Are we answering the wrong questions?

Lyndsay Wise wrote a good article on about different types of Business Intelligence (BI) and how organizations adopt them based on their level of BI maturity. It reminded me of a recent user group meeting where several people from a Fortune500 company discussed their difficulty managing the ever growing list of sales reports requested by their users. The business users were not finding the answers they were looking for and they hoped that having more reports would help answer their questions. Quantity over quality.

I think this is a reflection of how the evolution of BI has been driven by IT and not Business. This same reason is a common obstacle for BI projects and a contributor to elusive ROI. Looking around it is easy to find many vendors offering "Sales Dashboards". You can get them on a browser with AJAX or Flash, you can get them on your iPhone and even integrate them in your favorite SFA platform or portal. 

This is nice but when you look at the actual reports, they are still pretty basic. These dashboards show charts such as: Revenue and Win Rates Trends, Revenue by Industry/Region/Quarter, Variances over Plan, Count of Deals by Age, etc. These are important questions but companies have been looking at similar reports for the past 20 years. The technical delivery has improved (faster, better, easier) but the actual business content is still lagging.

What would I like to see instead? Well, if I was a sales executive I would be looking for information that can drive action. Something to tell me "what to do" and "what to stop doing" (beyond 'pick up phone and call a Region Manager to ask him why is he/she behind plan'). Knowing that my win rate for last quarter was 25% is fine but I want to know why? What are they key contributing factors? How do I increase it to 30%? 

Technology has had its 15 minutes (years?) in the spotlight. I think it is time to turn our focus on Business. This new focus will drive innovation and will ultimately make companies more effective and more competitive. Of course, I think the solution is Predictive Analytics and I will explain why in a future post.

Customer Experience beyond Customer Feedback

Customer Experience analysis and management has gained a lot of popularity as a business intelligence application. This popularity is due in part to advances in text processing technology as well as the exponential growth of unstructured data (i.e. blogs, email, IM, twitter, etc.)

A common analysis parses customer feedback to identify problems or causes of dissatisfaction. For example measuring the sentiment (positive or negative) of a hotel guest after a stay. This is an important metric for the hotel management along with identifying the root cause of that sentiment. However, I hope that we pay enough justice to these applications and consider all of their capabilities and potential. Otherwise our vision could be too narrow and a narrow vision is risky for adopters, providers and the industry in general. 

The vendors of Customer Experience software and methodologies offer depth that goes beyond the simplistic example of customer sentiment. In my opinion Customer Experience needs to be analyzed in the context of Customer Life-cycle and Customer Value. 

Once we have identified and ranked the key factors that drive customer's sentiment, we need to look at those rankings across a number of dimensions, including time and geography but most importantly customer segment. After tracking both sentiments (both positive and negative) across customer segments we need to overlay financial metrics at the customer level and at the company level. How is this sentiment affecting profitability and how big is the impact. For instance "... because the A/C was too loud in these locations, our business traveler segment reduced their number of stays by X which caused a drop in margins of Y ..." These type of analysis would offer a clear and meaningful ROI analysis to justify and champion initiatives to manage and improve Customer Experience. The next step of course is enhancing these analysis with predictive analytics to create stronger leading indicators and react before the problems appear.

Comment on this blog or email if you have any thoughts on this topic. If you are a vendor and have a case study that touches on these topics let me know as well, I'd love to write about it in this space.

Relentless Innovation

The mantra at Google is 'release early, iterate often'. This constant evolution inevitably leads to constant innovation. It would be easy to argue that their ability to innovate is a natural result of their size and financial resources but that conclusion is short sighted. Joining companies like  3M and Apple as icons of creativity, Google continues to shape business and society all over the world.

Some innovation might seem small at times but that doesn't mean they are not relevant. For instance, after adding Java support to the AppEngine, yesterday they release a minor upgrade to their Python SDK with new libraries for cryptography. Now, that might not sound like a big deal; in fact, some will claim that it should have had it a year ago. Either way this small step continues to enable developers to create more powerful and more secure applications. One step at a time.

Meanwhile on 4/21 they launched the Google Analytics Data Export API. Granted, other web analytics vendors (e.g. Omniture) have had APIs for a long time but they are not that easy to use nor are they free. 

OK, so might still think 'two little APIs, what is the big deal?' - well the big deal is that adding 2 or 3 APIs every other day you can compile significant functionality in a couple of months. However, the real value is the way Google continues to enhance every single one of their product every single day. Release early, test, measure, improve, release again. This is non-stop. For a slightly more impressive announcement, just take a look at the following post regarding the web standard for 3D Graphics. The video is stunning but remember it is running on a web browser. 

Thank you Google for pushing the envelope. I can only hope this approach to innovation permeates through private and public organizations alike.