It's About Usability
Submitted by orangeboxtech on Tue, 05/18/2010 - 16:38
Business Intelligence is complicated.
IT people think that they have all of the answers for all of the problems, and that answer is "data". Just give people the ability to drill through whatever it is that they want, the ability to pick whatever they want out of the giant metric bin of values, and they'll solve problems, right?
In practice, it's never that easy. The IT department seems to forget at time that while they might deal with the data, they aren't the end user, and while they understand the warehouse, they don't use it to make directional decisions. The response of some is just to throw it all out there, and have your user base sort through it, gleaning the pearls of wisdom that may or may not be there...don't worry about the fact that accountants, finance department, managers, strategic planners, and executives have never used the tools before, and might not be technically inclined; that's on them. Sometime the myopia of the data managers leads to poorly implemented systems.
In a great white paper by Kevin Quinn, VP of Product Marketing for Information Builders, he addresses this issue in depth.
He states:
Even a simple data warehouse has hundreds of columns of data, and it’s not uncommon for more complex systems to have thousands of columns. When an end user is faced with a blank canvas, thousands of columns of data, and hundreds of accessible features, complexity is automatic. “Where do I begin?” is often the first question, shortly followed by “I don't have time for this,” or “I give up.”
It's important to remember that while we might be quick to trumpet the value of in depth drill maps, predictive algorithms, and complex data mining tools, it's the end user that uses the data on a daily basis to make the strategic decisions that a company requires. As a data warehouse and business intelligence developer, it's not just our job to build systems, it's also our job to take the time to ask the right questions. What works for the technically advanced, might be useless for the 90% of people who are not, and have neither the time, nor the drive to learn systems that might be our life blood.
In the 60's, Theodore Levitt wrote the industry altering article Marketing Myopia where he criticized the marketing professionals of the time for their narrow understanding of the industries that they were in. Levitt concludes, "...the organization must think of itself not as producing good or services, but as buying customers, as doing the things that will make people want to do business with it." As BI professionals the end user is our customer, let's make sure in addition to focusing on the warehouse life-cycle, and data freshness, we take the time to make sure that our user base wants to do business with us. We achieve that by starting the conversation:
What do you need?
