nextanalytics blog

Craig Schiff wrote an article at http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=51201364 some time ago.  Following are some salient points he made:

"Without steady involvement by the business side, IT's dashboard projects are doomed to failure."

"IT thinks in terms of improving access to data, whereas finance focuses on improving its processes (particularly the painful ones)."

"What's most important is the content: that is, what's being measured and displayed on the dashboard."

"confront one of the toughest challenges: How do you get to that short list of agreed-upon key measures?"

"Once you've settled the corporate strategy, chosen the metrics development team, and put a facilitator in place, you can get down to business. The team needs to work down from the strategy to determine the key business drivers."

"the organization may not have the underlying data necessary to perform the calculations to support the KPI. What do you do then? Throw the KPI out? Wrong answer. What most companies do is manually enter the data for the KPI."
"KPIs should offer a good mix of financial as well as operational measures."

I think I've represented some of his key points accurately.  It's enough to tell me (and you) that Craig and I think alike.   His article was written in 2006 and following are my comments on what I think has evolved since then. 

To begin, I've think it's necessary to cut down the reliance on IT in providing the metrics and generating the KPIs because:

1. Managers like to generate their own information whether it be KPIs or metrics. The key evidence of this is the popularity of Excel. They need this to be able to react to fast changing business needs.  Routing new business questions and performance metrics and indicators through IT is too slow.
   
   
2. He suggested that, if a company isn't tracking the data, entering it by hand is risky and an auditable process won't be likely.  For me, this would be a least preferable approach, but at the time it was written, it was a decent & practical one.
   
   Instead, I believe there's a very good chance the data is there in the company, it's just that conventional BI tools are limited to what they can do. 
   
   If you're using a cube, then the data has to be in the one cube or you have to be a grandmaster in MDX to get what you want. If you're using a reporting tool, then the data has to be available from a single SQL query. Relying on this kind of technology and its limitations is just plain in-adequate now that better choices are avaialble. Let's for the moment ignore the fact that they charge way too much money and the IT overhead is a trememendous financial burden.
   
3. Users, not IT, need a way to read in data from multiple heterogenous data sources into the same report.

My work at nextanalytics has been addressing this evolving requirement.   I think we've made great gains and will continue to do so in the future.