The internet as a competitive source to drive sales productivity (click here to get the full white paper)

This short paper talks about the subject of the semantic web, providing a definition and context and outlining how this can be exploited to drive commercial productivity particularly in a sales driven CRM process. The conclusion reached is this is a category of technology which can provide key competitive advantage for companies that are savvy enough to spot the trends early enough.

The internet is critical to the way we do business today, rich with key insights to drive your business forward but using ‘search’ to find what you need can be frustrating, imprecise and time consuming. Whilst online data-sources and Corporate profiling tools can deliver value they are often costly, require discipline to drive and can be too narrow in their focus.


Automated Market Surveillance – Finding without looking

The challenge is magnified by the fact that the internet really knows nothing about us, our business and specific market challenges, our key customers and prospects and our competition. It doesn’t understand what our definition of ‘the west’ or International really means and combining business terms together to find patterns is almost impossible.

A new category of semantic web technology discovers the *context* and true meaning of web based business content linking this to specific business topics to get answers to critical questions from the thousands of sources.

Questions like:
Are my customers growing or contracting?
Are my competitors announcing new products?
Are there changes in my customers’ senior management team?
Are customers launching new initiatives that would create demand for our products or services?
What does the market think of our customers?
What does the market think of my company?
What will I talk about at my next meeting with my biggest prospect?


The semantic web changes all of this and through the use of technologies like Artesian’s Visual Market Surveillance the sales function should never be short of the insight it needs at the critical stages in an engagement process when it is required.

And the beauty of automated intelligent semantic applications is you can find without looking or asking saving valuable time and insuring intelligence is continually available on tap.

Let’s take a few minutes to explore some of the specific challenges we face in the world of the sales professional and look at ways these challenges can be addressed by the intelligence which is available on the web.


The flow of Sales Opportunities – using the web to find your next opportunity

Most sales organisations have figured out what an ideal customer profile looks like. Successful companies are also able to spot certain customer behaviour which in itself creates the need for their products and services.

For example an energy supplier might look for the following customer related stories

Plant and machinery purchases
New deals or projects
Hiring or firing
Expansion or contraction
Business booming or shrinking
Mergers and acquisitions
R&D announcements (new products and services)
Awards and accolades
Director announcements

Most sales organisations have also profiled a target list of companies they would like to do business with. Combine all of this with an intelligent semantic web based application and the end result is a flow of news and information stories which provide and facilitate demand.

Consider also the challenge of engaging with a customer for the first time. Corporate web sites are fine for basic information but what is your prospective customer doing in the market, their competitors and associated activity and what are the real industry issues right now?

By linking surveillance to a sales force CRM system intelligence is continually available on tap without the sales person needing to look or even ask saving valuable time and insuring maximum credibility and productivity.


Better Forecast Accuracy

A critical process is any sales focused business is an accurate sales forecast. Companies who are engaged in a lengthy and complex sales process often adopt a methodology which categorizes opportunity by stage or status. These stages tend to be classified as percentage factors which when applied to a trading forecast should provide an accurately estimated number which the business is likely to deliver.

For any sales-person selling high value products and services, the key to success is to try to advance a commercial opportunity through these recognized stages of the sales process.

Though the process and stages will vary from business to business, at the point where you become the vendor of choice and contracts are being discussed and signed, the probability becomes high that the sale will likely follow and it’s at this stage that the ‘deal’ is likely reported at the Board level and high expectations are set.

The key to sales management is to provide adequate sales pipeline cover for the plan number which needs to be achieved. The science behind this involves insuring that the adequate number of opportunities are in the pipeline and advanced to the stage where they can be forecasted with a high degree of certainty.

Sales people need to be adequately prepared at key stages in the cycle such as at engagement when they need to be knowledgeable about what the company does and why it’s been in the news. There are also critical points in the process where the customer contact diminishes typically towards the end where nerves are tested – this is commonly known as death-valley.

By linking market surveillance technology to a sales force CRM application you can insure there is a constant flow of insight which is tagged to the opportunity and presented in a way which corresponds to the sales process you are tracking

A sales person need never be short of discussion topics at critical stages in an engagement or surprised by a piece of news which could delay conclusion of forecasted opportunities


Reduced Surprises

Have you ever had *that call* or email from a colleague, which causes embarrassment because it tells you something you should really have known already about your best prospect for the quarter?

Automated market surveillance can help reduce surprises by tracking the key customers and prospects and
your competition to understand when they are winning and losing and why.


Leveraging your Business Network and Commercial Knowledge

With the advent of web 2.0 the delivery of relevant stories should just be the start of a process to leverage the insight delivered through intelligent semantic surveillance.

Combining relevant insight with the use of social collaboration tools and social networking principles make it easy to share and rate content amongst your business community team.

With Artesian you can instantly create a network of collaborative team Forums, each time bringing together the right team for the right discussion topic. Forums are useful to share ideas and facilitate knowledge sharing. Discussion groups are secure and private equally allowing you to collaborate with hundreds of different people, teams and departments globally in one place.


Advance search using business terms

It is also possible to carry out advanced searches for those things that are not published as general gazette content and unlike internet search engines, the index knows about your business and what you mean by the business questions you are asking.

These tools are simple and easy to use promoting the sharing and better understanding of the stories we
surface and what they mean to your organisation.


Intelligent Semantic Applications to Deliver Market Surveillance

Artesian delivers headline driven, exception-based, insight presented as a unique ‘news gazette’ which incorporates online market intelligence and social networking-style collaboration to deliver smart insight straight to the desktop or mobile device of the subscriber.

Users are encouraged to provide the system with feedback about relevance and accuracy. Collaboration and sharing is also prevalent throughout the application to insure communication is streamlined so that context and opinion can easily be provided resulting in a shorter time to action.


How does it work and why is it different?

Artesian Market Surveillance technology works in a different way than conventional search engines looking for the meaning and context of internet based business content. The software establishes patterns in the data relating to the *links and associations* you have defined which represent the way you classify your business activity.

Business activity, sources, topics and organisational structure information is captured in a taxonomy which is specific to each customer or community

Through a constantly running fully automated service, the emphasis is placed on finding patterns in the data rather than just manually searching or relying on generic alerts and news feeds

The unique tagging and indexing method employed by Artesian looks for a series of matches to the topics specified as interesting for the companies you want to monitor together with the other factors such as geographical proximity or sales territory

By aligning insight to the key stages by which you define your opportunity in a sales cycle, a sales person should never be without the competitive insight they need.

Furthermore by integrating this capability into the SFA system as well as Microsoft Office the high availability and use of visual market surveillance becomes second nature.


The Artesian Company

Artesian was founded on the premise that the delivery of smart insight is just the beginning of a business process and not the end.

We saw what was happening on the web as search engines made the internet a really useful source of insight for everyone. We also saw the advent of web 2.0 and the growth of social networking web sites.

We have also seen the explosive growth of social networking and the way people are beginning to use collaboration technology in the work place to simplify communication and drive business forward.

We bear witness to the frustration that the internet represents as a rich source of *free* insight on customers, prospects, competitors and the market. Frustration because it’s simple to search but difficult to receive precisely what you need at the point you need it in a way which is organized the way you want it.

That’s why we created Artesian.

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Author
Andrew Yates, CEO / artesian
As Chief Executive Officer has an 18 year track record of leading both listed and early stage companies with leadership roles at Cognos (BI), Misys plc (Banking and Healthcare), Eyretel plc (Operational CRM) and prior to Artesian with Aprimo Inc (Enterprise Marketing). Prior to joining Aprimo, Andrew served as CEO and co-founder of Then-Solutions, a leading UK-based MRM software developer specialising in intelligent asset management and operational analytics for marketing. The company was acquired by Aprimo in July 2004. Andrew holds a degree in Sports Science and Business Administration and is a Post Graduate in Marketing

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The Semantic Web – Why it’s important for business? (click here to get the full white paper)
(Semantics: the study of meaning in communication.)

This article talks about the subject of semantics and the semantic web, what that means and why exploiting technology in this field could provide a key competitive advantage for companies that are savvy enough to spot the trends early enough.

Consider the following two questions,
1. Find Indian restaurants in Blackpool
2. What are my prospects are doing about renewable energy in the North West


What is the difference between these two questions?

Both are specific, both are answerable, both answers are valuable albeit in different ways however any well informed information consumer could reasonably expect any internet search engine (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft etc.) to answer one of them quickly and easily, however the other would be difficult to the point of infeasible, why?

If you analyse the assumptions underpinning these two questions you begin to understand why semantics are important in the field of search and information gathering.

In the first example there are two important terms, these are “Indian restaurant” and “Blackpool” the important thing about them is that they are relatively unambiguous and their meaning would be fairly universal among any given set of people. However this doesn’t mean that these terms are completely unambiguous, for example there may well be several places around the world called “Blackpool” and the term “Indian” as it relates to food represents a very diverse set of possibilities, for example curry, tandoori, kebabs, Bengali, Bangladeshi and Pakistani etc. The reason why this first question is relatively easy to answer has more to do with the fact that there is better consensus about what the question means among a large number of humans, than the physical mechanism that a computer would use to find and group content on the internet in order to display it when the question is asked.

In the second example we run into difficulty almost immediately, i.e. what does the term “prospects” mean? Clearly, given any particular company or sales & marketing team this term is perfectly unambiguous, however to anyone outside of that circle of understanding (i.e. the internet search engines) it is meaningless. Next we have the term “renewable energy”; this is certainly more specific and more broadly identifiable than “prospects” but never the less it would have a wide meaning and the list of things it could successfully represent would be different depending on who is asked. Lastly we have a classically ambiguous term in “North West”, utterly meaningless unless you also know which country, counties, towns and post codes or perhaps it is simply a manufactured entity to suit a particular business or company, their market and how they sell to that market.

From this simple example we can see that semantics are important, and that lack of meaning in content is one of the primary barriers to getting machines to successfully find things for us.

One of the proposed approaches to solving this problem of “meaning” is the so called semantic WEB or WEB 3.0 as it is sometimes referred to, this is a set of ideas and projects which aim to extend the World Wide Web to include some notion of semantics in information and services, essentially “describing” content with a uniform set of definitions at source and therefore disambiguating it. WEB 3.0 is not a new concept, it has been around since an original 2001 article in Scientific American by WEB pioneer
Tim Berners-Lee, it is fair to say that this a much debated topic in the computer industry, most often people discuss whether the concepts are

a) Feasible at all with the limitations of current WEB technology (like HTML)
b) Will ever see the light of day outside of small well defined research communities

There are some key barriers to fulfilling the goals of the semantic WEB, not just technology but human, there is an underlying assumption that everyone will agree on how to “file” or structure information, even within relatively narrow domains of interest this seems to be a problem. A good way of visualising these structures is to use a diagram like a tree starting at a very high level, for example a company, then branching out and splitting up into ever more detail. Often people use the term “taxonomy” to label such trees, this is a term stolen from Biology where similar structures are used to describe how species are related and grouped.

In the world of corporate business intelligence this problem is equally challenging, imagine you are a sales person trying to answer the second question in our example by using one of the standard internet search engines. Let’s say there are 500 towns in your company’s definition of the “North West region” and that your prospect list contains 500 companies then add to that the 10 different terms that could mean renewable energy in theory you would have 500 X 500 X 10 = 2,500,000 separate searches to do in order to attempt to cover all of the combinations that would be of interest. In addition to doing millions of individual searches you would also want to be able to filter the results by what you saw the last time you did the search, obviously you only want to see new stuff!

Even using this trivial example it is clear to see why this is a difficult challenge for most organisations. At Artesian we recognise this challenge, our approach is solving it is to provide two key weapons that corporate consumers can use to provide better surveillance of relevant internet content. These two tools are,

1. A mechanism to define your own taxonomy.
2. A framework that does the “brute-force” indexing and searching so that you don’t have to.

An example of a typical taxonomy is shown below:


Designing and building such software enables a number of new capabilities that were previously impractical and beyond reach for normal corporate information consumers; firstly it allows them to define their own taxonomy, i.e. geographies, customers, prospects, products etc. Secondly it allows them to index content from the internet using this taxonomy in order to build indexes which can be queried just like you can with current public search engines, except, critically that these indexes already understand the semantics of that particular business making answering question two in our example trivial.

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Author
Steve Borthwick, CTO / artesian
As Chief Technology Officer has a 20 year track record in the software and IT services industry and prior to joining Artesian, was Chief Technology Officer at MRM solution vendor Then-Solutions (acquired by Aprimo Inc in July 2004) pioneering the area of dynamic content management and publishing. As CTO of Whitelight Inc (acquired by Symphony Technology Group in January 2002) Steve led the development of Analytical Application Server technology including high end data aggregation and scenario modelling techniques. Steve has also held a series of senior positions at Cognos Inc, including Business Development Director for EMEA. Steve holds a degree in Computer Science.

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Social Objects for Business (click here to get the full white paper)

We all know that Social networking platforms like MySpace, Bebo, FaceBook, LinkedIn and YouTube etc. are all the rage at the moment, a question that has been playing on my mind for a while now is how a “business software” company like Artesian can leverage the concepts and momentum of social networking in our next generation of business applications and how this could improve the uptake and value of critical CPM information, ultimately improving management decision making. Let me start by examining the concept of social networks; I believe the most successful networks are underpinned by things called “social objects”. Social objects in my opinion are the very essence of what makes a social networking application function in the very first place, so what are they exactly? My view is that social objects can represent almost anything, for example, abstract ideas (i.e. philosophy, religion), activities (i.e. sports, hobbies), products (i.e. cars, phones, computers) etc. The thing that makes the object “social” is the not the object itself, but the human conversation that happens around it and in turn that conversation affects the object or catalyses activity.

Social networks tend to be built around Social Objects, not vice versa with the latter acting as a kind of “node” in the network,
in the cases of YouTube and Flickr the “objects” I’m referring to are obvious for all to see.

Of course, the network is more useful than a single object or node as can be seen by the phenomenal growth of the social networking applications, but the network needs the nodes, like buildings need bricks. I ask myself, why have WEB users suddenly become so important to marketing these days, why are corporations so interested in technology geeks? Pervasive, fast, consistent access to the WEB seems to be a transformative factor; someone who spends 5 hours online is no longer considered a “technology geek”, it’s more likely that they are labelled a MySpace geek or a FaceBook geek, what is happening is that people are coalescing around the networking applications that socialise the objects they are interested in and are best at that; if you are into photography you may become a Flickr geek, if it’s music then MySpace, business contacts then LinkedIn etc.

When you think about it, we’re all “geeks” of sorts, because we are all enthusiastic about “things” outside of ourselves and our families.

By “things” we mean something of interest for example, rugby, wine, celebrity gossip or even Buddhism. All these things are potentially “Social Objects” within a social network of people who care passionately about them. Whatever social context you look at, there’s always someone who is a “geek” about something or other. So what are the important attributes of the network once you have a bunch of objects to socialise around? Clearly the overriding “purpose” of a network apart from acting as a repository of nodes, is to enable connection and sharing which in turn facilitates the “conversation” around the objects. The easier it is to share your objects and to interact around them with others, the more attractive and useful the network becomes, logically, the more nodes there are the higher the chances of you as an individual finding something interesting to act as a “conversation seed”.

It is increasingly evident to me that the most important concept in the brave new world of social networking and WEB 2.0 applications is not “Search” as it has been in the past, now its “Sharing”. Sharing is the driver, sharing is the mutation that will drive the next wave of application evolution; we use Social Objects as currency in a connected world and to share ourselves with other people.

So, what could “social objects” do for a workplace or business setting? I believe that savvy businesses will recognise a good idea when they see it, and see that value may be created by implementing network centric applications and new processes that facilitate the creation, development and consumption of social objects relevant to their business; the conversations that are seeded by these networks and objects then become a vital constituent to better informed and more widely adopted business strategies and decisions.

A business is a social network which operates around the social objects which describe activity & performance and the ideas
which emanate from the conversation they stimulate

We have always tried to make Artesian software innovative in the ways it delivers the insight needed to describe Business Performance; but we also firmly believe that our clients will benefit from the assimilation of the principals of social networking applications. By allowing the user to transform their own metrics, data and insight into social objects that are shared (socialised) by the network, we believe that significant business advantage may be accrued. In addition to sharing the underlying data, metrics and context we felt that to make objects more accessible, the “hard data” of the underlying data also needs to be combined with the users’ own soft data (gut feel, opinion etc.) in our experience this helps to drive more solid consensus, better understanding and ultimately more successful business change. We are pleased with the results; our applications seem to be giving companies new opportunities and mechanisms to create and nurture insight that drives better decisions and action.

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Author
Steve Borthwick, CTO / artesian
As Chief Technology Officer has a 20 year track record in the software and IT services industry and prior to joining Artesian, was Chief Technology Officer at MRM solution vendor Then-Solutions (acquired by Aprimo Inc in July 2004) pioneering the area of dynamic content management and publishing. As CTO of Whitelight Inc (acquired by Symphony Technology Group in January 2002) Steve led the development of Analytical Application Server technology including high end data aggregation and scenario modelling techniques. Steve has also held a series of senior positions at Cognos Inc, including Business Development Director for EMEA. Steve holds a degree in Computer Science.

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Why SO4B is Relevant to Business and Important to BI (click here to get the full white paper)

Social networking is firmly on the radar for businesses. Early reactions which included blocking access to employees because of fear of security and time wasting are being rapidly reconsidered. Suspicion and doubt are being replaced with interest, adoption and innovation. Deutsche Bank already have a significant base of Facebook users and their Global Technology COO, Daniel Marovitz is considering expanding usage to complement existing customer contact processes. (Source, Lara Williams, Computing).

So why this change of direction?
What is the relevance of social objects to businesses (or SO4B) and why is it important to business intelligence practitioners?

Firstly a business is, by definition, a social network. It is a group of individuals collaborating around common themes including their products, processes, customers and partners in pursuit of generating shareholder value.

Business activity might also be thought of as a series of interactions. Many of these interactions are operational in nature more than social. They are captured in the form of business transactions, for example a sale (captured by generating an order) a shipment (a despatch note) and the exchange of money (raising an invoice). These interactions are characteristically high volume, individually low-value and are almost without exception captured using ERP applications.

“Think about the implication for Financial Services for a moment. SO4B means that for the first time decision can be captured
with the information that was used to make the decision and at the time it was made. Is the FS Sector interested?
You bet they are!”

Interestingly whilst ERP adoption captures more and more operational interaction, the need to capture management social interactions has been largely overlooked. Formulating strategy, HR performance discussions, explanations of budget variance are all lost in a sea of documents, spreadsheets, daybooks and email threads.

And with global email traffic predicted to exceed 374 billion daily by 2011 it is becoming increasingly difficult for business managers to rely on email as a reliable, auditable or even navigable record of events.

This brings us to the field of information and business intelligence (or BI). As a BI Consultant
I was trained to ask the question ‘and once you have the information – what do you do with it?’ This seemingly simple question either helped achieve a greater insight into the original business requirement or exposed it as superfluous. After all, if the answer was ‘nothing’ then what is the value of the information in the first place?

BI practitioners have done a remarkable job of delivering insight to decision makers over the last decade but this is where BI applications tend to stop. Insight delivered – job done.

But of course, the job is anything but done. Once the insight is delivered a decision maker will engage in a variety of activities.

For example, a manager may share the insight with their peers soliciting their views on what the insight really means. This is not idle speculation but a process of testing the validity of the insight before committing to action.

Once there is consensus a manager may simply need to share it with their managers. Take for example a quarterly sales report that verifies an expected upturn in sales as a result of a prior quarters’ promotional activity. Here a marketing manager may share the information with the CEO and the Sales Director and secure additional discretionary budget for similar campaign activity for similar products.

“Global email traffic is predicted to exceed 374 billion daily by 2011. It is becoming increasingly difficult for business managers
to rely on email as a reliable, auditable or navigable record of events!”

An equally likely next step would be for a manager to put a plan of action in place. It may be simple. For example, overstock in one location may simply need transferring to another. It may also be more complex. For example, repeated stock-outs may require a rethink on distribution, increased manufacturing or a promotion on alternative products. A manager may need to interact outside of their department, country or organisation to decide on the right plan and then to make these things happen.

A SO4B application facilitates this highly collaborative approach. It links the information to the business conversation about what the insight means. It is underpinned with details of the extended organisation. Individuals, peer groups, formal and informal networks far richer than the traditional org chart. It then integrates this to the decision making process about what should be done and finally to an action plan to monitor that what was agreed gets executed. SO4B opens up a whole new world of collaborative tools and techniques to modern managers. Forums, for example, capture message information and post-reply relationships in structured data. Unlike email this is a rich source of application data for driving management activity and for later historical analysis.

These are just some of the ways that SO4B turns performance measurement into performance management.

Think about the implication for Financial Services for a moment. SO4B means that for the first time decision can be captured with the information that was used to make the decision and at the time it was made. Is the FS Sector interested? You bet they are!

Much of what has been written about Social Objects to date has been focused on the impact of advertising and marketing. This is unsurprising since early adopters are using social collaboration as an open and honest voice that circumvents marketing message with consumer candour. However, as a collaborative tool in the hands of modern managers, social objects are poised to make their biggest impact in the fields of performance.

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Author
Dale Roberts, Client Services Director / artesian
Client Services Director heads up Artesian’s implementation and consulting team working at a strategic level with customers implementing Performance Management solutions. Dale has been involved in Business Intelligence and Performance Management for over a decade, initially specialising in financial services data warehousing deployments for major global banking and investment institutions. Prior to Artesian, Dale was with Cognos for over 7 years latterly as European Services Director. Dale has collaborated with many global businesses to help them achieve real and incremental business value from their businesses intelligence initiatives.

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Executive Information Overload (click here to get the full white paper)

In his book Blink, author and staff writer for the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell, asserts that too much information actually impairs judgement. Gladwell illustrates his point by explaining that in a US study emergency room doctors proved much better at diagnosing chest pain when they had only four data points. Interestingly, access to additional data including whether the patient smokes, actually reduced the accuracy of the diagnosis.

As BI Practitioners we probably find it difficult to believe that after a decade of delivering insight to information starved decision makers that you can have too much of this particular good thing. However, widespread access to the internet, the ease of sending email to large numbers of people and a proliferation of often poorly created information sources are generating an overwhelming number of data points for businesses.

Alvin Toffler, American author and futurist is credited with first using the phrase ‘information overload’ in his 1970 book ‘Future Shock’ This proved to be prophetic indeed. The rapid growth in computing and then the internet removed many of the barriers to producing information.

The result can be that the modern executive can often feel like they are drowning in data and the implications for business can be serious. Psychologist, David Lewis, commenting on a world-wide, survey conducted by Reuters on this subject described the symptoms as reduced attention span, difficulties in memorizing and, most worryingly, poor decision-making.

“Business Intelligence initiatives are as capable of exacerbating information overload as they are of alleviating it”

To be provocative for a moment, I would argue that Business Intelligence initiatives are as capable of exacerbating information overload as they are of alleviating it. Whilst BI has delivered on many of its promises, there is still a lack of maturity in the way that some information applications are implemented and the result can be BI overload, long lists of unused reports, cluttered portals and overnight production runs that spray too many reports into already jam-packed email inboxes. BI Portals are a good example. What should be a navigable, searchable resource becomes a long list of similarly named reports all slightly different resulting in some users creating their report from scratch because it is quicker than finding the one they used last time.

The number one cause of BI overload is over-publication or over-subscription. It is easy for BI Administrators to misinterpret the subtle differences in responsibilities for those users with seemingly identical roles and to over extend the distribution list.

Likewise, decision makers, concerned about missing out on key information tend to sign-up for more than they actually need. Overnight report runs can become less about bursting and more like full-to-bursting.

Information requirements are rarely static. Business and individuals needs change frequently and users carry around their current, historic and future information sources with them like so much excess baggage. Much of this over-subscription could be avoided with some straightforward social interaction. Users should be able to subscribe and unsubscribe using techniques as simple as giving a report a ‘thumbs down’ or‘thumbs up’ Rating content in this way is a typical Social Objects for Business (SO4B) social gesture. Implemented correctly, it ensures that the less relevant content doesn’t obscure the more important. Interestingly this type of social gesture refines and improves the original, centrally managed BI metadata.

A more fundamentally driving BI overload is a tendency to only think about information in the context of reports, dashboards or scorecards. Information could also be thought of as ‘content’, a discrete piece of insight integrated with the way decision makers work.

This limited view of information leads to what I refer to as the perpetual report. When faced with a requirement for, say a sales performance report, designers seek inspiration in 1980’s, 132 column, green-lined listing paper. They opt for twelve columns for months, sub columns for actual, budget and variance with subtotals for products, customers, channels etc. Add totals

“A fundamental issue is a tendency to only think about information in the context of reports, dashboards or scorecards.”

for YTD and it has already become ‘squintware’. This hard and fixed format is difficult on the eye because it ignores the business context to time. At the beginning of a financial year a sales manager will only be interested in the first quarter. Obviously, there will be no actual in the future but the manager may want to substitute their current forecast instead. By Q3 the manager is typically interested in Q1-Q3 actuals and Q4 forecast so that they get a full-years picture but are probably less interested in variances for the first half of the year. What most applications ignore here is that this is essentially the same requirement but with subtle variations throughout the year. A more intelligent delivery mechanism would deliver a view on sales performance dependent upon the fiscal calendar instead of trying to deliver ‘all the data – all the time!’

Another common cause of BI overload is that essentially the same information can be unwittingly recreated into multiple variations.

Once information is delivered, it is actually only at the start of its journey. It needs to be shared, considered, debated, understood, presented and acted upon. BI applications don’t do any of these things today so managers resort to copy and paste, spreadsheets, emails and PowerPoint for collaborating. In order for the decision maker to communicate the specifics in their business or to fit in with an arbitrary standard for the meeting the content is manually reformatted and manipulated. This practice can often mean that a Quarterly Business Review degrades into a forum for debating the source and accuracy of the numbers without even considering what the information means or what decisions need to be made.

If these same managers could ‘pitch’ their results, share the commentary and the decisions behind it from within their BI application, essentially using a single consistent and reliable source it would focus management energy on executing on the information.

Business Intelligence applications, along with email and the internet are contributing to information overload, a phenomena that reduces management effectiveness. Improvements are achievable though. Social gestures can filter and refine what information consumers see. Social interaction can improve how information is used and reduce the proliferation of the same data. And finally smarter delivery mechanisms can deliver better targeted information if it is needed and when it is needed.

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Author
Dale Roberts, Client Services Director / artesian
Client Services Director heads up Artesian’s implementation and consulting team working at a strategic level with customers implementing Performance Management solutions. Dale has been involved in Business Intelligence and Performance Management for over a decade, initially specialising in financial services data warehousing deployments for major global banking and investment institutions. Prior to Artesian, Dale was with Cognos for over 7 years latterly as European Services Director. Dale has collaborated with many global businesses to help them achieve real and incremental business value from their businesses intelligence initiatives.

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