Erwin Boeren is Governance, Risk and Compliance Leader at IBM Southwest Europe. Erwin has over 15 years experience in the software industry, in various roles in business intelligence, performance management and Governance, Risk & Compliance. Together with his family, Erwin resides in the Netherlands.

    Twitter : @erwinboeren
    Contact : erwin.boeren@nl.ibm.com

  • Rolling Forecasts Keep on Rolling

    Am I surprised? Yes. Maybe I shouldn’t. Our rolling forecasts events were popular in the past, but they keep getting more and more popular.

    ROLLING FORECASTS TODAY

    Rolling Forecasts are indeed an important topic. And why wouldn’t they? Business and life in general is turbulent these days. No doubt about that. Just think about all the stuff that has happened this year. Major events like Tunisia, Egypt & Fukushima almost seem far away given the significant rate of change these days. And most of these events have a profound impact on the world economy. Think about Fukushima: it happened in Japan but the ripple effects created a serious tremor in Germany (the German government decided to completely pull out of nuclear energy within the next few years). Volatility and uncertainty have therefore increased the need to improve forecasting and decision making processes in almost every business.

    THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

    Rolling Forecast Popularity
    The number of participants is significantly increasing

    We have been running a lot of rolling forecast seminars around the globe for the past few years. The workshops are very interactive and feature a ton of hands-on best practices. We used to run them as roundtable events with a huge focus on personal interaction and discussion. But the latest series is different. My colleague and friend Mark Rolfe just blogged about it earlier this week: we have been getting so much interest that the events are no longer roundtables. We just can’t find any tables that can fit 50-150 people. The events are that popular. This week, we had over 40 people in London. Next week, we are expecting well over 40 people in Bratislava. While I personally prefer the smaller sizes (more interaction), I am certainly happy to see that companies are interested in improving these critical processes.

    HAVE YOU JOINED?

    The trend is very interesting. It seems to me that we are about to see a profound change in the way we run our businesses. The traditional annual budget process is just not working anymore. The huge popularity of these events reflects this trend.

    Are you interested? Please get in touch with me. You can find a description of the seminars on this blog. Also, take a look at the upcoming events in Europe. My colleague Tim O’Bryan can provide you with information about North America.

    P.S.: We are conducting a small survey amongst the participants. Look out for some interesting results in late November.

  • Governance, Risk & Compliance – An introduction by Erwin Boeren

    GUEST POST BY ERWIN BOEREN

    We have all heard the term: Governance, Risk & Compliance or simply GRC. But what exactly is Governance, Risk & Compliance and what are the challenges companies are dealing with?

    GOVERNANCE RISK & COMPLIANCE

    Let’s start from the beginning and look at the basic definitions. Governance is the overall approach for controlling the business environment and how to give direction to the organization led by our core values and ethics (voluntary boundaries). This includes the various processes, rules, policies and laws that affect the success of a business. Risk is all about the obstacles that we will have to overcome to reach our business goals and what type of  controls you have in place to prevent those obstacles from happening (controls). Compliance gives guidance on the boundaries that we have to adhere to while trying to reach our objectives. So far so good. Let’s took a look at some real life examples.

    EXAMPLES OF GRC

    Imagine that we are running a fictitious company. There are a number of things we have to do. An example of good governance is the protection of employees by labor rights (e.g. prevention of child labor). It could also be the company-wide travel expense policy that helps prevent improper spending. It could also be a company wide agreement on dealing with fair trade vendors only. In terms of risk , we might have to deal with a vendor not being able to deliver in time which might lead to claims from customers (a loss). A potential control for this risk could be a service level agreement with our suppliers to prevent this. And then there are also external regulations you have to comply with. This is the area of compliance. Regulations like Basel II for banks, the Solvency II for insurers and HIPAA for food handling belong to that category. No doubt – GRC is a broad area!

    THE GRC CHALLENGE

    The challenge organizations are faced with is the complexity of all regulations and the relationship between core values, ethics, regulations and risk management. Unfortunately, too many businesses look at GRC as separated silos. They often pay a huge price tag for this. Leading businesses are following an integrated, or enterprise approach for GRC. Doing this creates significant rewards like lower cost for external auditors due to existing and well documented proof about business controls and procedures. The benefits also include the ability to make better decisions due to deep understanding of risk which will lead to better outcomes. And I am happy to say that proper GRC will also lower the administrative burden due a significant reduction of those infamous and tedious control tests that are required to prove your compliance. Last but not least, organizations can also get loans at a better interest rate or cheaper insurance policies because they have proven to be better in control and thus a lower risk.

    GOVERNANCE SOLUTIONS

    Needless to say: IT can play a huge role in making GRC successful. It is no wonder then that IBM acquired one the leading software providers for Governance, Risk & Compliance solutions called Open Pages.

    But let’s talk about Open Pages and how Governance, Risk & Compliance can add value to Performance Management in another article next week…

    About Erwin Boeren

    Erwin Boeren, IBMErwin Boeren is Governance, Risk and Compliance Leader at IBM Southwest Europe. Erwin has over 15 years experience in the software industry, in various roles in business intelligence, performance management and Governance, Risk & Compliance. Together with his family, Erwin resides in the Netherlands.

    Twitter : @erwinboeren
    Contact : erwin.boeren@nl.ibm.com