What are Actionable

Insights?

Introduction to Operational Analytics Software…and why business intelligence isn’t

‘Confused’ by Luis Argerich

Businesses produce dashboards, charts, data visuals, maps and reports every day but is it useful…

… or is it just more stuff?‘Cathedral of Junk’ DoNotLick

This presentation is about actionable insights – what they are and how you get them.

‘Stop Go’ by Nana B Agyei

Ever played with Google Analytics before?

(Fantastic huh!)

Now imagine having the same analytics across every aspect of your business…

What a wonderful world!

…are those views of data that cause

people to think new questions about how

processes work and take action

Assimilate insights Create curiosity Invoke an action

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS

Actionable Insights can be generated using a bag of different tools...

’crystal ball’ by pasukaru76

Spreadsheets and Websheets

The first true ‘mashup’ tool

You can gather data from different places together on a spreadsheet

New online spreadsheets have more sharing and data visualization tools like GANT charts, traffic lights, trend arrows (and other cool stuff)

PROS CONS• Easy to Learn

• Economy

• Struggle to cope with big data volumes,

particularly map resources etc.

• Lots of manual harvesting/normalizing data

• Lack richer data visualization tools

• Difficult to share and manage versioning

In-Memory ‘Guerrilla BI’ Software

Dashboarding and charting platforms that exploit in-memory processing and web 2.0 characteristics

More nimble and responsive that mature platform BI players

More versatile than spreadsheet tools for creating data views

PROS CONS• Low skills overhead

• Surprisingly affordable

• Powerful data visualization, etc.

• Remove need for dedicated BI data

repositories or expert staffing

• Web/cloud based = no install

• More expensive than spreadsheet+

• Generally smaller vendors with less

financial strength

• Lack the installed base enjoyed by mature

BI platform vendors

• Tools that demand new ways of working

Mashup and PaaS Platforms

Emerged when web server apps and Web 2.0 technologies appeared

Agile, code-free, easy to design and deploy apps with powerful data harvesting + Web 2.0 graphics / UIs

Friendly, affordable, powerful but…

Demand new thinking/change in IT philosophy

PROS CONS• Instant-on cloud based

• More capable at supporting ‘big

data’ views

• Low skills overhead

• Remove need for dedicated BI data

repositories and expert staffing

• More expensive than spreadsheet+

and guerilla BI

• Generally smaller vendors with less

financial strength

• Lack the installed base of BI

platform vendors

• Tools demand new ways of working

Legacy Business Intelligence Platforms

The most expensive but very complete

Normally require pre-processing of data into data warehouse (OLAP)

Powerful, scalable, secure and can do lots as long as you have the cash

Require expert skills and systems

Not terribly agile, costly to adapt

PROS CONS• Completeness of platform

features and capabilities

• Financial strength of vendors

• Knowledge of, and close

integration with, core operating

platforms and workflows

• Expensive – not just to buy and install but

to employ dedicated systems and people

• Slow to adapt to changing requirements

(generally but there are exceptions!!)

• Self-service capabilities can be lacking

But maybe I’m going too fast…

(Let’s go back)

First Came Business Intelligence Software

What’s that? Software that makes your business

intelligent?? (SIGH.)

GOOD GUESS, BUT YOU SEE THAT’S THE POINT: FEW IT VENDORS EXPLAIN TO BUSINESS PEOPLE - IN WORDS THEY

CAN UNDERSTAND - WHAT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE DOES TO HELP GET THEIR JOB DONE BETTER…AND

MAKE THEIR BUSINESS INTELLIGENT

Let’s start with what it is, and then explain what it’s for ;-)

What is Business Intelligence?

[Business intelligence] Computer-based

techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and

analyzing business data. Wikipedia

Pretty broad then.

So (again) what’s it for?

It’s much easier to understand what ‘BI’ is for when you break it down into chunks of capability

Everyone has an opinion. The four blobs I prefer are:

1. Enterprise Performance Management

2. Daily Operating Controls and Forecast Reports

3. Operational Analytics

4. Social, Community and Predictive Business Intelligence

Enterprise Performance Management

This is where ‘BI’ began – Scorecards, dashboards and alerts that report

on progress against strategic business objectives, normally focused

around Balanced Scorecard principles and methods.

It’s about defining strategy, then objectives, then measures, then

actions… and then installing a mechanism to report on progress.

In reality, dashboards look great and swishy but the most important thing

is to setup a small number of objectives that genuinely reflect what the

enterprise should be doing and keeping tabs on them.

Can you do this with a spreadsheet? Perhaps – but it’s sometimes

important to drill-down into the detail of data to understand how a figure

has been calculated. Also, sourcing data and reporting can become

time consuming and you don’t want to make mistakes. Also, BI tools help

to share performance and embody performance management thinking

into the day-job of managers.

Daily Operating Controls and Reports

This is about meeting budget and forecast targets and providing an early

warning system for managers when areas underperform while there’s still

time to do something about it.

Many of these systems today rely on spreadsheets, basic charts and

tabular reports. Creating reports and updating budget and (particularly)

forecast data can be hugely time consuming for financial managers.

BI tools can gather and share this operational data – make it available

on mobile and ‘team TV’s – so that managers and workers are

encouraging to achieve more and work together to overcome areas of

poor performance.

Levels of competition created by powerful reporting tools can

encourage every individual to achieve more.

Federated reporting systems encourage managers to report in the same

way to build a consistent understanding of ‘success’

Operational AnalyticsThese are ad hoc or structured reports designed for the purpose of

revealing ‘new questions’ that demand managers to question norms of

behavior and seek to improve processes…

This is the real ‘actionable insights’ stuff that dreams are made of.

It puts the ‘wow factor’ into BI for senior managers and leaders who

worry more about what they don’t know than the performance

indicators they’re so aware of they’ve built a KPI system around them!

Many of these views are about visualizing pipelines, or building new

connections between data that aren’t well understood. Many of the

views of data require integration with third party data or ‘big data’ that

sheds new insights on known data. Maps are used lots too!

Often, the challenge with operational analytics is that discovery of an

issue requires a new or adapted system or process to be installed and so

these platforms can take on the form of ‘half BI’ and half ‘app design’

Social, Community and Predictive Business IntelligenceI could just as easily have called this ‘other stuff’ but there are a lot of

ways business intelligence is used within a social and community context.

Business intelligence is not a stand alone or silo ‘thing’.

Increasingly communities require the ability to predict or understand stuff

and then, having understood it, they want to do something about it.

Business Intelligence, that once was the domain of a small number of

senior managers is now ‘social’ and becoming ever more-so.

Companies that originally employed BI for Performance Management

are using similar tools to predict depreciation of vehicles in customer

portals or predicting journey time on customer maps!

Many systems vendors are moving away from a two-tier (transactional

and analytical) data architecture to a one-tier (checkout SAP Hana)

Maybe, think of it this way…

Enterprise Performance Management

•Tells me what I need to know about what I know so I know when to worry, who to prod

Daily Operating Controls and Reports

•Tells me what I need to know in order to fix something before I can’t fix it anymore

Operational Analytics

•Tells me what I don’t already know

Social, Community and Predictive Business Intelligence

•Tells our community about what we all want to know

But while this has all been going on the world of

business has been changed.

Social Networking

Mobile Computing

Consumerization of IT

From Brands to Lovemarks

Online Shopping

Globalization of Markets

Cloudy IT

Rise of Individualism

Operational Analytics is now center stage in the BI arena because businesses

are looking to…

‘A view from the stage’ Joe Strupek

GROW LOYALTY

REDUCE ERRORS

GROW CAPABILITY

GROW AGILITY

REDUCE RISKS

CUT COSTSGROW COMMUNITIES

FIND CUSTOMERS

Grow ‘Loyalty Beyond Reason’

It’s about building more personalized, event-driven,

fine-grained communications and reasons to engage customers and stakeholders on their terms

It’s about giving your brand over to the people that

value it and developing ‘distant deep support

relationships’

To do all this you need to understand your customer

through their digital persona – ‘customer science’

Grow Communities

It’s about building communities – with

customers, suppliers, workforce, industry

partners…

The noughties is a BATTLE FOR COMMUNITIES

Many companies are valued by the size of

their community

If you can gain the attention of a big slice of the communities that matter to your enterprise,

it becomes a BIG competitive edge

Find Customers

It’s about creating new customers from new

connections between the data you have access to on customers…

With operational analytics tools you can build an

understanding of who in your business knows which

customers the best and identify the most effective

person/route to engage with them

Develop your knowledge of:

• Strength of ties

• Trust lines

• Association, identity and roots

• Shared life experiences

• Frequency of interactions

• Activities and habits

Grow Capability

Organizations don’t work in a bubble.

Few are best placed to deliver every competency they

need to operate their economic engine and discharge

their customer value.

Realizing the capabilities of customers, suppliers,

industry partners, professional associations – workforce

– enables executives to grow their ‘gross’ capability and

competitive advantage by harnessing the capabilities

of others.

Reduce Errors

It’s about reducing errors by having a clearer

appreciation of how key processes and pipelines of activity work.

Operational Analytics tooling will show you how work is

progressing through each key pipeline in your business

to reveal bottlenecks, points of resourcing constraint,

predict where shortfalls in capacity or supply are likely

to occur.

Methods like Six Sigma and Customer First are all about

reducing the errors and process variances that occur

by understanding Voice of The Customer and the consequential impact errors have on customer

experience. It all begins with capturing actionable

insights!

Cut Costs

‘Exchange Money Conversion to Foreign Currency’ epSos.de

It’s about achieving economies by understanding sub-

optimal processes.

Some organizations struggle to fire poor suppliers

because they don’t have the analytics to prove poor

performance that breaks SLAs.

Other organizations waste money on activities that

happen in their enterprise that do little or nothing to

achieve strategic outcomes (managers simply aren’t

aware how staff spend their time.

Most organizations lack clear analysis of processes that underpin their business because IT systems are

fragmented as are management responsibilities.

…. And many other areas. Improvement starts with ‘AI’.

Grow Agility

‘Stretching Elephant’ David W. Siu

AGILIZATION = An enterprise that possesses the ability to

react to new market opportunities faster than competitors creates an organization that always fits its

most profitable addressable markets.

Agility has much to do with:

• Alertness to change (early warning system)

• Preparedness to change (culture and systems)

• Ability to change (infrastructure and capability)

Actionable Insights are VITAL to agile businesses. They

are the ‘food’ that creative, capable leaders depend on.

Grow ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS and you grow AGILITY.

In Summary…

Business Intelligence is ONE huge category of the art of IT!

• Actionable Insights aren’t a piece of software – they’re what gets

produced from (primarily) Operational Analytics tools

• Operational Analytics tools range from spreadsheets to sophisticated

Business Intelligence platforms

• It’s not just about the technology, it’s about how creative you can be

to bring data together in new ways and understand how to harness

technologies to achieve the outcomes you seek

• Operational Analytics are center stage because they have great

potential to source AI and create curiosity in management teams that

drives all of the outcomes I’ve summarized in this presentation

• Operational Analytics tools are difficult to build a case for because

you don’t know what you don’t know

• To build a compelling RoI for BI in your business you’ll probably need to

think about the four main facets of BI and how they bring value

Or (if you’re into Blue Ocean Strategy…)Operational Analytics tools will help you to:

Reduce

Remove

Add

Grow

• Errors• Operating Costs • Operating Risk• BI Costs (de-skill)

• Loyalty Beyond Reason• Communities• Capability• Agility

• A Culture of Curiosity• New Customer Relationships• New Ways To Discover Actionable Insights

• IT Infrastructure Costs• Programming Overheads/Risks

Thank You.

Article Sponsors:

Workforce and Talent www.workspend.com

IT and Technology www.ustechsolutions.com

Data Engineering and Customer Science www.ndmc.uk.com

Ian Tomlin is a management consultant and

author. He's written several books and

hundreds of white papers and articles on

the subject of customer science,

organizational growth, technology and the

evolution of the workplace.

Books by Ian Tomlin:

Agilization – The regeneration of

competitiveness

Cloud Coffee House – The birth of cloud

social networking and death of the old

world corporation

SOS - Social Operation Systems