By utilising some of this protective gear the wearer’s physical body is typically protected from harm caused by an impact, exposure to electrical hazards, exposure to heat, chemicals or an infection. Of course risk is not only found in work, as we can additionally be confronted with real danger whenever we get involved in amateur and professional sports as well as other pastimes.

On the job one of the primary possible hazards is something slipping and falling on top of our feet. For this reason work boots today typically possess a steel toe cap, a kind of defensive reinforcement around the toe area resistant to virtually any compression. It’s usually coupled with some type of plate below to avoid any punctures from nails or other sharp objects, should the boot be pushed downwards.

Back many years ago reinforcement would typically be produced from steel, however with developments in technology reinforcement can now be made out of composite materials. In turn this often makes the boot lighter and much more flexible and simpler to use over long periods of time.

Understand that a lot of shoes and boots have to be licensed for use in specific vocations and quite often insurance requirements dictate that specific types of work shoe or even safety boot be used in some situations. Nevertheless, people who stress about their looks should not worry too much as a variety of boots created for use in hazardous environments have in addition found their way into the fashion “cat-walks” as time passes and have actually been favoured by a part of contemporary society.

Stimulating Ideas On How Your Work Shoes Can Even Be Fashionable is a post from: Business Intelligence Secret Solutions If you'd like to read more about Business Intelligence, Decision making solutions and much more please download your copy of Business Intelligence PDF.

On the meeting CEO stated: “We do not have strategy any more!”

Well…

Such statement might look unpleasant, can terrify and is rather surprising.

Considering all the uncertainties on the market, inconsistencies in organizations  in any kind of form. Considering process gaps, communication malfunctions, values, knowledge… Considering main business drivers like innovation, enormous resources, first move advantage…

there is no surprise what caused this statement.

Furthermore, there are many hidden variables that were not included in previous strategic plans and their quality was below expectations, so to say in mathematical language.

Strategy is Dead is a post from: Business Intelligence Secret Solutions If you'd like to read more about Business Intelligence, Decision making solutions and much more please download your copy of Business Intelligence PDF.

Captain’s Log, May 20012.

Business Intelligence Based Trade

We’re passing Zig’s Nebula. Two more days and we will enter into Jota planetary trading system market, our old colonized market with 3,2% Steal-er. Our top rated business analytics from controlling estimated impact in first 3 trading months losses of 5,612M Galacsaars with approaching colony. We have new Tuga prototypes of replicators for launch before competition.

Our collective on ship is very proud for using all our KPI’s in calculation (41,227) in our business cases for upcoming trade fairs. Calculation release OracloBO Pentah 5134.7676.323 gel business intelligence structure.

We are on the plan with product releases, reorganizations, marketing expenses, innovation center creations and gathering of hyper produced data. It is all more then beneficial for our 0,0002 EVA impact in this trade.

2751 analytics are waiting for transfer to other challenges in other business units.

Nebula is gorgeous.

We are still searching for meaning of all our beneficial data.

What a divine century. Long live Corp corporation.

Signing off,
Captain (CEO) Kirk Gordo, branch of MBA ancestors, 8th year Black-belt Six Sigma, onceadirectorallwaysadirector level

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=735-fUcclO0

Talking silently to adjutant,

“I’m just wondering how they connected all this intergallactic KPI’s together? Most likely they did not connect any KPI to Alfasolar Balance Sheet.  Who cares… Corporation has enough money.”

Talking loud,

“Why is churn of experts so big every week, what are our HR corporate injection strategists doing? Send urgent call to the board memebers – topic is urgent Wa-bank-reorganization of processes and tasks. We are still below corporate 1,3 producttoorganizationchange weekly unit ratio. Include our consultancy partners with their proposals for release of old reused Teta products with new replicators.” 

Captain’s Log is a post from: Business Intelligence Secret Solutions If you'd like to read more about Business Intelligence, Decision making solutions and much more please download your copy of Business Intelligence PDF.

Often prejudice is that with installation of Business Intelligence there is no more need for manual work. Reality shows something completely different. Manual work is present, but is it smaller this is for discussion.

Without Business Intelligence it is always hard to maintain models and calculations. Any change that has to be made in models, especially spreadsheets models is very painful and time consuming. This was seen like manual work.

Business Intelligence reduces time for calculations, and in data access. This is one side of the story

Business Intelligence increases significantly time needed to administrate information system: mappings, report structures and etc. This part of the manual work is very often neglected and underestimated.

Many might disagree, but with growth of reporting demands Business Intelligence systems might acquire complex masterdata models and allocations that demand skills, knowledge and time in order to run business intelligence systems. With tremendous information demands information urge more and more dimensional views. This increases complexity of mappings between data. With more and more dimensions that need to be co-related together grows complexity of mapping models. It is getting very hard to relate thousands of product lists with 100 of columns that contain additional data, for example.  And then in other example relate other huge tables with their columns to the previously named table… Result is huge complexity that is hard to maintain and to consolidate for proper work of business intelligence.

Maintenance of a complete model for BI feed is actually manual work. From perspective of experts engagement, one “manual work” into other type of “manual work”.

So, when somebody promotes many kind of calculations that are built in their corporate business intelligence system, I’m just wondering how much of hidden manual work is behind to maintain different and multidimensional mapping dimensions.

Is Business Intelligence automated information flow?

Never!

Manual Business Intelligence is a post from: Business Intelligence Secret Solutions If you'd like to read more about Business Intelligence, Decision making solutions and much more please download your copy of Business Intelligence PDF.

I can not help myself, I can not stop noticing managers and project leaders making suggestions on how Information Systems work and what others should do. They are not experts in IT, they are experts for their respective area of expertise like product development, marketing analysis and research, business analytic’s, predictive analytic’s, business performance analyzers and etc. Well, at least I hope they are. They are experienced in own business area and they are heavy information consumers. Most important fact is that they create corporate knowledge and play significant role in budget allocation.

Some of them, not all, like to simplify processes they do not know so well.

In Information Systems case, they like to make their own visions and advises of how data warehouse should provide data to them and how they should be setup. It is not a problem when suggestions stay on level of suggestion but problem starts when suggestions are translated into must have requests. For example, into unrealistic delivery time for complex reports.

Lack of knowledge creates unrealistic expectations, spreads negative marketing and makes huge pressure on the area that actually has no or little to do with information problems and bottlenecks. At the end it causes unnecessary company internal energy consumption. Usually this is costly resource consumption. Lack of knowledge about Information Systems, complete overview, super simplifies information delivery problems. They make leaf letter or brochure out of Information systems. For me it is the same to compress neural science into leaf letter and then to make suggestions and actions upon this assumptions. One of their greatest and often false interpretation is to force data warehouse

Such knowledge is OK for understanding but not for conclusions and especially not for decisions and actions on processes that directly affect information flows.

Former IT experts promoted to management positions can be especially dangerous, those IT experts who worked on only one system, on very standardized platforms or on simple Information Systems, thinking they have figured out all regarding Information Systems. They do like to underestimate information flow creation and complexity in environment not known to them.

Simple minds consume lot of energy. Energy on explanations showing harmfulness of demands.

Simple Minds is a post from: Business Intelligence Secret Solutions If you'd like to read more about Business Intelligence, Decision making solutions and much more please download your copy of Business Intelligence PDF.

Less Is More

I’ve spotted interesting psychological aspect in estimation process. Colleagues did not want precise estimation. They wanted smaller estimation.

For example, if you estimate 100M $ and realization fails to perform planed figures. It is 97M $. Your calculation included experience factor, seasonal correction and estimation formula with smallest deviation.

Well, always use use mathematical figures that have smaller planed amounts, not smaller deviations, because it is far more easier to explain “gain” instead of “loss”. “Gain and Loss game” is interesting despite the fact they are not real.

People do not like estimations that present “Loss”… how could this happen? It was predicted revenue, but it hurts like it was real… They do like to see that real performance is higher then predicted. In this case they would rather see prediction of 96M $ and gain of 1M $. This would be far more acceptable. Mathematically, first estimation is more accurate, but second fits better into our minds.

Off course, can not underestimate complete plan, but most of it… .

Always Plan Less is a post from: Business Intelligence Secret Solutions If you'd like to read more about Business Intelligence, Decision making solutions and much more please download your copy of Business Intelligence PDF.

Hired students trying to earn few bucks came one day to our company to help us with movement of office stuffs. They went through offices and moved tables, chairs, PC’s and etc. to vans.

In one empty office they found huge pile of paper binders in big wooden box. Since nobody was near they started to automatically move it with care, not loosing single paper. This was horrible job because box was very big and clumsy to handle through narrow stairs. 6 students struggled 30 minutes with it going down and up again to third floor. Offcourse, in new building elevator was not yet in function. They finally made it. “Yep, we did it ”.

Meanwhile, colleage - owner of the box also appeared in new office…    

“Boys, why on earth have you removed papers for garbage???”

Just imagine faces of this students, finding out that they have sweat so hard for something that was not intended for removal…

This is the evergreen funny anecdote, just like from the Monthy Python’s Flying Circus factory.

Does something similar happens in Information Systems? All the time…

Users simply forget that they should warn IT whenever they do not need certain reports or functionalities any more. I’ve seen so many times that IT removed piles of garbage instead of trying to find the owner and ask them for the future purpose of current functionality before it was removed…

Movement Anecdote is a post from: Business Intelligence Secret Solutions If you'd like to read more about Business Intelligence, Decision making solutions and much more please download your copy of Business Intelligence PDF.

I’ll try to describe what is complex reporting system through bullets, complex reporting is:

• consisting of more production systems, source data are for reports are taken from several different sources;
• when aggregated figures fit but on the level of details differences exist and are not easily explainable (without deep and painful analysis);
• when new and unstructured products are released without proper information stabilization in Information Systems;
• when number of unstructured data and information for decision support is much bigger then of those from from company Business Intelligence systems;
• when number of paralel reporting cubes (OLAP, universes and etc.) are becoming rules not exceptions;
• when company Information System does not have any more testing resources (hardware, software and experts) and needs to make modifications on production;
• when there is no possibility to compare data and reports, dependancy on single point of truth;
• when there is a lack of business analytics and demands for ad hoc reports continue to generate…

I’m mentioning this to describe future problems that will happen everywhere. Generation of new beneficial data can not be stopped. Question is, how to survive in messy reporting environment. Worsening, day by day.

Complex Reporting is a post from: Business Intelligence Secret Solutions If you'd like to read more about Business Intelligence, Decision making solutions and much more please download your copy of Business Intelligence PDF.

Throughout recent meetings I’ve witnessed thrill about upcoming Master Data Management solutions. “They will solve all generated problems”. huh,… It sounds like new utopia.

So, I’ve dug deeper and found out that this mapping solutions are targeting at certain problems, and are designed to establish missing relations between systems. Not even whole systems but certain parts of systems.

These approaches do not include historical mapping possibilities and do not contain possibilities to enlarge and create other MDM clusters. I’ve forgot… they can not support inclusion of more dimensions into mappings, just few. They are local solutions, designed for specific problems.

It’s interesting to spot how others like to proclaim solutions over whole company information relations, that are actually not. It’s interesting to spot lack of completed Information Systems understanding and how information for reports are generated.

Mapping applications can not be considered automatically as master data management applications. Simple mapping means to relate one dimension to one dimension with its hierarchies. What is often neglected is necessity of multidimensional to multidimensional mapping…

Partial Master Data Management is a post from: Business Intelligence Secret Solutions If you'd like to read more about Business Intelligence, Decision making solutions and much more please download your copy of Business Intelligence PDF.

Recent strategies of many marketers include now combinations of many products into one, as one package. That means placing subscriptions, gifts, coupons, services, gadgets and much more for one price. This is actually wrapping of different products as one product toward customers. I think that pretty soon they’ll create targeted bundled products for John Smith and it will include gallons of gasoline, dentist coupon for several tooth, excursion to nearby state, 10 kWh of electricity monthly, if you sign for their product… just kidding. But it is getting in many industries like this. 

Hate me / love me, bundle me / un-bundle me.

You may guess how do such marketing creations affect Information Systems (IS)… They can be compared to IS earthquakes.

Story and conversation between marketing and IT goes like this in company… Make first unstructured products for the market, then tie them with the existing products and for specific niche. Then count bundles with elementary products. Finally, give me all the details that we can think of for our data analysts to make new and advanced products. This is typical bundling and un-bundling process from marketing side. Well, this is more then tricky to install in old information systems, especially if they do not have multidimensional solutions for all kind of product modelling.

It is not impossible to make such complex and versatile unstrucured marketing products. IS usually can support them. Problem  begins with variations of same products like:

• cancellations,
• up-sells,
• down-sells, and
• gross adds.

This is the place were IS are usually not prepared from the beginning and this is where collapse of reporting system begins. More bundled products = more internal errors in Information Systems. Fun continous when IS implementation capabilities are slower then generation of new unstructured bundled – complex products. Peak of the party is proclamation from the Board that new bundled products are of company strategic interest… meaning, information instability will continue and will lead to implosion of reporting system.

Whatever was built for reporting improvement purpose like Data Warehouse, specific Business Intelligence solutions and etc., will be endangered and will fail in its prime task, to deliver basic information for decision making.  

If management insists on new strategic products, all that can be done is to leave Information Systems and find job in other area or company… Somebody is going to be blamed for collapse of reporting system and this are not going to be those who caused it.

Bundled and Un-bundled Products is a post from: Business Intelligence Secret Solutions If you'd like to read more about Business Intelligence, Decision making solutions and much more please download your copy of Business Intelligence PDF.