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September 22, 2008
The Busyness of Information
MicroStrategy has published an online article about the 5 Styles of BI, which is interesting primarily in its view that these are operational styles that "evolved" in the form of tool functionality.
It might be more precise to say that the article promises understanding of the adoption of BI capabilities by the currently recognized differing types of BI users, which are relabelled and listed here:
- activity monitors
- managers and dataset explorers
- information explorers and power users
- professional information analysts
- information subscribers
This offers a view of how business is learning to adapt to BI technology so that the tools can be more effective. The individual user may find it easier, as well, to identify where he or she fits into the big picture of possibilities. In turn, that refines demand for the BI tools and helps to organize deployments.
But to get a real grip on this, it makes sense to reorganize the groups into producers, providers and consumers.
- Information Producers find and manipulate data to create information appropriate for describing and distinguishing events and conditions.
- Information Providers group and package information for managed delivery to designated recipients per requirements mandated by rules and/or agreements.
- Information Consumers receive and examine packaged information to determine what correspondence its included descriptions and distinctions may have to prior expectations and/or to prior received information.
What makes this more complex is the accompanying issues confronting each party (producer, provider and consumer) such as:
- formulation (validation/certification) of information
- formatting of information
- information access methods
The challenge, then, is to establish logical connections between how producers solve those three issues, how providers solve them, and how consumers solve them.
(You've read the book; now see the movie!)
One continuing dynamic affecting that interconnectedness is the shifting balances between the willingness of the different parties to use solutions offered to them versus working up their own solutions. The shifts occur from time-to-time, from place-to-place, and according to prevailing levels of urgency and risk. This brings up the matter of standards and governance in the overall BI "practice", but from an evolutionary perspective it is most likely that "standards" must be seen mainly as negotiable "agreements" that are living (changeable) but socialized. Given that, some agreements could become jurisdictional (e.g., consumers should not force information formulation) and others may become promotional (e.g., providers should diversify for consumers) -- which sets the stage for different roles to be defined and anticipated in the organization's ecosystem of BI.
In BI, there are also higher-level operational problems to be solved such as how to compare word-of-mouth with statistical analysis, or how to repackage existing information on demand for a different party. It is fair to say that the day-to-day experience of business is pretty rich with such higher-level "BI" problems, and that the presumptive evolution of BI should be describable in terms of what solutions to these problems have turned out to be most broadly feasible. These may generally surface as "use cases" during the construction of RFPs or in the design phase of implementations, but without a survey it is difficult to know whether they are usually seen as necessary or just nice to have, short of any Darwinian force they might prove to exert. What may be the most interesting question of all, then, is this: increasing rationalization of different tools makes BI more likely to help advance the cause of businesses, but isn't it still mainly the case that BI is adapting to each business more than that business is adapting to BI? No harm meant in the question: the point is only to encourage adequate attention to managing the internal business environment of participants (producers, providers and consumers) before making valuations of a BI tool's importance.
Tools referenced in the MicroStrategy article:
- Enterprise Reporting - incl. scorecards/dashboards
- OLAP Cube Analysis
- Ad Hoc Query and Analysis and automated OLAPslice and-dice into all data
- Statistical Analysis and Data Mining
- Alerting and Report Delivery
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at September 22, 2008 5:46 AM