Some BI venders claim that their products are so easy to use that they can be administered by accounting. It is true that today’s BI tools simplify complex programming tasks to the point where a powerful BI app can be developed with simple drag-and-drop operations. It is likely that more technical…
Good advice on a part of our daily work flow that can always be bettered.
A company we consult with recently adopted a new document classification policy. All documents were now labelled in different categories of sensitivity, and this was to apply to all documents created from that point onwards.
It was announced with a detailed cascading email from manager to manager, and a news post on the Intranet.
It will probably fail – or at least, take a great deal of time to achieve full adoption.
And Switch helps to explain why.
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There are so many ideas in Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard that it is hard to pick somewhere to begin. The Brothers Heath have followed up Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck with a book that surpasses the first – because Switch can be applied to ease the difficulties encountered when we try to make change; and life is full of change.
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Littered with examples drawn from fields as diverse as conservation, medicine, manufacturing, and education, Switch engagingly describes why Change is so hard to make work, and describes strategies that can be used to improve the odds.
But it is the central model used in Switch that is so interesting to us. The model used by the authors describes how humans deal with change, and explains why, so often,we are our own worst enemies.
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The authors borrow the model proposed by psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book The Happiness Hypothesis, which splits us into two sides;
Our Emotional side is an Elephant.
Our Rational side is the Rider.
And both follow the Path.
The Rational Rider holds the reins and seems to be in control of the Emotional Elephant – but it is clear that this control is precarious. In any disagreement, the Emotional Elephant wins the argument.
From this model, the authors develop their central premise.
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“Change fails because the Rider simply can’t keep the Elephant on the Path long enough to reach the destination”.
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Elephant! Photo by Rob & Jules
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The authors take time to describe situations whereby all the good, long-term, planned, rational intentions of the Rider are defeated by the emotional, short-termism of the Elephant, who is either unmotivated, irrational, or reluctant to follow a difficult Path.
Think of how you plan to go for a run early tomorrow morning; only when you wake up the snooze button is all you are interested in. Plus, you’d have to fish your running gear out of the laundry, and it’s cold in there.
Our good intentions – considered, planned, beneficial, tend to be defeated by the immediate, the easier, and by emotionally-driven decisions.
From here, the authors lead us through separate strategies to help in making change stick, whether it is motivating the Elephant, making the Path easier, or engaging the Rider.
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Back to our document standards.
This Change has been ‘implemented’ the easy way – a reasoned message delivered directly to the Rider. This is the new policy, this is why, this is what we do from now on.
But we all know that it is the doing of anything that makes the Change. And in this case, we have a directed Rider – but we have direction without motivation.
The situation is easy to see – the report is due, and you remember something about a new document policy, but you’ve deleted the email and the news item is gone from the intranet. So you just copy an old document (which doesn’t have the new standards) and get the report done.
The direction was clear, but motivation is lacking and the path is hard.
Whereas, consider – the email and news item contain a story about how the company almost emailed sensitive documents to a direct competitor because they didn’t have the right classification on them.
New document templates containing the classifications are rolled out across the company, easily accessible in the company’s word processing program. The templates are included in the email and news post, and the news post remains easily accessible on the intranet for several months. And any documents created without the new classification are considered incomplete by managers, and sent back to the team member to correct.
Here, we have still spoken to the Rider, but we have also caught the emotional interest of the Elephant with a story we can relate to, and made the Path an easy one to follow.
How much more likely is this Change to stick?
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We all make, or try to make, changes stick; personally, at home, at work, and throughout our lives. Switch describes how to make them stick, and is a must read for our clients.
So when trying to implement a Change, consider;
Have I reasoned with the Rider?
Have I motivated the Elephant?
Have I made the Path easy to follow?
This ad got me thinking about our client’s networks and data provision.
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Image by Philip G Mayer, All Rights Reserved.
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Some major developments in the evolution of Business Intelligence are gaining traction, and within 3-5 years will see adoption throughout most large and medium-sized companies.
Increases in the sophistication of analytics, the distribution of these tools throughout the business rather than just in support/finance functions, and the wild growth of Mobile BI and the Cloud will all combine to mean that BI will see usage on a level not previously encountered.
More problematically, we will see BI usage on a level that was not previously envisioned.
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As BI providers in businesses face exploding growth in usage of BI, we will see a similar growth in;
Server capacity required to host the data, the thin client, the cloud - along with related infrastructure. And infrastructure management issues.
Network capacity
Security and access control risks
Change Control programmes and restrictions
Metadata Management issues
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Which brings us back to our ad.
It will not be good enough for BI departments to tell their users that “the system is slow because there are a lot of people using it”. It will not be good enough to simply plonk existing systems onto more servers and 128-bit platforms and cross our fingers.
It will not be good enough to restrict how or how heavily the data is used.
BI departments will need to fundamentally rethink how they obtain, store, manipulate, and provide BI. They will need to start looking closely at issues like locking between Reads/Writes, Rule/Feeder/Process efficiency, splitting out transactional and reporting cubes, and peak usage capacity.
It’s time to look at your infrastructure and plan for the traffic. Because it is coming.
For individuals, character is destiny. For organisations, culture is destiny.
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On a flight from LAX to JFK last week, I blasted through Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
This book had me thinking about the difference challenges between purely customer-focussed organisations like e-Commerce businesses, and our clients who are business Support functions with a very different set of customers. Is it possible to apply these lessons to a Support function?
There are some key differences we must keep in mind. However, there are also valuable lessons for them.
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In a Direct-to-Consumer organisation like Zappos, the addition of a new customer tends to add no significant burden to the organisation. They tend not to have to choose to serve one customer over another, or to rate the priority of customers in debating which order to fulfil. The incremental cost of a new customer or order can be easily absorbed without diminishing the customer service others receive.
So we can say that customers and their orders are homogenous in priority and are low cost.
In a Business Support function, like IT-Finance, we find that customers are very different. There may be large numbers of end users in the business, smaller numbers of regional managers, and few Chief Financial Officers. We can fit our customer-base to a skewed Bell curve in terms of their importance in the business, and thus priority. The demands of customers are also highly variable, and can vary significantly in ‘cost’. Whilst the organisation can absorb an amount of low-cost demands, such as changes to reports or metadata updates, there is a limit to the amount of high-cost work that can be accepted.
So we can say that customers and their ‘orders’ are heterogeneous in priority and have variable cost.
Support functions, then, are unlike Direct-to-Consumer organisations in that they face the issue of having to prioritise the demands of their customers. The small end of the Bell curve will wield the most power, and high priority demands will take precedence even over large numbers of low priority demands. Inevitably this leads to customer dissatisfaction among a wider population.
In an environment where some customers must inevitably be dissatisfied with the service they receive, how does a business function like IT-Finance ‘deliver happiness’ to it’s customers?
Should that even be a focus of the function?
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To answer the second question before the first - I think the benefits of providing high-quality customer service in a business Support function, even happiness, are apparent. It should be clear to everyone in a Support function that they are competing for the right to provide that support. They are competing against outsourcing, external consultants, technological innovations, and reorganisation.
Moreso, I believe they are competing to keep their own people interested and committed. No person has an endless capacity for accepting the frustration and recriminations that customers will vent, having experienced poor customer service.
Additionally, Support functions generate the largest amount of costs for most organisation. In some large financial firms they can comprise 50% of the cost base. As they don’t directly generate revenue, Support functions must rely on intangibles like customer satisfaction as proxy for their effectiveness and contribution to the organisation’s success.
Therefore customer satisfaction is, for Support functions, a reflection of quality. And excellent customer service can, as Zappos shows, actually help to generate tangible results for the business. Their call centre, rather than merely acting as a Support function, has moved up the value-chain into generating revenue.
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Back to the original question of how, in an environment where some customers must inevitably be dissatisfied with the service they receive, Support functions can provide excellent customer service.
In the same way that we prioritise the demands of the customer, we should also prioritise their satisfaction with the service.
For a Finance function, if the CFO, senior management, regional managers, and other customers like external analysts are satisfied with the service provided, then that Support function can be said to be more successful than one which meets every request for an updated report from wider business analysts. Due to the conflict of scare resources and customer demands, the Support function is forced to prioritise. This does not, however, mean that they are not fulfilling their role to a high level.
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Support functions, due to the nature of their customer-base, will find it difficult to generate happiness in that whole customer-base from their customer service. Yet this can surely be a driver of improvement and innovation - and can, as Zappos shows, generate significant value for the organisation.
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Interesting Quotes:
It was a valuable lesson. We learned that we should never outsource our core competency. As an e-commerce company, we should have considered warehousing to be our core competency from the beginning. Outsourcing that to a third party and trusting that they would care about our customers as much as we would was one of our biggest mistakes.
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By the end of the lunch, we realised that the biggest vision would be to build the Zappos brand to be about the very best customer service.
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If someone asked you to recite your corporate values or mission statement without looking it up, could you?
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…many companies think of their call centres as an expense to minimise. We believe that it’s a huge untapped opportunity for most companies, not only because it can result in word-of-mouth marketing, but because of its potential to increase the lifetime value of the customer. Usually marketing departments assume that the lifetime value of a customer is fixed when doing their ROI calculations. We view the lifetime value of a customer to be a moving target that can increase if we create more and more positive emotional associations with our brand through every interaction…
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Top 10 Ways to Instil Customer Service into Your Company: #10 Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.
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Your Culture is your Brand.
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Although change can and will come from all directions, it’s important that most of the changes in the company are driven from the bottom up - from the people who are on the front lines, closer to the customers and/or issues.
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The role of the manager is to remove obstacles and enable his/her direct reports to succeed.
OLD:
“Why should we hire you for [X] job?”.
“I have experience in this field and I am a qualified [X]”.
NEW:
“Why should we hire you for [X] job?”.
“Well, I have a popular blog on [X], I have 1,000 followers on Twitter where I write about [X], and I recently put together a webcast on [X] that was attended by 50 people. Also I have experience in this field and I am a qualified [X]”.
This post aims to capture the many places across the web where you can find help with IBM Cognos TM1.
Whether you are after tutorials on basic to complex features of TM1 or need help from TM1 professionals on Rules, TI, and other issues, hopefully there is something in this list for you.
If you have any suggestions please let us know in the Ask box or on Twitter @balmoraltech.
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General TM1 information:
Forums:
OLAP Forums : the OLAP Forum (formed out of the old Applix forum) remains the original and best forum for TM1 questions and guidance.
BI Expert Forums : not that heavily populated at the moment.
Tutorials/Articles:
TM1 Tutorials : registration required to view articles.
Wim Gielies : navigate to the TM1 Articles section.
J Wakefield : dormant for a long time but now back in action.
Help Guides:
OLAP Forum FAQs : the FAQs on the OLAP Forum are extensive and growing in size.
IBM Online Help Guide - TM1 Version 9.4
IBM Online Help Guide - TM1 Version 9.5
TM1 Groups on LinkedIn (ranked by size @ Dec 2010):
LinkedIn is a great resource for being able to directly contact people working with TM1 every day. Here are some of the TM1 Groups on LinkedIn which can assist in finding someone to help.
IBM Cognos & TM1 Consultant Group
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Linda Parker Hudson of BAE “told her top lieutenants that she expected “rapid responses” to email around the clock. To her surprise, several started sleeping beside their beeping BlackBerry so they could answer her 3 a.m. messages right away”.
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Following a tweet by Dan Pink we found an interesting article in the WSJ discussing “executive amplification”, which is the phenomenon whereby unmeaning actions or statements from people in power can be taken to the extreme by their subordinates.
The example above, whilst demonstrating pretty poor managing-your-manager skills from her staff (“Linda, quick question - does that include overnight? And weekends?”), does illustrate the possible consequences.
On reflection we found that this can also exist as “expert amplification”. As a system administrator or power user, contractor, or consultant, your power stems from your expertise, and your statements and actions send very strong signals which can modify behaviour in undesirable ways.
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If you need to make a rapid change and don’t worry about making it in the metadata reference files, but instead just make it directly in the system…
If an error occurs and you mock-throw up your arms in panic in front of a manager, or even if you treat a significant error as no-big-thing…
If you don’t bother to comment your code or document your system or follow best practice because you’re the Admin, and your team should be smart enough to figure it out anyway…
If you disparage someone’s suggestion as dumb, or impossible, or as likely to take forever to complete, or easy…
If you blast through basic testing of your changes because you’re sure the code is ok…
…you are not only going to encounter the obvious issues, but also produce ripples of similarly undesirable behaviour in others through your status as an expert.
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The key point for experts, whether they work in the business as employees or as consultants, is that “you are always on…Make sure you send the messages that you want to send.”
We’re a small, resourceful technology consulting practice, currently located in London. We specialise in Business Intelligence software and Performance Management.
We’re going to be writing about business and technology, and other things we find interesting.
