Monash University Business Intelligence Blog

DSS LAB Internship Sharing: BI application prototype development on iPad

2011-11-26T21:27:00.000+11:00

The DSS Lab runs an internship programme for coursework students to get a taste of what it's like to be an active participant in the research group. Jason Lu recently completed a project where he developed a proof of concept iOS interface for a BI reporting tool, something that we hope to be able to use to do research on mobile and touch interfaces for BI. - Rob

In recent years, mobile BI has become a frequent topic of discussion among BI vendors and users, especially after the success of the iPhone and iPad since 2008. Smart phones and tablet PCs are performing an essential role in managers' daily lives, however, BI users and vendors face challenges with using and developing mobile BI applications.

Over the last 15 weeks, I have worked as a research intern in the DSS Lab to develop an iPad application prototype for exploring the dimensional structures of BI reports. In this prototype, I adopted an approach that presented the user interface using Apple's WebView controller, as well as Javascript and HTML. Users select report generation criteria in the user interface and the criteria will be sent to a web server that, in turn, uses SQL to create a query command for execution on a data warehouse. Finally, the information for the report is sent back to the client system on the iPad to display the report.

One of the issues for the BI software vendors is the need to connect to a server to retrieve data every time the users attempts to generate a report. This creates a problem when using the application without a network connection, such as when flying. One area of further research may be to try an alternative that stores temporary report data locally in the iPad. However, this may present a security issue if the user loses the device.

Some other areas of future research might also include investigating user interface principles for touch such as pre-defined gestures for things like drill down and roll up.

To conclude, this internship experience offered me a great opportunity to study, in depth, some of the advantages and disadvantages of mobile BI applications on multi-touch mobile devices. In my opinion, with the tablet device, users can interact with reports more intuitively, but they face potential security and accessibility issues along with the benefits provided by the portable device.

Jason

Help needed with a study

2011-11-03T14:49:00.002+11:00

I'm running a web based study at the moment. I'm asking people to look at a random series of charts - created using chart styles found typically in current BI systems. Got 5 minutes to help out? Then visit http://vishnu.infotech.monash.edu.au/BIcharts

I'll post a summary of the results here in a week or two.

Peter

Design versus Engineering

2011-03-08T12:40:00.005+11:00

Stephen Few recently wrote a post after having attended an SAP BI presentation here in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago (unfortunately I missed it, and the chance to meet him, although a couple of colleagues from the DSS Lab did manage to catch up with him). The central thrust of his post centred on the issue of an engineering versus a design perspective on the problem of providing decision support.

I reckon he's spot on and his argument echoes a line of thought that I've been toying with for quite some time.

For myself, I've been grappling with this concept of design versus engineering as I've practised and taught IT-based design techniques like conceptual data modelling. What's fundamentally different between the two perspectives? Both engineering and design express themselves through the properties of a technical artefact. They also have a symbiotic relationship with each other - one can't do design without engineering, or vice versa. However, intuitively there is a fundamental difference of perspective, and it's taken me a couple of years of reading and thinking to put my finger on it.

The 'aha!' moment came a couple of weeks ago as I was working on a paper trying to more rigorously define the notion of Web 2.0. One of the problems with that idea is that every IT industry niche has jumped on the bandwagon so that now we have BI 2.0, ERP 2.0, even Library 2.0, without really identifying what it's fundamentally about.

My thesis is that Web 2.0 is not about the technology itself - AJAX, RoR etc. etc - because you can achieve the same Web 2.0-style outcomes using different technologies like HTML5 etc. Instead, Web 2.0 is a design concept, perhaps even a design movement. This led me, in a circuitous way, to read a paper by Lynne Markus and Mark Silver called A Foundation for the Study of IT Effects: A New Look at DeSanctis and Poole's Concepts of Structural Features and Spirit.¹ In this paper, they critique an earlier theory of studying IT artefacts based on the idea that what's really important is not so much the features of a given piece of technology, but rather the relationship between that technology and its users.

For example, they draw on the concept of affordance. This relates to the things that an object or environment offers an actor, but it's specific to each actor. While a chair might be something that offers me the affordance of sitting, to a child it is an object that can be climbed on, crawled under, and so on. In other words, to understand a technological artefact, we have to look, not so much at the artefact itself, but how the properties of the artefact and the properties of the user interact.

And this was that aha! insight: the difference between design and engineering is that design is concerned with the space between the user and the artefact; engineers, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with the artefact itself. Both express themselves through the properties of the artefact itself, but design treats that as secondary to what the artefact does for the user, what it means, and how it impacts on the environment.

The problem with vendors in BI, and really most of the IT industry in general, is that we're all focussed on the technical artefact. As a result, the design of how that artefact is used, what it allows users to do, and the impact that it has on the decision support environment is largely ignored. As Stephen Few points out, old-school, large-scale BI vendors are so focussed on their software's bells and whistles that they almost completely ignore the fundamentals of helping people make more effective, better quality decisions.

Following from Markus and Silver's paper, I'd argue that design of IT artefacts, including BI software, needs to consider two key concepts: affordance, as described above, and what they call 'symbollic expressions.' The latter refers to the implicit values, principles and ideas communicated by the technology to the user. Too often in BI, the values and principles that are communicated by tools like Crystal Xcelsius, and lots of dashboard implementations, is form over substance. Dazzling your audience with 3D exploding pie charts and speed-dials is given more importance than imparting a proper understanding of the relevant information.

It's time that we had a design company in Business Intelligence, rather than the plethora of engineering companies we now have. Think Apple versus IBM. Love or hate them, there is no denying that Apple's focus is on the experience of using their products within an ecosystem of iTunes, App Store and iDevice, rather than on the technical attributes of the devices themselves. From a technical standpoint, Apple's devices are not significantly better (and they're often worse) than their competitor's products. But it's the design that goes into the experience of using the device that makes the fundamental difference. IBM, on the other hand, is the classic engineering company focussed primarily on the technical artefact itself.

We need a vendor to do for BI what Apple did for music players, mobile phones and tablet computing. We need a vendor that understands tactical and strategic decision making in organisations and who is willing to have a go at changing and improving that process rather than bolting on yet another suite of 'smoke and mirrors' to their already bloated software.

--
¹ Markus, M. L. and M. S. Silver (2008) "A Foundation for the Study of IT Effects: A New Look at DeSanctis and Poole's Concepts of Structural Features and Spirit," Journal of the Association for Information Systems (9) 10/11, pp. 609-632.

Andrew McLean at Mastering SAP

2011-02-11T22:03:00.001+11:00

How cool is this - video's of the keynotes presented at last year's Mastering SAP conference. This talk is from Andrew McLean - from the Monash DSS Lab.

1000_Andrew McLean from The Eventful Group on Vimeo.

Time flies

2010-12-16T09:55:00.003+11:00

Just a quick update. Been a hard couple of semesters for us all keeping us busy, making it hard to get our research done, and even harder to get time to blog. However, we have had a bit of a reboot as a group and are now all busy pursuing our research agendas over the Australian summer break and hope to get a bit of time to blog in the next few weeks and months, and hopefully do a better job of blogging more regularly when teaching starts again at the end of the first quarter next year. There have been some significant organisational changes for us, we wound up our Centre and reconstituted our "Lab". Our hope is this will make us more agile - like we once were - one concrete change in the short term has been the establishment of our lab web site at http://dsslab.infotech.monash.edu.au. Nice place holder site there at the moment but that site will grow. It will also be the base we use for web applications and experiments so stay tuned for posts featuring calls for participation that involve using applications hosted at that URL. It will also be the URL to visit to get copies of reports and working papers.

POD

Herding Web 2.0 Cats: Contributions to the Platform

2010-03-25T12:04:00.008+11:00

This is the third of three posts looking at the details of a functional framework for Web 2.0 / social media. The earlier posts are:
An introductory post is here
A look at contributions to the content of social media platforms is here.
A look at contributions to the social networks on the platforms is here.

The final category in our social media framework deals with contributions to the social media platform itself. One of the key ideas in O'Reilly's explanation of Web 2.0 is the adoption of lightweight, flexible development methodologies that rely on the active involvement of the community of users to build the platform. Intuitively this makes sense: the usage of a particular social media platform shifts and changes over time as community members use the technology for a variety of real-world purposes. Users stretch and pull the features of a particular platform: think of the conventions that have built up on Twitter: the use of the @user reply format or integration of Twitpic, TinyURL and other similar tools - none of which featured in the original design spec for the Twitter platform.

Platforms that don't adapt and change go into decline. MySpace, for example, is burning a US$580 million hole in Rupert Murchoch's pocket in part because News Corp didn't understand the need to allow the platform to evolve and change in a free and flexible manner. Decreased usage of that platform can be attributed to an increased emphasis on advertising (leading to a crappy user experience) and a glacial bureaucratic process for the implementation of design changes.

Involving the community in the development of a social media platform is an example of utilising the wisdom of the crowds, again a key component of O'Reilly's explanation of Web 2.0. A social media platform is more than just the site itself, but also includes the 'ecosystem' of related applications and support sites that allow the community to use the site for a variety of purposes. This means that there are two different ways in which the community of users of a social media platform can contribute to the platform itself:

Contributing to the platform design
Contributing to the ecosystem of applications around the platform.

Clearly the former is more common than the latter, and takes the form of both explicit and implicit feedback. Often, the developers of a platform will directly engage with the community to find out how they want to use the platform, looking for ideas for new features. Frequently, though, the feedback takes the form of a change of usage pattern. As users try to use the platform in unanticipated ways, developers respond by either making it easier to use existing features (eg. embedding @replies into the structure of the Twitter platform) or introducing brand new features (eg. the ability to geotag photographs on Flickr).

Very occasionally, a user of a platform will develop a 3rd party application to introduce some feature not directly supported by the platform, or to allow a customised means of interacting with the platform. The plethora of Twitter applications for devices like the iPhone is an example of this, as well as the image, video and link applications that extend the functionality of the basic platform: hardly anyone uses the web interface as their primary means of using Twitter. Sometimes the 3rd party applications end up being integrated into the platform itself (see the Twitter search tool which started as an independent web app), but even if that doesn't happen, the platform is extended and supported by this 3rd party ecosystem, leading to a wider range of uses and appealing to a larger group of users. The easier it is to develop a 3rd party application (through technologies like XML, SOAP or even plain old HTML APIs) the richer this ecosystem will be.

Herding Web 2.0 Cats: Contributing to the Social Network

2010-02-12T15:54:00.009+11:00

This is the second of three posts looking at the details of a functional framework for Web 2.0 / social media. An introductory post is here, and the first substantive post on the framework can be found here.

Geez, you sure can tell when semester hits - blog posts here come to a grinding halt! What was supposed to be a short interlude of a couple of days has turned into a couple of weeks.

In the first post on the framework, we looked at three kinds of content contributions members of a social media community can make to a social media platform. This post addresses the second category of contributions: those to the social network itself.

The social network is a critical part of what makes Web 2.0 different - in fact, I think that the social nature of Web 2.0 is the thing that makes Web 2.0 fundamentally different to what came before. Social phenomena are notoriously hard to understand. Just look at the competing paradigms in sociology and social science research, all wrestling with the complexity of explaining non-rational human behaviour.

But for our purposes I think we can conceive of three different kinds of contributions to a social network supported by a social media platform:

Creating new social networks or groupings
Administering these networks
General participation in the social network

Each of these three kinds of activities can be formalised to a greater or lesser extent and either explicitly built into the social media platform, or occur in a much more organic way. Indeed, even when formal mechanisms are in place to establish groups or networks, informal groups also tend to form. For example, Flickr.com's groups or Reddit's sub-reddits provide explicit, formal groups to which community members may belong. But the use of contact or friends lists, or simply engaging with other users on the site can lead to informal groupings that can socialise and collaborate. Networks or groups can be short-lived, forming around a specific event, or more permanent.

Regardless of the purpose of the grouping, at some stage the network has to be initiated which can happen in several ways. Many sites support mechanisms for reflecting real-world social networks such as families and friends through the use of contact lists and groupings. These also support intra-platform groupings as they form as well. Social networks will typically have various formal and informal norms and rules (with occasional discrepancies between the two). A group might form based on the initiative of one, or a small group of members, or the platform itself may encourage a grouping, such as with Facebook's country, city or school-based networks. In the former case, the initiators of a social network may require a comparatively high profile to encourage other users to connect with the group.

Social networks also rely on governance of the group to enforce the rules and norms. In some cases, these tasks fall to the group as a whole, in others there are one or more members designated as 'moderators' or something similar. At first, it may be that the members who started the group perform the role of group moderator, but over time, other members and the group as a whole can take on the tasks. A healthy social network, to a certain extent, will be self-governing, but from time-to-time issues arise where if there is disagreement on how the rules should be applied, or discrepancy between what the group as a whole expects and what is actually undertaken by the group moderators, the group itself may devolve into factions or simply go out of existence. Group governance, therefore, is an important part of ensuring that a social network remains healthy and functional. The health and functionality of a social media platform itself is a function of the health and functionality of the various networks that it supports.

Finally, there are the acts of socialisation of the community members themselves. Typically these socialisation acts will be in the form of the primary and secondary contributions to content I wrote about in the last post. But they also include private messages (like Twitter's direct message feature, or Flickr's mail system). These activities collectively make up the social fabric of the individual social networks as well as the broader community on a social media platform, all of which are further shaped by the technical design of the platform itself.

Interestingly, while the nature of the technology (ie. its design and features) shapes the nature of the social networks on the platform, the community also helps to shape the technology (for the academically minded, this is an example of Gidden's duality of structure and Orlikowksi's adaptation of this idea to technology). This idea, of the platform itself being shaped by the community will be the topic of my next post, which will hopefully not as long coming as this post was!

Herding Web 2.0 Cats: Contributions to Content

2010-02-08T11:50:00.007+11:00

This is the first of three posts looking at the details of a functional framework for Web 2.0 / social media introduced in the previous post.

Tim O'Reilly's coining of the term 'Web 2.0' was based on an observation of the rise of a new breed of web company, based on a model of collaboration and socialisation rather than the traditional model of publisher/consumer. As I mentioned in the last post, O'Reilly talks about two different kinds of contributions that users of social media make to a web site that they didn't under the old model: contributions to the data set and contributions to the platform (he didn't use those exact words, though). We also added a third to that list: contribution to the social network. This post breaks down the first of these types of contributions to start filling out the details of our social media framework.

Contributions by users to the content of a site are perhaps the most obvious of the three different contributions, and we think think that there are three different types (how's that for symmetry, eh?): primary contributions, secondary contributions and passive contributions.

A primary contribution is typically the main purpose for which a social media platform is developed. For example, a photograph uploaded to Flickr, a 'tweet' on Twitter, or a video uploaded to YouTube would be considered primary contributions. A primary contribution tends to stand alone - that is, the contribution is worth the community's attention in and of itself. The primary contribution is often a 'package' of content. So, for example, a user doesn't simply upload a photograph to Flickr, they also attach metadata such as a title, tags, a description and so on.

A primary contribution - Flickr photo page, consisting of photo and metadata.

A secondary contribution, on the other hand, is not a standalone contribution, but is submitted as a response to a primary or other secondary contribution. The classic case is a text-based comment, but on Flickr would also include actions like adding to the photographer's list of tags on a photo page or adding the photo to a list of favourites. On a site like Reddit.com, a secondary contribution might be an up or downvote for a comment or link, while on YouTube it might be a rating of a video, or even a video-in-reply. Secondary contributions represent, on an individual level, a reaction to something on the site, and in an aggregate sense indicate the community's perception of that thing. Secondary contributions allow for dialog between users of a platform, thereby allowing communities and social networks to form.

Secondary contributions in the context of the primary contribution above.

Passive contributions are examples of O'Reilly's idea of "harnessing collective intelligence". They come about not as an explicit contribution on the part of a user, but rather as a consequence of their use of the platform, whether that be a primary or secondary contribution or simply through clicking around the site. Passive contributions tend to be contributions to aggregate data derived through some algorithm implemented on the platform: it may be as simple as a view count of a photograph or video, or could be as advanced as Google's PageRank algorithm based on web author's linking behaviour or Amazon's recommendation system based on purchasing patterns. Through the tracking of user actions and the application of algorithms, the platform can add value to the user experience, adding to the appeal of the platform. Think of the predictive search in Google, or the use of tag clouds to handle the problem of building taxonomies.

Contributing content to a social media platform is one of the key ways in which users establish their position within an online community and add value to the platform itself, and is the most obvious difference in the way Web 2.0 works compared to the old publisher/consumer model of Web 1.0. Instead of relying on a large database of proprietary information (the Web 1.0 mantra of "content is king!"), Web 2.0 harnesses the concept of "human computing" to build content that in many cases is more compelling than what you find with Web 1.0. With the incorporation of social elements to the online experience, the next most obvious difference is the formation of social networks supported or enhanced by social media. Contributions to social networks will be the topic of my next post.

Herding Web 2.0 Cats

2010-02-03T12:30:00.007+11:00

The BI vendor marketing departments are scrambling to get on the BI 2.0 bandwagon, partly as a means of doing something different with their products and partly because they've seen the success of the Web 2.0 juggernaut and want some of that action. The efforts to date have ranged from the fairly ordinary (let's bolt on a comments feature to our reporting tool, but bury it on a separate screen!) to the potentially good (I'm watching the 12Sprints stuff with interest).

The problem with BI 2.0 is kind of the same problem that Web 2.0 has, though: it's easily dismissed as nothing more than a marketing term, and each commentator has their own take on what it means. At least for Web 2.0 there's Tim O'Reilly's fairly reasonable outline of what he meant when he coined the phrase. For BI 2.0, though, the term means pretty much whatever the marketing department wants it to mean: your tool supports decision automation? BI 2.0 baby! Got a poorly thought out commenting feature? You bet that's 2.0!

POD and I have been watching this go on for a while now with interest and occasional amusement. Clearly the BI 2.0 term is inspired by the Web 2.0 equivalent, but we're not sure that everyone who lays claim to the term actually gets it. We reckon that the idea of BI influenced by the kinds of things that have been happening on the web can be a good thing, but to show that, we need to do some research on it. Before that can begin, though, we need to be clear in our own minds about what Web 2.0 is, and how those Web 2.0 features might apply in a BI setting. Our problem is that no-one, apart from O'Reilly, has really done a good job of saying exactly what Web 2.0 is, so we chose that as our starting point - this post (and the next few) is a way of testing the water to see if what we've come up with in that regard is reasonable.

To break this all into consumable chunks, I'll set this out over several posts, but start with a bit of an overview of what we've come up with - the detail will come later. What we decided to do was to work up to a coherent statement of what Web 2.0 is from the ground up. Rather than trying to cover every commentator's pet definition, we thought it would be more realistic to come up with a functional definition of the term. In other words, forget formal definitions - Web 2.0 is best described by what people actually do with it.

O'Reilly's original outline talks about lots of characteristics of Web 2.0 firms like "harnessing collective intelligence", having a "light" approach to development and so on. At it's core, though, O'Reilly's characteristics boil down to the shift from a consumer model to a collaboration model: the community is not a group of passive consumers, the community fundamentally contributes to the Web 2.0 site. O'Reilly talks explicitly about two kinds of contributions the community makes: contribution of content and contribution to the design of the platform. We took that as our starting point and built up a functional framework for Web 2.0.

In addition to O'Reilly's two types of contributions, though, we added a third. The key difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is the social nature of the latter (we reckon the term social media is a much better descriptor). Beyond the technology platform and the content hosted on that platform, we reckon that the social network itself is something that people contribute to as well. So, at the highest level, we reckon Web 2.0 can be described functionally with the following categories of use:

Contributions to content (see this post)

Contributions to the social network

Contributions to the platform

Where are we headed with this? I'll flesh out each of these three in three separate posts, and perhaps wrap up with a fourth that summarises it all. But our end game really is to take this framework and use it to look at BI: If BI 2.0 is treated as a social media platform, what features might it have? How might it work? And ultimately, does the idea of applying social media concepts to BI hold any water?

Vendor innovation and the iPad

2010-01-29T13:33:00.003+11:00

Steve Remington and I have been working, along with our other colleagues, on a project looking at innovation in the BI software industry. We have been using press releases as a surrogate 'history' of BI firms. We think that they record - along with lots of sales and marketing related information - important events in the development of products. We have been looking at the major vendors, trying to determine if there has been any change in the rate and nature of product innovations since they have been taken over by larger general IT firms. The data is messy and complex and the answer doesn't appear at this stage to be a simple yes or no ... the work continues.

However, we are coming to the conclusion that we haven't seen a lot of really major innovation for the BI community generally - really ground breaking stuff. When you look at the major advances in the technology we use they are either really old (for example, what we now call in-memory OLAP dates back to the late 60s!), or developed elsewhere (the web).

In my shtick on interfaces - the talk I gave in a variety of forms at a number of venues last year - I begin by lamenting that in the 80s (in the 'good old days') the best interfaces were found in EIS tools and in games. Both classes of software really pushed the envelope of what was possible with the limited graphics resources of the computers and PCs available at the time. EIS tools like Commander, Pilot and Holos came with their own GUI system. Macs also featured heavily as a platform at the time because, of course, they have a GUI built in that was easier to develop for than building your own. Then of course Windows came along, and now the web, and BI tools just take advantage of the standard graphics tools built into those underlying platforms. They no longer represent - there are few exceptions, but not many - the leading edge of interface design.

This is a pity I think. Games software has continued to push the envelope, games are still written to take advantage of specialist graphic and interaction technologies and have helped foster the development of new interface techniques (think the Wii).

So, to the innovation of the moment ... the Apple iPad. I like it, I'm wondering why Apple, or somebody, hadn't produced it a few years earlier, but still its a nice device and looks like it will sell well and evolve into a serious category of product. I think it has the potential to be an excellent platform for BI software. Love to see some well design software that allows me to pinch and gesture my way around a multi-dimensional database.

The major games houses have been keen to develop versions for the prototypes they have been given access to, and there are press releases galore from them heralding Apple's product and announcing support for the platform and specific titles and release dates. That's an industry that's willing to take risks and continues to innovate and exploit new technologies. Sadly, so far from the BI software vendors ... I've seen nothing. No doubt there will be, eventually, a few half hearted announcements of the availability of Apps that run on the platform but I doubt there will be enough risk taking or innovation to get me excited ... I guess I can always hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think I will be.

POD

Business Intelligence, 1923 style ...

2009-12-04T10:08:00.006+11:00

Continuing on the theme from the last post - a press release from C3 Business Solutions (a Melbourne-based BI consultancy) that includes some statements from me has been in the "wild" for some time now. Thought it was worth reposting here:

http://www.abhishek-tiwari.com/2009/10/is-business-intelligence-too-sexy.html

The vendors do a great job of making everything they do seem exciting and new - that's their job, they have to sell software and that's a good way to do it I think. It plays into the general IT culture. However, there is a real danger we will ignore the lessons of the past if we focus uncritically on the new. I was reminded of this recently when I an amazing article - it was written in 1923 (before the great crash). It was published in the Harvard Business Review and it described the creation of a statistics department (providing information for management) at Eastman Kodak. Abstracting a little (the article referred to draftspeople - report designers, and statisticians - data managers), and substitute the name 'statistics department' for 'business intelligence competency centre' and the advice given could apply to a large company today. It really is a stunning article. Here is a quick summary of a selection of the main points in the paper. They might not all work in your organisation, but they represent some excellent ideas for organisation your BI efforts.

The head of the BI department must report directly to the CEO. Not to Finance, Marketing or Information Technology. They need to have a direct line to the executive decision making processes; this is the only effective way for them to be able to develop processes and systems that will support the strategy of the organisation.
If there are already BI groups in the organisation, perhaps groups located out in the business units (creating what today we would call data marts), don’t fight against them, and don’t replicate their efforts. They already will have a good understanding of their functional area and a good relationship with their clients. Allow the central team to (slowly) develop standards, and processes that those groups use. The central team can provide quality control, and also help to minimise areas of overlap and inconsistency. The central team can source data from those groups to allow for more “enterprise” views to be created.
The BI team should be organised along the same functional lines as the business. This will allow members of to develop a deeper understanding of ‘their’ area of the business and to develop relationships with the people in that area.
Have equal numbers of people in the BI team devoted to the design of processes of systems to source, transform and store data, and to design the reporting systems that users will actually interact with.

As you read the, remember the paper was written in 1923! The important lesson, I think, is to remember people have been attempting to provide managers with information they need for a long time. Quite a lot is understood about how and how not to develop BI systems them – yet I see a lot of the same mistakes being made. Teams that develop and implement systems that are successful, more often than not, include some people with experience. We should try hard to learn from the past – experience really does make a difference.

POD

Do we really build systems to improve decision making?

2009-11-10T10:23:00.005+11:00

Just wrapping my mind around a new direction for a research project. Some of you know, I've been around the traps in the last little bit doing my schtick on interfaces. Of course everybody says the interface is important but I don't think we do a lot about it.Main message of my talk is that we don't devote enough effort or resources to the design of the interface. We just use the "orthodox" tables and charts provided by the vendors in our data displays (and the same for the navigation between views of data) - and many of them are not very good.

We just did a study where we can two different groups of people the same data - but one group got the data in "orthodox" BI charts, complete with 3D effects or gradient shading, not over the top but typical of BI systems today - and the other group an equivalent set of charts - very plain in their design (think the design principles of Tufte or Few). As we hypothesised, when asked questions about the data that required accurate analysis - the group that got the plain charts did much better than the group that got the sexier charts. Neat to see that this study and article that Trevor Clarke wrote for Computerworld after a chat with me has stirred up some debate.

Most BI systems provide users with a slicer dicer style interface in the hope that they will explore the information our systems give them access to - finding the "number" that solves their problem - just like in the demo's the vendors give. Sadly for that dream, in another study, we showed that a lot of people can't use pivot tables.

I think we have a problem. A serious one. Nigel Pendse thinks (based on his global survey) that the mean usage rate of a BI system is around 7 to 8%. That seems a little low to me - but its been a while since we collected that kind of data, and with web technologies (esp. in the last couple of years) meaning that more people have access to BI systems, the proportion using them might have fallen - so while 7-8% seems low, his data collection is good, I've got to think that he must be close to right. Even if he's not, the best take up rates we have seen in our case study work aren't very good.

In my presentations and writing I've been arguing that one main reason for this low usage rate is the interface we provide. I think that most BI systems have very similar interfaces (with few exceptions, the character of the main offerings from the BI vendors is identical). Those interfaces suit a few people, but not many. We need a major re-focus on the role and place of the interface if we are going to get better rates of usage of BI systems.

Now, there are a couple of underlying assumptions to those assertions. The first is that its desirable for lots of people to have access to a BI system, and to use that in their daily work. That may not be true. There have been studies that show that using decision support systems actually decreases decision performance - so the people using BI systems might actually be doing their organisations and themselves harm. I'm happy for the moment to believe in the value of BI systems, and leave the research on that one to other people.

The second assumption that I have been thinking about - is that people use BI system to help make decisions. What if that's not true? What if people use these systems for some other purpose. It could be (as would be predicted by cognitive artefacts like the confirmation bias) that our systems are to build a case to convince ourselves and others that a decision already made is correct?

If that's the case, no wonder we are putting 3d funnel charts in our systems - in response to user demand. The aim of the display of data would be to impress people, show them how clever we are, how the data supports our strategy (better obscure the data a bit just in-case it doesn't). Im exaggerating the case a little (of course), but it is interesting to think about - and not to hard I think to design a research instrument that can be used to go out and find out what BI systems are actually being used for: decision making or decision justification?

POD

:-( back to marking exam papers.

Timo Elliott's demonstration dashboard

2009-06-21T23:23:00.005+10:00

Neat little demo put together by Timo Elliott (@timoelliott) from Business Objects using their Xcelcius product as a - think I'm inventing words here - mashupable object. He plonked the dashboard he made, on his blog with a number of controls that allow you - YouTube style - to share via email, twitter or cut and past as an object in html. This kind of functionality will get even easier when HTML 5 gains traction, but as Timo shows its do-able right now. Doesn't matter that it's a dashboard, the idea could work with any report or report part. I really like the ability to click to expand to full-screen view - just link clicking on a web page section in iPhone's Safari, a visual drill-down (or up).

So with a click on Timo's blog and a paste, here is Timo's demo Dashboard (his blog has some context that's fun to read too). To start with our blogger hosted blog isn't coping with the width of the element so well, but Timo kindly set a new code block that does fit - Thanks Timo.

An experiment on Twitter

2009-06-10T09:19:00.007+10:00

For a long time a few of us, and not just at Monash, have wondered how a real time text feed - perhaps in RSS format - might be applied to BI systems. Now that social networking sites like Facebook/Twitter/Friendfeed exist and are becoming widely used the idea has a bit more traction with people we talk too - nothing like concrete experience to help people understand what you are talking about.

I've just set up a Twitter account that I'm going to use to develop a prototype system to demonstrate how a "feed" of text updates might be useful in a BI context. This feed (@monashbiindex) will contain updates and observations on data collected as part of out BI Index project.

Right now, all it will report on is a single number - the number of on-line job ads placed in Australia for positions related to business intelligence and data warehousing. I've been collecting this number (off and on) since 2005. It's quite interesting, there are weekly wobbles (up on Thursday and Friday) and significant seasonal variations too (up before and after the end of the financial year - way down in January). The analysis we are doing will soon expand (just like any dimensional data set) to include more detail like locations, industry sectors, job categories and the like. Later we might extend it to other countries but right now we'll stick to Australia.

So, I've got a nice little automated app, that will at 9:00 Am each morning go to seek.com.au, do a search and grab from the resulting page the total number of jobs. It records that number in a database - along with the data and time. Then a 'reporting' app fires up and does a simple day by day comparison of the number to the previous days and posts a tweet. Much better than the Excel macro's I've been messing with since 2005! Once I'm happy with how that's working, I'll extend the range of topics tweeted on to include a wider range of temporal tweets (end of week, end of month, end of season summaries), link the tweet to reports (no 3D donut charts I promise) and start to build agent style data monitors that look for exceptions, to demonstrate how a twitter style feed might be used for reporting the results of data mining algorithms.

POD

P.S. Oh, later the "Index" will include more measures of health than job ads. We are planning a regular survey of the "industry" and also a stock market index - something again I started a long time ago.

P.P.S The BI Job index is based on the number of jobs that match the search terms "Business Intelligence" or "Data Warehous" that are listed on www.seek.com.au. The index is expressed on points based on a ratio of the number of jobs to the number on the day the index started 23/10/2005. On that day there were 349 jobs - 100 index points.

Light at the end of the tunnel

2009-05-31T21:01:00.004+10:00

Rob and I and co. bloggers have been more than a little quiet as - despite our best intentions - we got run over by our teaching work load in semester 1. Semester 1 is about to end so we'll get back to some BI blogging very soon.

Worth mentioning that we'll also be starting a BI podcast (not the same as the ones we have for our units). This will feature interviews with BI "thinkers" from Melbourne and around the world, as well as the occasional talk from members of the Centre. We will start with a couple of talks from me - the first will be a "briefing" on the decision support industry I gave to Prof. Arnott's FIT5094 class a fortnight ago, and my closing keynote at the Mastering Business Objects conference in Sydney last week. We hope to have a new posting in the podcast stream every two weeks. If you have any ideas about people you'd like to interview, or topics you'd like us to cover, please let us know.

POD

Cranky Geek - John Dvorak - takes huge swipe at spreadsheets, BI and accountants.

2009-01-23T14:13:00.004+11:00

Lots of other things I want to and should post at the moment, but I couldn't let this slip. An article by John Dvorak that is kicking up quite a storm. Love John Dvorak. Always worth reading and listening. He's often wrong (and very wrong), but always there is something to what he says. Anyway, he is an article about the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet.

He's nuts of course (in a good way, and that's what I like about him), but he makes a point. We have all this wonderful what-if analysis, information at our figure-tips, enterprise Bi all over the place - so how come we aren't making better decisions? Of course, the spreadsheet isn't to blame but its a fun read.

The 30th Anniversary of the (No Good) Spreadsheet App

POD

Scoble on BI Panorama/Google style

2009-01-22T11:48:00.003+11:00

Thought it was worth drawing your attention to a recent video post by Robert Scoble.

The story of 2009? Enterprise disruption?

It's not particularly critical - really just a PR puff piece - it covers the tool's Panorama have been creating in partnership with Google. Panorama are a company to watch, Novaview - their core offering - is excellent, and they are the company that sold Microsoft the technology that became Analysis Services.

However, I'm underwhelmed by the tools they have created with Google so far, but its a start I guess, into a potentially interesting shift of BI services in the 'cloud'.

Have a watch, I'd be interested in your thoughts. I'll post a little later on why I think this in general is a big deal, but this particular tool isn't.

POD

Simple Designs are Hard

2008-12-03T12:31:00.004+11:00

Reading Peter's last couple of posts got me thinking about a great TED conference presentation made by former Broadway pianist and NY Times tech columnist David Pogue. A couple of years ago he talked at TED about the design of technology and the importance of simplicity in design.

A lot of what we do as BI developers is design ways for people to mess around with, and learn from, information. One one of the key principles behind a doing this well is to ensure simplicity. A lot of what Tufte and other data visualisation experts talk about can be seen to derive from this principle, and as Peter said, despite the experimental and anecdotal evidence to support it, it's something the vendors often don't do well. One of the reasons for this is that it's just plain hard, and probably something that most software engineers are not very good at doing. Simple, elegant and intuitive interfaces for BI apps are not just aesthetically pleasing, they lead to better understanding on the part of decision makers, and creative uses of the tools that can lead to unexpected insights - which sounds awfully like the vendors' own jargon. I wish they'd listen to people like David Pogue a bit more.

An unexpected finding ...

2008-12-03T11:30:00.006+11:00

It's a good time of year to be an academic, nearly all the marking and teaching related administration is done for the year, though next year is approaching fast - we do have some time to fully devote our attention to research. We have a lot of projects that are finishing up, which means it time for us to get out and start collecting data for the next round of case studies and investigations. We are also doing some tiding up of our infrastructure. We have had to move out of a room we had devoted to project related activities but that has given us an chance to throw some stuff out and generally get our "house" in order. For example we been have updating and sorting out our files hosted on various servers. None of that has any direct impact on this blog, except we have run out of excuses not to extend our blog related activities a little. Shortly, we'll have a podcast featuring presentations and interviews by and with staff from the Centre. Another thing we will start to do is talk a bit more here on the blog about our published research. So lets start that right now ...

Here is a link to a paper we published earlier this year.

A note on an experimental study of DSS and forecasting exponential growth

(The file is hosted on Science Direct and they own the copyright, so sorry if you can't access it. If you are on the Monash network, you'll be able to view it, or if you have a Monash authcate, try using the VPN. If you are at another Uni. you'll probably have a subscription)

I know that sounds a bit technical, and that its not of interest if you aren't into forecasting or that worried about exponential growth, but actually, its interesting beyond those areas. The paper presents and experiment we conducted where we asked subjects to forecast growth in iPod sales - which have been exponential. We conducted a similar study years ago, but used made up data, we thought it would be better to use a real exponential data series, so we re-did the study this time using iPod sales as the data series to forecast. Now, it turns out humans are poor at forecasting exponential growth - there is a cognitive bias at work related to the anchoring and adjustment heuristic - which means we just don't pick up on the exponential nature of a data series and forecast growth as a straight line and as a result under estimate growth of exponential data.

In our experiment, we gave the subjects some historical quarterly data, and asked them to forecast 2 quarters out (we knew that "actuals" for the periods we were asking them to forecast).

The idea we designed the experiment to test is a simple one. If you take a log of exponential data, you get a straight line. Humans are good at doing straight line forecasting so we reasoned that if you take a log of exponential data, forecast based on that, you'll get a better forecast than if you just have the data in its 'raw' state. The conversion to log data and back is something a computer system - a DSS - can do nicely, so that's the basic shape of the experiment. All the detail is in the paper - as you'd expect there is a control group using a paper based version of the data, but we built a nice little tool to perform the forecast. You can click on a chart to make a forecast - and it shows you the number, or type in a number and it shows where that number is on the chart. One version of the tool had just the raw data, the other showed both the raw data and the log data.

So, to the results ... the computer supported forecasts were better. Phew, often in these types of studies the DSS is of no help. In our case it was. However, the simpler version of the system, did better than the version that had the log data - the opposite of what we expected. Our explanation is that the simple version encouraged experimentation, letting the users think a bit more about their forecast - exactly what you want a DSS to to. However, rather than helping, the more complex system with the log data, intimidated the users, stopping them from experimenting and as a result they made poorer forecasts.

So forget about forecasting and exponential growth, the main lesson from this study is keep the interface simple.

POD

A survey of Australian BI practice - call for participation

2008-11-21T20:58:00.002+11:00

We really like the folks at Intalign and are doing a couple of research related activities together with them on an ad hoc basis. Right now they are doing a survey of Australian organisations to understand what they are doing with BI. Martin Kratky, one of the Directors at Intalign, just sent out this update and reminder to people on his list about the survey:

"So far, more than 50 major Australian companies have participated in this important study, held in conjunction with Monash University. To gain the broadest possible cross section of prominent Australian organisations, we would be very appreciative of your confidential input.

As a thank you for participating in this survey (max. 10 mins), we would like to offer you:

A free copy of the survey results to benchmark your BI processes including reporting, software, budget allocations and more against best practices and other survey participant's organisations.

A $150 voucher to be used for a one day executive workshop

We are still inviting professionals that are in charge of Business Intelligence processes in their organisation (with an annual turnover of at least $20 million) to take part in the survey. To participate, please send an email to: survey@intalign.com."

If you fit the demographic - an Australian organisation with turnover > $20 mil, and have some spare 10-15 minutes, why not drop them an e-mail and get the link to the survey.

Peter

The vendors ARE mad!

2008-11-14T00:16:00.003+11:00

Now I need to qualify this post - which is in response to a vendor presentation I went to during the week - by saying, that the vendor - Cognos - is in my opinion one of the good ones. Their technology is pretty good, maybe still a few performance issues with large numbers of users but generally in great shape. I really like the new report meta-data feature (lineage they call it) in version 8.4 of their core reporting tool. That will be quickly copied by the other vendors.

But, and I mean BUT, I saw a demo of a guided report writing tool - intended to help end-users build their own reports without IT support. All the vendors offer something like this, and none of them work very well.

I counted clicks during the demonstartion. The presenter went through a standard demo, just building a simple financial report with revenue, target and variance shown. It took 31 clicks and 7 drag and drop actions to the build the report. The presenter didn't make a single mistake, knew the software backwards and knew where the data was, and it still took 31 clicks and 7 drop and drags. NO. That is not and end-user report creation tool.

Arrrgggghhhhh.

POD
P.S. They also had 3D pie charts with the middle taken out to make them look like donuts. Why?

The iPhone

2008-10-28T20:18:00.002+11:00

I have an iPhone and I love it. I hate phones, and I hate mobile phones in particular .. but my iPhone is different. Really. the reaction I get to it, when people see it reminds me of the "old" days when Windows was young and DOS ruled and Macs' were the only platform that really implemented a WIMP interface (only when Windows became better accepted - really after the release of Windows95 did mainstream people start calling the bit-mapped, mouse driven graphic desktop-metaphor based interface a GUI).

DOS folks (and I was one once too!) would laugh at me and complain that I was letting the computer make decision for me, I was missing out on the power of commands like "Copy *.*" - look at all the clicks you have to do to copy all your files, ... and on it would go.

Many early EIS systems were Mac-based. To write for DOS mean't the vendor's had to create their own GUI - a non-trivial exercise - so the Mac was a preferred platform. (In 1990 we evaluated Pilot, Comshare and Holos - all had Mac versions that were heaps better than the DOS versions.

Along came Windows 3.11 and then Windows 95 and the game changed.

The Desktop metaphor was created at Xerox Parc in the 60s. It is still with us. In a less defined and less consistent way our interfaces are now also dominated by a document metaphor (partly due to the take up of the Web).

The reason why the iPhone is so cool - and so interesting to me - is not that it's a phone, or that is has a touch screen, or GPS, or a camera or whatever other feature it has - all of those are neat, but as my Windows Mobile/Blackberry/Palm/HTC loving friends point out there are other phones with similar or better technical feature sets. The thing is its easy to use - and it not because it has a great screen, and a touch interface. The interface is based on a "new" metaphor. Information is displayed on a surface - the information becomes the interface. That's the revolution. Many of my friends don't get that.

Sadly, at this stage, it seems very few BI vendors get it either. This metaphor - and the technology that supports it - is perfect for BI systems. Watch this video from Edward Tufte - he's talking about the iPhone as a phone - forget that and just think about what he says about the interface. He's describing an almost perfect way of presenting and exploring data. As he explains it, the iPhone is a dramatic new paradigm. It will be copied and probably improved upon - but not by phone vendors who think squeezing a menu based system onto a touch screen is an appropriate interface for a mobile device.

I hope that one day the BI vendors will understand too. I wonder - if as before - we have to wait for Microsoft (who are playing with this new metaphor with their surface product) to build a new version of Windows before the BI worlds makes a real change for the better.

Reblog: Godin Causes a Data Visualisation Storm

2008-07-16T09:27:00.004+10:00

A quick post with no content of my own:

Seth Godin, professional agent provocateur, has caused something of an outcry amongst data visualisation aficionados in a blog post lambasting the use of bar charts in presentations. Although his heart is in the right place, Godin's somewhat simplistic prescriptions for improving communication effectiveness miss the mark. Perhaps his greatest crime is to advocate the use of pie charts, which, as we know, are as "professional as a pair of assless chaps." The boys at Juice Analytics and Stephen Few have the scoop.

IT Folks are Luddites

2008-05-30T11:59:00.003+10:00

A while ago in a previous post, I referred to an interview with Neil Raden entitled "Is Business Intelligence Stuck in the Past?" where he talked about how most business users today are more tech-savvy than the IT department. Peter O'Donnell just sent me through a link to a Gartner Voice interview with Peter Keen (one of the founding fathers of DSS/BI) where he makes essentially the same point:

IT is in danger of becoming the technology laggard.

Tune in here to listen to the interview. You can also subscribe to the Gartner Voice podcast in iTunes (the interview with Keen is the most recent episode).

Data Warehouse / BI Security

2008-04-17T12:27:00.005+10:00

Peter O'Donnell and myself are currently supervising an honours student who is looking at the issue of data warehouse security, with a view to doing a survey of DW security practices in Australian companies. It's still early days, but one of the things that Justin has found is that there is very little literature (academic or otherwise) talking about the issue (either highlighting problems, or outlining best practice). This is both good and bad news: it means that Justin will be making a real contribution, but he's going to have trouble writing the literature review section of his thesis!

To give you some idea of where our thinking is at, here's a generic architecture for the flow of information through a data warehouse:

Each component of the diagram above is a potential security problem. Just the ETL process, for example, poses problems of massive amounts of data moving around a network, taken out of what is presumably an initially secure environment. We've found very little that talks about securing the individual components of the architecture, or of taking an holistic view and securing the whole process, end-to-end. On the flip-side, security often poses a problem from a functionality or performance perspective - what can we do to make the whole thing as responsive and functional as possible while still protecting an important organisational assett?

Any thoughts, war stories, pointers to resources or comments would be appreciated!