Petr Olmer, evangelist

Define, explain, measure, share, act

2011-04-27T08:05:00.000-07:00

Here are five steps to metric-driven business.

Step 1: Define

That’s easy, I was told once by VP of Sales in a big company. We have only one KPI, and that’s the number of our clients.

Ok, I said, how do you measure it? The VP raised eyebrows. What do you mean, how? It’s just a number!

Well, I continued, so what’s the number today? In a minute, he realized it’s not a single number: Corporate clients should be separated, people with savings accounts should count more, etc. It actually took two weeks to discuss it in detail and define what they want to measure.

It’s hard to come up with a good definition but it’s worth to be as exact as possible.

Step 2: Explain

This is the most difficult step. It’s tricky because there are several questions hidden under the “why” stone.

Clients give us money, we need to measure the number of our clients! That’s a lazy answer. It’s our KPI! Even lazier.

First, with “why” you often realize your definition can be better. What does “we have 5,000 clients” tell about the performance of your company? (KPI should be about performance, right?) Not much unless you know what’s the goal (to have 10,000 clients) and what was the same number a month or a quarter ago (we had 4,000 clients a quarter ago).

Second, there’s a difference between having a set of KPIs and running a metric-driven business. Knowing the values of your KPIs does not mean you drive by it. It’s good to know you’re driving 65 mph and your target is 130 miles away but it does not tell you where to turn.

Hunt your “why”. It is good to measure your velocity because if you know it’s 65 mph and your target was 130 miles away an hour ago and now it is not 65 miles but 100 miles away, you also know your direction is wrong.

Answering “why” tells you a lot about your directions. Company momentum can be a great KPI.

Step 3: Measure

A lot of people do it the other way round: They look at what they are measuring or what they can measure easily at the moment, and they try to find their KPI there. That’s wrong. The goal has to be defined by business. Don’t get dragged into numbers just because you have them. The important question is: Do you need them?

Not so long ago, CEO of a GoodData client was very strict about it: he was coming to meetings with a single consistent request: give me this metric. The events in the application were not logged: he didn’t care. The internal database was not ready for it: he didn’t care. He insisted on his metric and he got it: application was changed, database was changed, and today his morning ritual is simple: drink coffee and watch the numbers.

If you know what you want to measure and why, IT will follow.

Step 4: Share

You’re either Louis XIV of France (enchanté) or you want everybody in your company to move toward the same goal (even bigger pleasure to meet you, and congratulations to this wonderful idea).

Nothing can get you closer to your goal than sharing the number you drive by. This is what we measure, here’s why, and you can see our up-to-date numbers every day.

Being secretive helps if your goal is to know more than others. If you want to achieve more, you need to share. To have the numbers visible to everybody on your intranet homepage is great. To let them shine from big LCDs in the office is better. To talk about them every day is... guest what.

When you share, you motivate. Shared number is our number, shared goal is common goal.

Step 5: Act

Imagine you measure your great metric. The number grows constantly over the last two quarters and the value was 4,912 yesterday. Suddenly, it’s 4,073. And 2,885 the next day. And even lower the day after. You need to act, and you need to act quickly.

It’s great if you can dive into the numbers, break them down, analyze them, and understand the infamous “why”. It can be anything: wrong process alignment, lack of marketing campaigns, new competitive product, bad support. You can save yourself a lot of time if you’re prepared.

Imagine it happened right now. It’s a great mental exercise. How would you start to analyze the failure? I bet you would first like to know what was responsible for that constant growth during the last two quarters–and that’s the point.

When your numbers are on 50% of what you expect them to be, it’s a great time to do a retrospective, a post mortem analysis to understand what went wrong. However, you need to learn faster. Post mortem can also mean it’s too late because the company is already dead.

In a metric-driven business, acting is an integral and continuous part of the process. Why? Because that’s the driving, nothing else. All the previous steps are helping but without acting you’re not getting anywhere (and if somewhere, it’s definitely not where you want to be).

To be able to react to a failure, you need to know what drives your success. If your numbers move, it’s time to act. If your numbers stall, it’s time to act.

Define, explain, measure, share, and act. And measure, share, and act again. And again. Every day.

You don’t need to spend two weeks identifying your first KPI. Start small, grow fast, and hold your driving wheel.

What to see at #cloudstock

2010-12-02T16:30:00.000-08:00

Cloudstock puts us all into a very challenging situation. At every minute, there are 5,000 awesome developers to speak with, and up to 12 parallel sessions. The bottom line is–if you are from this world–you will miss most of them. So where to go? Here's my list of the sessions I want to be at.

9:30am - 10:15am
Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, mongoDB, force.com, and Engine Yard in the same slot? Oh my. Based on what I know about the cloud apps and infrastructure already, I'd skip Amazon Web Services introduction and Google introduction. There's a lot of online stuff available about mongoDB and force.com, so LinkedIn is my winner.

10:30am - 11:15am
Jakub is talking about GoodData APIs and developer tools in his talk called One Stop Shop for Analytics. I would like to know more about Heroku but I'll go to Introduction to Bulding Apps with Twilio.

11:30am - 12:15am
This is easy, I need to get some enlightenment before the lunch, so Apigee it is: Your API Sucks.

1:15pm - 2:00pm
Apigee one more time? Or Box? Yahoo? This is not decided yet. Most probably Thinking outside the API hosted by Box. Interaction of platforms is something I want to hear about.

2:15pm - 3:00pm
This is very easy. I need to be at BI Platform as a Service because I talk there. Do you want to know what I'll be talking about? Check out my mindmap.

3:15pm - 4:00pm
Another difficult slot: Yahoo, CloudKick, Twilio, and Heroku together. After the whole day in Moscone, I would need some air, and Yahoo's Managing a Cloud: The View from 30,000 Feet will give me exactly that.

As you can see, Cloudstock will make my day. And–I will not be participating in Hackathon. I have no idea how the hackers among us will be able to code and listen to the sessions at the same time.

You can tell me on Monday.

We help you over troubled water

2010-12-02T13:53:00.000-08:00

It can be hard to start with a new technology. And it's even harder to start with it and deliver an application in a few days. That's what Cloudstock Hackathon is about. You need to use at least two Cloudstock partners APIs or services, and you need to deliver the application by Monday. See complete rules.

I mean: stop reading, start coding! Time is running fast and you don't want to spend another minute procrastinating. We want the hackathon to be fun, not pain, so we are here to help you. In the end, you have to build your hacking bridge over API water on your own. However, if you want to use GoodData in your app, we are here to help you understand how to work with our APIs and tools.

So start your keyboards now: MacBook, iPads, iPods, Mac Minis, Kindles, and other prices can't wait to be won!

Join our GoodData Developer Network. Start with reading our blog post about Cloudstock Hackathon. You should also follow @gooddata_dev at Twitter.

What integration is next? #inext2010

2010-11-03T12:18:00.000-07:00

San Francisco goes crazy as the Giants are marching through the city. In the same time, I'm in Austin, Texas, at IntegratioNEXT 2010, Pervasive Integration User Conference.

I like the conference. It's very well organized (thanks, Lori), great people, excellent talks. If you ask people at other conferences, they tell you it's interesting. Here I hear it's useful, and useful is better than just interesting.

I'm here because we've just announced our partnership with Pervasive. With GoodData connector, you can just take the integration stuff you already have and send your data directly to GoodData platform.

Dashboard in 15 minutes? Not a dream. As Pervasive is now completely in the cloud, it's very easy to make your data actionable. It just makes sense. Data as a Service and Platform as a Service fit together. Read more about it at GoodData blog.

The conference is almost over, and some people say I'd better be home, watching the World Series Champions parade. But believe me, this is not the last time the Champions parade is happening in San Francisco. I tell you that.

The best dashboard ever

2010-08-09T15:41:00.000-07:00

There's hunger for dashboards outside. You can buy books about creating dashboards, you can hire consultants to create dashboards, you can spend a lot of time and a lot of money hunting your dashboard dream. The truth is, the best dashboard is very simple.

The only dashboard that anyone would ever need has three pieces.

At the top, there's a line chart, and the line goes always up. There's no explanation of axis or whatever (you can guess time is running to the right and money is running to the top but who knows and who cares). The only goal of the chart is to make you happy. The line's going up, hurray!

Then there are traffic lights on the left. The light tells you how you're doing. Is it green? Perfect. Is it yellow? Do something. Is it red? It's too late to do anything (however the line's going up, so you have enough time to pack your box and quit the job in a decent way).

Finally, there a text box telling you what to do. If the light is green, it's telling you what to do to keep it green. If the light is yellow, it's telling you what to do to make it green again. (If the light is red, don't waste your time reading the text box, just go, go!)

Now there's more than a joke in this dashboard. A friend of mine who's running a very small business has recently told me that BI tools are useless for her. "I don't need to slice and dice my sales, I don't need to measure how good my campaigns are," she has complained. "I just need to know what to do next."

Her point was clear: It's good to know your sales are decreasing for the last 6 months. And it's better to know that it's all because 85% of your existing customers in South Africa have declined your renewal package. Maybe you knew it without BI, maybe not. However even if it's a new fact for you, it's not telling you how to deal with it, how to fix it.

Davenport, Harris, and Morison are describing it in their recent book Analytics At Work as a shift from information to insight. Fully automated BI tools can help you with information: what happened, what is happening now, and what will happen.

To understand how and why did it happen, what's the next best action, and what's the best/worst that can happen, you need something more. You need people who can make the shift: understand information, and get insight out of it.

These people will create the dashboard discussed above, and it will be the best dashboard ever.

Five excellent excuses why not to be agile

2010-07-31T22:53:00.000-07:00

Sure, everybody says: be agile! But what if you don't really feel like being agile? You need some excuses. And here are five excellent ones.

Recently, I've read a book about usability testing, Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug. In my opinion, it's not a good book but I like its Chapter 11.

In Chapter 11, Steve Krug describes what designers say when you ask them to change something. And I've realized that it's not about usability testing. It's about agile development, and about life in general.

Here are five excellent, absolutely essential lines. Learn them, use them, and you don't need to be agile again.

If we're going to fix it, we want to do it right.

It's a core problem. There's no easy way to fix it.

That's all going to change soon anyway. We can live with it until then.

It's going to end up feeling like a kludge.

We can't fix that right now. We don't have time.

How often I have heard these lines!

And you know what, here's a neat trick. Don't keep them just for you. Tell everybody in your company about them. Make them visible, write them down in big letters and post them high so everybody can see them all the time.

And then just wait until somebody says one of them. Enjoy that moment, point at the lines, nod, and say: Chapter 11. You'll be surprised how it works. Because excuses cannot be excellent if everybody knows them.

How to create a good funnel chart

2010-07-15T13:23:00.008-07:00

It might sound crazy but there are holes in a good funnel chart.

If you've read my previous article, you already know how easy it is to create a funnel chart that is wrong in many ways. And that sometimes it's better to visualize your data in a simple bar chart. However, as my colleague Sam Boonin observes, funnel charts are very popular:

I did a survey during the "track your marketing waterfall" webinar where I asked people to vote on funnel chart vs bar chart, and they all voted for funnel.

Would you believe that? A funnel chart, which is in fact a single stacked bar chart -- the second-worst evil right after pie chart! (Read Stephen Few if you have no idea why.)

Let's look at the funnel chart we've ended with yesterday:

There are 3 opportunities in the Qualification stage, 3 in the Proposal stage, and 3 in the Negotiation stage. Do these numbers (3, 3, and 3) look like the same in the funnel? No, because the chart is funnel shaped, so it looks like the Qualification stage is bigger than Proposal, and much much bigger than Negotiation.

But wait, isn't it true that an opportunity was in the Qualification stage before it went to Proposal? That's a very important mind shift. If opportunities flow from one stage to another, it's not really important where they are today but how they were able to get there and whether they move in the future or not.

Check out the following table:

in stage	as of today	ever
Prospecting	2	2 + 17 = 19
Qualification	3	3 + 14 = 17
Proposal	3	3 + 11 = 14
Negotiation	3	3 + 8 = 11
Closed Won	8	8

If we start from the bottom, there are eight Closed Won opportunities at the end of our funnel. In Negotiation, there are three opportunities right now, but these eight won opportunities were in Negotiation, at some point in time, so the total is eleven. Fourteen opportunities were even in Proposal: three that are there right now, and eleven that were in Proposal and are in Negotiation or Closed Won. And so on, the funnel starts with 19 opportunities.

If it's simple like that in your business, you're lucky. But most of us have no sales funnel like that. We have a funnel with holes, we have a funnel combined with a colander. That's why the whole funnel metaphor is wrong -- if you pour a glass of water into a real funnel, you get a glass of water coming out of it. If you pour a thousand leads into a sales funnel, you don't get a thousand won deals.

In our example, there are eight opportunities won but also ten opportunities lost and 2 opportunities deferred. And unfortunately, we're not able to fix the table, because we're not sure at what stage was an opportunity moved to Closed Lost. Was it after Negotiation or immediately after Prospecting?

To understand that better, we need to look at opportunities history. To make a good and correct funnel chart, we need to switch from Salesforce.com to GoodData.

Don't take me wrong, you can create a very wrong funnel chart in GoodData, too. Look at this one, created in the Sales Analytics Demo project:

The two Closed stages are so big that the real funnel is almost invisible. So let's fix it, i.e. let's introduce holes into the funnel.

In GoodData, Salesforce.com data are stored in snapshots. You can look at your numbers as of today but you can also look at history: how was my pipeline two months ago, in the beginning of quarter etc. In this case, we will look at all the snapshots at once and ask a simple question: How many opportunities were ever in these stages?

We need to create a metric to answer such a question. This is the first one. It counts all opportunities that were ever in our funnel:

The next one starts with the second stage:

I guess you already know why we include all the stages. Let's explain it on the third metric:

One would say that to get the number of opportunities that were ever in stage Cultivate, it's enough to include this stage in the metric definition, and skip the tail of the funnel. That is true in an optimal world where opportunities are not beasts and sales reps are not lazy to track everything.

For example, there might be an opportunity that was won without entering the Cultivate stage. Or maybe it was in fact in Cultivate but nobody has changed the stage in Salesforce.com. Maybe it skipped Cultivate and went immediately to Proposal. In all these cases, we want to count this opportunity to the Cultivate stage of our funnel, because it would be there in the optimal world.

What is the difference between the first and the third metric? Here we have the holes. The third metric doesn't count the opportunities that left the funnel in the first two stages. If an opportunity was in Prospect and then closed as Lost, it's not there. If it was in Prospect, and then Qualify, and then Lost, it's not there.

Stage is a checking point, and you measure how many opportunities were able to get there. That's what a funnel is for and what a funnel chart should visualize.

I guess you can imagine how the other four metrics look like. Drum roll, here's a good funnel chart.

It's a holistic overview of your historical pipeline, your successes, and -- your holes. 4,192 opportunities are at the top of the funnel, and because it's part-funnel, part-colander, only 2,893 of them are at the bottom. As you go down, the numbers are getting thiner and thiner. The shape of the chart is not funny anymore, it has a meaning.

So now you have your funnel chart. Time to get these holes fixed.

It's easy to create a wrong funnel chart

2010-07-14T16:19:00.010-07:00

Let's try to create a funnel of opportunities that are moving through stages, from Prospecting to Closed (either Won or Lost). If something is moving along a defined way, it might be useful to display that as a funnel. So how many opportunities do we have in each stage?

To create such a funnel chart in Salesforce.com, you just need to select Opportunity Stage field as "Segment" and Record Count as "Value". You get something like this chart:

Why is it wrong? The funnel suggests the stage order. Each opportunity should start in Prospecting stage, and then it is moved to Qualification stage, Proposal etc. But look at the last two stages: Closed Lost and Deferred. It's definitely not what you want -- Closed Lost is not the next stage after Closed Won. Deferred and Closed Lost are stages that don't belong to this funnel chart.

To do that, you need to exclude these two stages in Advanced Filters:

Now it's better:

Better but still wrong. The opportunities in the first four stages are really floating, they're moving or they are at least expected to be moved. On the other hand, Closed Won is the final stage (the positive one), and it's not a part of your pipeline. It's the bucket where your opportunities should end, not the funnel itself.

If you keep it like this, opportunities in Closed Won stage will take the biggest part of your chart because these are opportunities that were ever won. Other stages shows opportunities as of today. You might have thousands and thousands won opportunities, and only a hundred of opportunities in your pipeline, and that ruins your funnel chart.

So back to the filters, again.

Is this funnel chart correct? Well, not really. Salesforce.com help says:

Funnel charts are useful for showing the flow of opportunities through the stages; a substantially larger segment may indicate a bottle-neck at that stage.

So if this is what are funnel charts for, do we have a bottle-neck in any stage? I guess no but is funnel chart the best chart type to find that out? In fact, it's just a stacked bar chart, funny shaped, yes, but stacked bar chart. Let's convert the funnel chart to plain bar chart:

Now I'm pretty sure, there's no bottle-neck. So are funnel charts bad? They're not but most of them are wrong, simply because it's easy to create a wrong one.

How to create a good one? Here's a hint: Go to your kitchen and check your real funnel. Pour water into it. Does it ring a bell? If not, come tomorrow. I'll write about it.

Ted Mosby, architect

2009-03-04T01:25:00.004-08:00

Every time I introduce myself, I have to explain: "Petr Olmer, evangelist." "Oh, what? I mean, what do you do?"

Well, I try to prove that many of us can profit by using business intelligence in a light, agile, Web 2.0 way. Now I have a better sentence: I look for yes.

Seth Godin wrote:

If you're out to provide a service, or organized to deliver a product, then look for a yes. At every interaction.

That's what I do. If you want to analyze your data and you're not sure how, if you think it's difficult or even impossible, I'm here to find a solution. Petr Olmer, looking for yes.

Register for Good Data beta version!

2008-07-29T13:42:00.006-07:00

Last weeks were hectic. You have probably noticed that Good Data secured the initial funding totaling $2 million (read more about it at BusinessWire). We have also released so-called private beta version of our business intelligence tool. The feedback was pretty good, so we have switched to the public beta today - anybody can request an invitation at our registration page. You should receive your invitation within several days, or several hours, if you're lucky.

What can you expect from our beta? We have prepared a warehouse you could be familiar with (it was used in our first video) - Foodz.com is a fictitious retailer (check out the schema). We have prepared sample reports and you can try how easy it is to create one yourself. (Read more about our beta.)

Release early, release often

We want to release often. I'm very happy that our users can cooperate with us on Good Data improvements at our GetSatisfaction forums. Please share your ideas, report problems, or just write us what's your feeling about Good Data.

Good Data team is developing according to the Scrum model, and we started another sprint yesterday, so new features are implemented almost every day.

On a personal note, I like musicals. Julie Andrews sings the following lyrics in The Sound of Music:

Let them bring on all their problems
I'll do better than my best
I have confidence they'll put me to the test
But I'll make them see I have confidence in me

I can tell you we'll definitely do better than our best.

False reasons why enterprises aren't interested in SaaS

2008-06-18T03:32:00.003-07:00

According to a Forrester Research survey (source: CIO.com), these are the top reasons to say no to SaaS:

Integration issues.
Total cost of ownership concerns.
Lack of customization.
Security concerns.

I an convinced these reasons are wrong. APIs and microformats speak for better integration. In my experience, TCO is one of the main reasons why companies want to try Good Data platform. Customization depends on application, no matter whether it's SaaS or not. And security? Your data are more secure in a cloud out there than in your own house.

Mike West, VicePresident and Senior Strategy Consultant with Saugatuck Technology, comments the survey:

I hope everyone realizes that Forrester polled only IT managers. [...] SaaS is really primarily a business solution that disintermediates the IT department, shifting workloads to the cloud. If IT is concerned about SaaS -- and Cloud Computing, as well -- it may be because more SaaS means smaller, more management-oriented IT. Defending the IT department's technical turf by resisting the considerable business benefits of SaaS is a disfunctional (but completely understandable) response to this burgeoning phenomenon.

He's very right. And the four reasons aren't reasons why companies are not interested in SaaS. They are the reasons why IT managers are scared of SaaS, scared of change.

New twist on data analysis

2008-06-04T07:26:00.003-07:00

BI failures tend to be at least as spectacular as the successes. Some companies spent the GNP of several small countries a few years back producing "decision support" systems and data warehouses that never matched up with rapidly changing user requirements.

Things have changed. A multitude of products and tools to build BI applications are available today, and their cost is plunging. The whole BI and online analytical processing market changed irrevocably.

BI is one of the fastest growing segments of the software business. The fact that BI vendors are flourishig, despite the distractions and budget drains caused by Y2K preparations -

Stop! Y2K? Well I have something to admit. The previous paragraphs were cited from the Enterprise Development magazine, September 1999.

A lot of interesting stuff is written there: Newest releases appeal to a diverse user base and feature an adaptable architecture for deploying BI solutions. Decision support for the masses, finally. OLAP goes on the Web. Put the spreadsheet out to pasture.

Wayne Eckerson, director of research and services with TDWI, noted that for the past 10 years BI has targeted the technological-savvy employee—the super-user. He pointed to TDWI data showing that a mere 24 percent of users actually access BI tools. "It’s a huge problem [underscoring] why BI is not invasive," Eckerson told the crowd.
However, a common theme projected throughout Information Builders keynotes and sessions is the idea that BI is no longer just a back-office tool.

Lauren McKay: Business Intelligence Comes Out of the Back Office

These words were written today, and you can find the same thoughts in the 9-years-old magazine. The magazine does not exist anymore, Y2K is over, and the BI issues, mmm still the same "new twist", n'est-ce pas?

Don't improve things you're not asked to

2008-06-03T06:09:00.004-07:00

Image by 96dpi via FlickrRecently I worked as a BI consultant for a big bank. I was responsible for their metadata warehouse solution.

We would like to integrate our data dictionary with your solution, they told me.

Data dictionary? I asked and they explained.

Oh I see, I replied, you're talking about business nomenclature. And I explained what business nomenclature means in terms of metadata warehouse, the CWM standard etc.

Then there was a presentation where I explained everything once more. I believed my presentation was quite good but I missed a point. I was strict in using "business nomenclature" because hey, I was right, wasn't I?

I understand you but where is our data dictionary? That was the first question.

So don't try to narrow paths that are given. Especially when you're not asked to do it.

Mark Madsen writes about the same issue although his issue is the ideology of bad non-centralized Excel data in BI:

We're facing the incomplete data problem because of another piece of BI ideology: all the data must be centrally managed. This is unrealistic. We can't possibly house every last bit of data. Because of this reality, BI tools like Business Objects added the ability to bring outside data into reports. Other vendors moved the BI processing to the PC.

Our ideology has failed us by setting up a paradox. If we do use these features or tools, then we contribute to our biggest complaint about Excel — manipulation of data outside the centrally integrated view. If we don’t use them then users will continue to circumvent BI tools.

Mark Madsen: Spreadmarts and the Ideology of BI

Mark is right, people use and will use Excel. Don't try to convince them they're wrong because they are not. Just take it as a fact and build on it. Put the twisting path to use.

Reaching out for good data

2008-06-02T07:23:00.003-07:00

When do you talk about good data? Google returns sentences like these:

"We don't have really good data..."
"Once we have good data..."
"It's hard to make good policy decisions when they're not grounded in good data."
"If you have good data..."
"Do you have good data to validate your opinion?"

These are not positive statements but there's a hope the world will be better (once, if).

There is a difference between good data (data quality) and Good Data BI platform. However, I cannot resist to convert the sentences:

"We don't have really Good Data..."
"Once we have Good Data..."
"It's hard to make good policy decisions when they're not grounded in Good Data."
"If you have Good Data..."
"Do you have Good Data to validate your opinion?"

It makes sense, doesn't it? Well it's not enough to have good data, you need a good analytical tool too.

How to write a good elevator pitch

2008-05-23T15:04:00.004-07:00

I am back from the TechCrunch party and I'm overwhelmed by the crowd. I've met some interesting and smart people like Scott Wheeler from Directed Edge, and many others. I've also met many of my friends, but I already know that they're interesting and smart, so it was no so big surprise.

Anyway, there were seven or eight start-up elevator pitches presented, and I was quite happy to see the presenters well prepared. I hate boring presentations, and believe me, you can get people bored in less than two minutes.

I remember when my friend and I wrote a TV sitcom pitch. It is possible that our sitcom was funny, but the pitch definitely wasn't. We tried so hard to put too much on one page that we lost our main desire: fun. Or pitch failed and so did we.

It is hard to be short. Look at me, this is my forth paragraph, you've already read 158 words, and I haven't tell you anything about writing good elevator pitch yet.

Here it is: Solve my problem.

It's not easy to do, but that's the point. Don't tell me who you are, how many employees you have, don't bother me with your blabla mission. Just tell me you have a solution for my problem.

Do you need to understand your data, do you need to have a report prepared for tomorrow presentation but your IT department cannot help you? We in Good Data can. Yes, it is on-demand, software-as-a-service, collaborative, Ajax, heuristic ETL, automatic, intuitive - but these are only features. Who cares, if it solves your problem?

I believe that when you do something, it solves somebody's problem. Find that somebody, invite her to an elevator, and tell her your solution. If it really solves the problem, you can always present your company later.

TechCrunch meet-up in Prague starts in one hour

2008-05-23T09:05:00.003-07:00

Good Data is proud to be part of it. It's exciting how many people promised to come. I guess there will be so many questions about Good Data, but I would like to be a big ear tonight, to listen what's going on in other heads than mine.

Video kills the rock'n'roll

2008-05-07T04:44:00.000-07:00

I read faster than you talk. This is only one of the reasons I actually don't like video blogspots. I see it more and more often - a video without any added value.

To create a video is a long but funny process. However, the fun is over when you have to watch it. It's a little bit strange - why would anyone spend several hours producing a videospot if writing text is so fast?

To answer it, we have to think about the preparation. To write a text, you have to know how to write, and you have to know your point. It should be the same with audio and video recordings, but it's not.

Today, you don't even need an expensive camcorder to be a video hero. You don't need to have a point, just aim, shoot, cut, and publish. Should we blame the technology for that? Or are we victims of our laziness?

I can work with text. I can easily look at the end of it, to read its conclusion, I can look at the paragraph beginnings only, I can skip boring parts and re-reads the interesting ones, I can highlight them, and save them, and share them.

But I'm not able to work with video in that way. I don't know how much time should I skip to watch something interesting, and I have not even a little intention to watch talking heads for minutes if I can read the same in seconds.

That's why I don't like video and why I don't listen to podcasts (nor audiobooks). I am bored to listen to something I can read easily.

Think before shoot. Is your video necessary? Helpful? Does it really show something that's better watched that described?

If not, please save my time.

Hopelessly devoted to metadata

2008-04-29T14:41:00.002-07:00

I spend this week in Bratislava, leading metadata management training, couching new metadata experts-to-be, and reviewing existing metadata projects. It's all about metadata in data warehouses.

I begin to meta - I say "meta" a hundred times each day. I see metadata everywhere.

I, to begin my third paragraph with this beautiful pronoun, I try to explain the difference between theory and practice. Usually, people and the projects are concerned about the technical side of the metadata issue. However, the technical part is the easier one.

You can find the real problem in business process. That's why most of the metadata projects fail. They can be at very high technical level but without a proper business flow, they're useless.

Everybody wants to buy a metadata solution. These millions should not be invested to software. Invest them to your people.

Looks like I'm not thinking about metadata, am I?

Are you fed up?

2008-04-24T06:06:00.007-07:00

Mark Smith writes:

The current situation should have business mad as hell and fed up. With so much of an organization's IT budget being spent on technology, but the situation in business having gotten a whole lot worse, now what? I would recommend that business either take back control of their BI destiny or just write them off as educational experiments. Another choice is to develop a new strategy built on the demands for information and analytics that might need to completely bypass IT and outsource to a supplier that provides software as a service (SaaS) and just requires data feeds to populate their analytics and BI capabilities.

Mark Smith: Why Business Should Be Mad as Hell at IT
The Intelligent Enterprise Blog

At today's Open Coffee Club, we have talked just about that. The following question emerged: Will IT fight back? Do they feel that SaaS makes them useless and incompetent?

In my opinion, IT departments are not happy about consuming so much time on operations and deployment, and the SaaS concept will force them to focus on the boring stuff more and more.

Poor IT!

Getting Things Lazed

2008-04-23T13:29:00.004-07:00

This method is not as well elaborated as the famous David Allen's Getting Things Done, but it's pretty easier to use.

It borrows the idea of inbox from GTD. With everything that goes to your inbox (like emails), you just have to do a single action. Archive it or delete it or whatever. Hide it all away! It can be a little bit sophisticated like this: You can use Gmail with GTDInbox extension, and mark every message that needs to be replied by "Next Action" label. It disappears and your inbox is always empty.

Mind like water guaranteed.

Sites I'm excited about: Blist, Social|median, Twine

2008-04-22T11:16:00.002-07:00

Blist is a spreadsheet-like database. Imagine your Excel where you can easily include different data types like checkboxes, pull-down lists, even images and documents. You can even have a blist in a blist. Very nice concept. I had some ideas about transforming my boring wine list from Excel to a web application, but I guess I stick to Blist now.

Social|median is in almost-public alpha, enter RWW invitation code provided by ReadWriteWeb to sign up. The site is full of so-called News Networks - imagine topic related RSS aggregations. You can comment on their articles, add new sources, clip new web sites etc. Business intelligence network was created yesterday, it has 8 members, aggregates 10 sources, other 14 sources are recommended automatically by the system.

Twine allows you to blog in a different way, but it's not the only purpose. You can create/join twines (spaces) and clip web sites to them easily. You can twine bookmarks, books, photos, documents, emails... and then tag them and share them. You need an invitation to join Twine, I have some.

So these are the cool sites I'm excited about, because I sign up today. I feel dizzy sometimes: Did I clip this web page to del.icio.us, EverNote, Twine, or Social|Median? Or did I only starred it in Google Reader?

It simply can't work

2008-04-21T02:25:00.004-07:00

Any question or comment? - asked the presenter.

An old man stood up: - It can't work! The whole concept is nonsense, it will be slow, unreliable, nobody will want to use it. Plus, the concept is not new and it does not solve anything that can't be solved by today's standard procedures. It simply can't work.

It happened several years ago at an international conference about databases. The talk was about XML databases.

The presenter smiled at his embittered old friend. - I would like you to remember this conference some 30 years ago. I talked about SQL then and you criticized my talk with the same words as today. I ask you, can SQL work?

The question is not whether it can or cannot work. It is always about you. Do you want it to work?

Too deep in my comfort zone

2008-04-17T06:17:00.002-07:00

London Symphony Orchestra released Mahler's Sixth symphony recently. I have to listen to it again and again. This neurotic and scary recording makes me uncomfortable. It is different from the recordings I know. Gergiev's reading of the symphony is wonderfully tempting.

I feel very good in my comfort zone. I listen to CDs I know, I read blogs I've been reading for years, I buy books written by authors I've read before, I eat meals - you get the point, I guess. It makes my life organized and tidy.

And boring. The bell in my head is ringing: Try something new!

Ok, Japanese fish soup with a complete fish head, Gergiev's Mahler, blog in English. It makes me uncomfortable and I like it.

What a surprise.

On the need for on-demand business intelligence tools

2008-04-16T00:52:00.004-07:00

On-demand BI, let's imagine it! - a friend of mine was excited. - It can be here in a few years!

Well, - I opposed, - it's already here for several years, but the huge companies haven't noticed it yet.

In a huge company like a bank, time is flowing differently. What can be done in hours, it takes weeks there, and nobody is concerned, nobody notices.

A new report? Ok, if you have such an idea, you go to business people, they discuss its business case and prepare its business design. Then it's IT move. The business design is not easy to implement, one has to change this and that, that attribute is not in the data warehouse yet and maybe you need a completely new datamart...

And there you are: Your new report is ready to be used in three or six months. At that time you realize it's not exactly what you need.

Can you be happy with it? Many people in the big companies are, and they are convinced it's the only way how it can work.

It is not. Time is running fast elsewhere.

Changing my job, starting a new blog

2008-04-15T00:38:00.000-07:00

I am not new in blogging. I started to blog in summer 2003. I just moved to Switzerland at that time and I was there alone, without my friends, without my family, without my girlfriend, without my cat. So I started to blog to be in touch with them, the cat included.

By now, I have ten blogs plus five others that are dead. None of them is in English. However, I'm changing my job, and that's a great opportunity to start blogging in English.