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Human-centric BI & The Wall

October 28th, 2010

For information to be useful, we must explore it, analyze it, communicate it, monitor it, and use it to predict the future, but the BI industry’s attempts to support these activities with few exceptions have been tragically comical.

The technology-centric, engineering-oriented perspective and skill set that has allowed the industry to build an information infrastructure is not what’s needed to support data sense-making. To use the data that we’ve amassed, a human-centric, design-oriented perspective and skill set is needed. All of the traditional BI software vendors and most of the industry’s thought leaders are stuck on the left side of the wall.

The software vendors that are providing effective data sense-making solutions—those that make it possible to work in the realm of analytics on the right side of the wall—have come from outside the traditional BI marketplace. Highlights from http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=820

And at the same time we enable effective data sense-making by providing choices of data being cleaned, transformed and integrated when that’s absolutely necessary to increase the possibilities of exploring and analyzing.

With Westbury there’s no wall!

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What your manager will demand from you coming months: create a glass box!

September 16th, 2010

A new Forrester Research report, From Black Box to Glass Box: Case Studies in IT  Financial Transparency, urges CIOs and IT shops to shift from being technology asset managers to  internal service providers—who can demonstrate that value.

Non-tech people typically still have little insight in the value and activities of IT. IT is  being correlated to as “stuff”, facility management… IT spending is based on % of the revenue and IT costing is based on the investments in assets instead of services. That makes it a black box and the comparison with competitors impossible; the competitive disabler.

But we are heading for change. IT changes from asset management to being an internal service provider knowing and showing true value.

You will be asked to:

  1. Translate assets into insight in meaningful services (don’t pick-up your ITIL book from behind your desk but study your organization – http://westbury-it.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-itil-processes/);
  2. Expose and communicate those services (service catalog and start measuring the quality of the service and compare it with the service conditions);
  3. Deliver a bill and/or report to your customer;
  4. Start controlling services instead of assets.

In general you should be prepared for change in the way you are discussing IT processes and assets from a customer centric approach.

Your IT manager and CIO will have the following problems or disadvantages if they can’t deliver:

  • As long as IT costs are not related to the organization services and products it will lead to false assumptions. Such as having too much overhead leading into a new round of cost savings (perhaps at your department?). In the end it might direct you to a competitive disadvantage no one knows of.
  • It could cause managers to make wrong decisions in allocating more investments in certain fields believing it is more profitable.

To start IT cost-transparency, the following is learned from real live experiences:

  1. Start by making IT more credible;
  2. Don’t underestimate the magnitude of the effort;
  3. An organization change with new roles, skills and based on customer focus.

Are you ready? Why wait? It could start with you!

We are and know the field experts.

Just drop us a line:

http://westbury-it.com/about-us/office-locations

Others:

http://www.cio.com/article/608063/Why_IT_Costs_Must_Come_Out_of_the_Black_Box_Now

http://westbury-it.com/blog/report-openness-our-window-dressing/

Martijn

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How to improve your ITIL processes

September 14th, 2010

How to improve your ITIL processes?

Measuring is knowing, but without real understanding no use.

I just read a good article which sums it all up: “Before you can improve a process, you have to understand the current process. You have to get out from behind the desk and walk the process …”

So we are not talking about only knowing but also about understanding. “… how a process currently works is often very different from how you think it is (or should be) working.”

I want to deliver you the following takeaways as important steps you should take before you start improving processes:

  1. About processes, control and truths – The very first thing you have to do is accept that no one really knows what is going on and how people perform their work, neither workers nor managers. Regardless of what you think you know, the work really getting done, and how it gets done, is different.
  2. Workflow: what is real and what imaginary? – The only way to actually discover what is really getting done is to get up from behind the desk, walk out of the office, and literally walk around, observe, and take notes. You cannot practice ITIL from behind a desk. This sounds simple, but as in many things, the doing is not so straightforward. To practice ITIL you have to walk the process, literally. Keep in mind that your goal is to collect and model the existing process as it works today; not what you imagine it ought to be, but rather the actual tasks and workflow in place.
  3. Walk the walk – It takes time to learn the workflow with the right accuracy and detail.  You need to capture the “who, what, when and where” of the process, and should skip the “how and why” to start with.
  4. Than model the workflow – Based on the new info you will probably be surprised about the actual work and time involved. Now you are ready to map your processes with ITIL standards and to my opinion other best practices and your own experiences.

Be aware of:

  • It takes work, time and attention to detail
  • Get up and leave your office!
  • Accept that you don’t really know what is going on, but that you are heading for an exciting journey
  • It’s sometimes difficult to observe unbiased
  • During your analysis your goal is documentation, not improvement
  • Improvement in: the time it takes to do things. You should capture how long it takes to perform the work before you can answer the question “should this be changed”. That’s an important measure (consider our start-up reports on actual duration)
  • The value of an accurate process model cannot be underestimated. You cannot improve anything without understanding it first.

Read on

http://www.itsmsolutions.com/newsletters/DITYvol6iss32.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DoITYourself+%28Do+IT+Yourself+%28DITY%29+Feed%29

Martijn

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Report Openness our window-dressing?

August 25th, 2010

I feel we are about to enter a new area of Openness. How are you responding to that? How are you using those opportunities in day-to-day practice? Are you catching that train on time?

At Westbury we’re entering a new stage of Openness by means of Yammer. We use it for expressing feelings, ideas, vision, and performance and to just celebrate victories internally at this first stage. It will prepare us using this culture of Openness for the next stage in which we will be sharing with our allies outside our organization (partners, customers, industry specialists …). Openness provides new opportunities of idea generation, vision commitment breaking through all hierarchical settings and it (will) attracts customers, partners and talent. Some regions like Australia show where we are headed. And it’s more and more influencing fields of expertise like communication, leadership, competitive advantage, idea generation … Just notice the headlines and different articles.

On the other hand window-dressing seems almost normal behavior in the world of finance (products, financial stability …). Don’t we all know the examples by now? In an other field like IT Service Management we often notice the same kind narrowness and fear to share figures and ideas on the performance of processes and units. It’s a heavy burden for those involved and they often strangle with new improvement initiatives (processes, products, services) which in the end should lead to new competitive advantages. It results in static, nothing saying reports instead of reports being information drivers for improvement and idea generation to get there.

It’s difficult to move forward. Sometimes it seems we need a crisis and new social developments to open our eyes to really start providing data en stages to discuss these problems and data into the Openness.

How to start in the field of service management? Ask questions and provide openness. I think it’s just as simple as that. Questions like: Are our reports really reflecting the correct picture? Are we providing the right data at this moment? What does that data actually say? And if we compare this with other data, what does it mean to us and our customers? And discuss those kinds of questions with managers, colleagues and customers. Perhaps by using network tools like Yammer?

Be aware that we can’t keep up window-dressing taking into account that more and more real improvements and authenticity are counting in this world within the social context in which more and more of your performance, data and comments on your organization will be available and free accessible on the Internet (benchmark sites or sites like http://www.glassdoor.com/index.htm).

Are you prepared to clean the window and share your lights?

Also check out:

http://www.itsmportal.com/columns/clean-window-if-you-want-more-light

http://www.yammer.com

http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2010/08/the_future_of_w.html

Martijn

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Strategies for Doing More BI with Less

August 4th, 2010

Is there a second economic downturn coming up? When will it be possible based on the first downturn to do more with more? Will this ever be the case in the near future?

Interesting research from TDWI among BI adopters shows the following popular strategies to squeeze more out of existing BI investments:

1. Use more BI Self-Service as this offloads reporting from IT and empowers users to get the data they need & when they need it;

2. The implementation of a BI Competency Center and/or the use of small-inter disciplinary teams;

3. Reduction or elimination of spreadmarts;

4. Using existing tools instead of purchasing new ones as well as cutting-edge approaches such as the application of agile or spiral development techniques.

5. BI tools consolidation.

Especially 1 and 2 were rated as the most important strategies to do more with less. From our engagements we notice the same. Our product is a typically a self service solution and attracts more and more attention this year. We earlier choose the path of self service and based on experiences and customer requests most of our development efforts are heading that way.

An interesting downside mentioned in this research is report chaos which occurs when BI teams implement self-service BI without governance or controls.

Together with the second important strategy mentioned above it more and more shows that the organization and processes around BI are crucial. This underlines our vision that successful reporting and day to day BI practice should be embedded in a governance structure (BI strategy, reporting process, organization and roles).

Are you ready to Do more BI with Less?

Feel free to respond or to contact us.

Source: TDWI report – Getting the Greatest BI Bang for Your Buck http://tdwi.org/Articles/2010/08/04/BI-Bang-for-Your-Buck.aspx

Martijn

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Information at your fingertips

April 26th, 2010

Do end-users really exist?

I am wondering about the definition of end-users. Regarding reporting or BI, I find it difficult to define these. Taken literally the word ‘end-user’ seems too static and out of date to get around a real description.

However based on our extended experiences of more than 12 years of report building, BI implementations and end-user training I feel the following types are close to what we experience in day to day’s engagements.

  1. Light users – The users who need static and reoccurring overviews. Real time information is not required and exploring data sets or ad hoc in-depth analyses neither. How? Static, free-of-charge pdf or html overviews. For managers and to support fixed and predefined arrangements on information sharing.
  2. Dynamic users – Those who need real time refreshable information. For example they want a real time status of the performance of department during a specific period. How? Reports which could be refreshed and prompt you for the data set you would like to see. For example the report will prompt you for department, region, classification, period … before it refreshes. Process owners, workgroup managers, team leads, business users …
  3. Explorers – Users who need to explore, navigate and visualize data themselves (googling your data). There are certain questions to be answered which need low profile data mining. How? Use a BI tool which provides you exploring data sources, the capability to define your data set by pointing/clicking and easily sharing your results (by iPhone)? It should be powerful, simple, intuitive and fast. Process owners, workgroup managers, team leads and your business for low profile data mining. But are you up for it? Mature enough yet to provide these access and responsibilities?
  4. Power users - The users which need slicing and dicing data for specific answers. To empower route cause analysis when dashboards are telling you, you are under performing as a group or at your process. So not for answering questions on how we are doing it, but why this is happening. How? Use easy to use slice and dice functionalities together with application configuration knowledge to get there. By the way these are your colleagues which provide you also the above 3 information sources.

Do you agree?

Step in the future and enjoy it now at:

http://westbury-it.com/media/product-demos/part-1-introduction-to-report-building

http://www.sap.com/netherlands/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/large/business-intelligence/search-navigation/explorer/index.epx

Martijn

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Business Objects auditing

March 11th, 2010

Business Objects Enterprise includes auditing functionality that allows you to verify if reports and user management are appropriate, are efficient,

and are adequately controlled to ensure valid, reliable, timely, and secure input, processing, and output at all levels of a system’s activity.


What’s in it for me?

  • A controlled environment in which it’s clear which users and user groups use objects and reports.
  • Root cause analysis to easily relate the disruption of a service to changes and users.
  • Which reports are used and which reports are ‘dead’.
  • It enables efficient license usage. Why pay for want you do not use?

The audit should answer the following questions:

  1. Who is using your reporting solution?
  2. Which groups use your reporting solution the most?
  3. Which objects they are accessing?
  4. Which reports are they using?
  5. How many user licenses are we using at any given time?

You can audit the actions of individual users of Business Objects Enterprise as they log in and out of the system, access data, or create file-based events. You can also monitor system actions like the success or failure of scheduled objects. For each action, Business Objects Enterprise records the time of the action, the name and user group of the user who initiated the action, the server where it was performed, and a variety of other parameters available in the documentation with Business Objects.

The auditable actions I like the most are:

  • Track when Objects are created, deleted of modified;
  • Track when reports are opened, saved, refreshed, created, modified and deleted;
  • Job monitoring and failure;
  • Changes and history in login behaviour of users and groups;
  • Monitoring of license usage.

A post last year on the Chennai Bi blog gives some useful guidelines on how to implement auditing: http://chennaibi.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/business-objects-auditing-in-xir3/

Martijn

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IT service management is threatened with extinction, Darwin says.

September 10th, 2009

darwinAs we all know, Darwin proposed the theory of ‘survival of the fittest’. Species have to evolve from generation to generation, adapting to their environment to survive. Based on this theory and more than 20 years of talking about business and IT you have to conclude that by now, IT should know exactly how to incorporate business requirements and needs. Moreover, IT is crucial in surviving against the competition.

So why does this seems so terribly untrue? Why after 3 versions of ITIL, top of the bill process improvement consultants and the newest flashy service management tooling, most of the implementation projects do not deliver what the business needs? And what about continual service improvement/ASL/BIZL and more …?

From my experience the most successful IT projects and organizations start with clear goals set by people for people, motivated project members, managers and key employees knowing how to change behaviour. As science proves, success, attitudes, culture and motivation start with defined, clear objectives and changing your behaviour; walking the talk. And of course don’t forget to measure the success and to celebrate it.

IT started with people and every initiative and project still depends very heavily on the people involved. We need to start focusing on the central and most important asset, THE PEOPLE! IT for the business needs People for People and walking the talk.

Or perhaps it still takes a couple of million years of IT evolution?

How to start? Just grab some ideas at: http://www.abc-of-ict.com/principles.php

Martijn

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