Practical Business Intelligence

I recently had the chance to sit down with Shawn Blevins who presented for SAP BusinessObjects at the ITA BI Roundtable in September. We called it the BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match.

Here’s what we talked about, with my commentary added …

Background

Jeff: Tell me a little about yourself, your background.

Shawn: I started out by having my own consulting company called IntelliThought in Tennessee. We had a tremendous SQL install for Eastmen Chemical and moved them off of AIX over to DB2. From there, I went over to Accenture for about 18 months but then Microsoft came calling. I was at Microsoft for almost five years as a SQL Server technology specialist when I started. I left to go over to the management side and started the solutions specialist community which was designed to build solutions using SQL Server as well as the other Microsoft products. A lot of BI solutions, a lot of business decision support systems. Then I went to Oracle and ran the application server sales group. It was BI solution building work under global sale services. I talk a lot about build-based BI systems, because I think that’s the mindset of the world when you’ve grown up with Microsoft and Oracle.

When I came to SAP, I began working on the BusinessObjects acquisition. We [at SAP] realized they were a vendor that truly had an end-to-end, productized, standardized platform that matched SAP’s productized ERP solution. It became evident to us what we needed to do–to get out of the BI tool business and buy someone that could provide full top-to-bottom standardization, metadata, and master data … to have them consume the key metrics out of our ERP platform and make them available to our customers. We’re not trying to buy additional vendors. We believe in a complementary partner approach. We made the announcement so we weren’t going to disrupt BusinessObjects or force any SAP technology in there.

So, I’ve come full circle from building it to making money on building it as a consultant to selling the vision “if you buy these tools, learn them, and build a lot of complex pieces, then eventually you’ll have a data warehouse” to where I’m at now. I’ve evolved to a focus on business execution instead of having to wait for execution while you go down into the IT/technical weeds and build a bunch of software. Using a platform like BusinessObjects, you can depend on a robust, full-featured reporting solution delivered by a company that sells the solution and its configuration and discussion of what’s the best way to implement the solution, rather than a toolbox you have to invest a bunch of additional work into.

Jeff’s Commentary: Even from my first impressions of / interaction with Shawn, it was clear to me that he was A) very experienced, B) very knowledgeable, and C) very charismatic. He certainly livened up the Grudge Match, and clearly brings a lot of enthusiasm to whatever he does. Shawn’s brief introduction of his career demonstrates that this is not his first bar-b-que. He’s worked for a number of big shops, been exposed to several competing philosophies in the sale and delivery of BI tools. And he’s implemented solutions for large and small companies in lots of contexts. This makes him an ideal candidate to have an opinion on where BI is going and on how to appropriately approach complex BI initiatives. I was eager to get his thoughts in this brief interview. For more about Shawn’s background, check him out on LinkedIn.

Considerations Before Launching a BI Initiative

Jeff: What is the number-one thing companies should consider before launching a BI initiative?

Shawn: The first thing is you need to do some CSI forensics. Sometimes BI can be a little like Monty Python and the Holy Grail … a lot of crusades, but what really became of all of it? What separates a successful, game-changing BI project or a BI initiative from the 647 that happened before? In my experience it comes down to two or three things. First, it comes down to integrity–not just of the products or approach or planning, but the integrity of the people that hold themselves to a certain level of commitment and excellence. Once that integrity begins to change into taste or a favorite tool, product or vendor, you’ve lost your integrity, and your initiative will begin to slide. You need to think about your CFO standing in front of your shareholders or a bunch of financial analysts, or even worse, standing in court having to explain why he missed his forecast or why information got out from under the business or why there wasn’t governance that prevented the fraud or misuse of customer information. Those are the kinds of things that override taste or preference or religion or background.

Most BI project initiatives need to be thinking like a CFO or a board member with the end in mind from the very beginning … putting the right outcomes out there at the onset of the project. This is because BI projects, more than any other projects, really play in to IT’s need to be cool and IT’s need to craft and build complex things. The key is to move from being an engineer (building things) to being more a strategic business leader (driving value). Think of it in terms of instead of being a field commander or somebody who crafts villages, you need to think of it like a Macarthur or general who says, “Where are we trying to go? What market share are we trying to take? In what ways can I empower this business to grow and acquire and merge?” To build those kinds of thoughts is what makes a BI project truly strategic. It also improves careers. But if you take the other approach–the “build something really cool” approach–then you’re quickly down to the weeds comparing vendor A and B and it becomes a game of taste.

Jeff’s Commentary: First, I’m impressed about Shawn’s ability to weave a Python reference into the interview. Second, I couldn’t agree more with him on the content of his response. He uses words like “commitment” and “integrity” to describe the building blocks necessary for a successful BI initiative, where I use words like “intentionality” and “discipline.” At the end of the day, we’re talking about the same thing: It’s not necessarily about the product; it’s about the people, processes, policies, standards, data involved. All these things require integrity–Shawn’s word–if you’re going to be successful.

His point about alignment between the Business and IT is also crucial. The days of business guys being ignorant to technology and having it work like magic are over. So are the days when the IT guys didn’t need to understand and speak the language of the business. Successful BI requires a close partnership between business and technology leaders, including technologists who can imagine themselves in the shoes of the CFO in Shawn’s proverbial board meeting.

Most Common Mistake

Jeff: What is the most common mistake you encounter in a company’s thinking when approaching BI?

Shawn: It’s the idea that we’re one interface away from greatness, or that we’re one data schema away from greatness, or that we’re going to build something amazing that’s going to achieve greatness. Or, perhaps thinking that your company has very unique needs. This betrays that you don’t really understand business, especially the competition, works.

The fact is if you go into anyone’s kitchen and you open the utensil drawer there’s going to be a knife, a fork, a spoon, etc, because that’s what we all eat with. Maybe there’s a chopstick in a few of them, but the key is that you can use common tools and eat just about any kind of food. So people need to standardize tools and then they can think about what kinds of food their customer eats. Whether you’re buying your food at the market or growing it yourself, regardless of sourcing, you need to think about the delivery. The same is true of technology. You need a standardized way of delivering data, because it’s the standardization that drives adoption and use. It’s not how cool you are or how in depth or complex the data models need to be.

The reason Excel is everywhere is because people know how to use it. Even though there may be a million sources behind it people dump it all in a spreadsheet and manipulate it themselves. The way you stop that is … you don’t stop that. You give them better and richer tools and make them more independent and self-servicing so they can continue to do what they were doing but in a way that doesn’t break or isn’t stringently tied to standardized data models or data schemas. You have to empower them, but empower them in a standardized, easy to use way. If you miss that, or if you think you’re going to create or craft something new and unique, then what you’ve effectively done at that point is cut off the end user’s ability to act. They have to learn what’s in your mind and how you built the data model or how you built the system. So use a knife or fork and spoon and concentrate on a consistent, standardized way to deliver it.

Jeff’s Commentary: This section is also basically focused on not getting the cart before the horse. BI is not a technology, it’s a disciplined approach to data. I love his “one interface away from greatness.” There are lots of companies out there that believe they’re one tech purchase away from perfect efficiency and data-driven clairvoyance. That’s a lie, plain and simple, and I love that Shawn calls it out.

I would also add to Shawn’s call for standardization – a call for simplicity. Enter one of my mantras: If your BI report or dashboard is not mind-numbingly intuitive, then it will not reach its potential.

Future of Business Intelligence

Jeff: What’s the big thing to look out for in the BI space in the next 5 years?

Shawn: The first thing is that you should be thinking about inter-business BI. This is a whole new market. What I mean is that you have tools in your company for reporting and forecasting and I have tools in my company for reporting and forecasting, but we need to think more like Microsoft and Wal-Mart. For example, the Wal-Mart model is: “I (Wal-Mart) will guarantee that I’ll buy these widgets from you (mom-and-pop widget manufacturer) at a nickel a piece, but you have to: a) make five million of them, and b) you have to have them here by Tuesday. If you do all that, I’ll buy them for a nickel a piece.”

Imagine if that model went across all business and we all agreed to that you’ll ship these in 2.5 days and you’ll do it in less than six minutes to pack and ship. If there was some way to sit in the middle and have a reporting tool and a forecasting tool that managed SLAs to contracts and agreements between companies, it would be amazingly valuable. You’re going to see a standardization in that SLA-type KPI reporting between multiple business entities. The first vendor who can say from the perspective of the cloud that the two companies have these expectations and are performing these KPI’s against a set of inter-company SLAs, will rule the field. That’s where you’re going to see the BI industry going.

Jeff’s Commentary: I think Shawn’s insight here is very good. I’m also seeing calls for truly federated data warehouse models, and these are far less standardized or vetted than traditional models. Data governance, master data strategies, data warehouse architectures, and much more will ultimately have to evolve to support multiple, distributed businesses working together.

Closing Statements

Jeff: Would you like to make any kind of closing statement?

Shawn: I want everyone to know I am incredibly impressed with both the people involved at Capstone and folks from the ITA. I’m impressed with the focus and intensity you guys put toward this. This is the right pursuit, this is the right conversation because IT itself is changing. There’s a great movie called Tucker and it has Jeff Bridges in it, where he’s a guy in a garage who built a Tucker automobile. Now you cut to the big three automakers but they are now struggling because Toyota and Honda are killing them. They’re not struggling because they don’t make good cars but the perception is if you want standardized, reliable quality, you want a Toyota or a Lexus. They’re struggling because of the perception of complexity and the risk of not knowing what you’re doing. Similarly, there’s a shift happening in IT quality. The people in the room that are asking hard questions are focused on that shift and what’s the right thing to do for their company.

Jeff’s Commentary: Thank you so much to Shawn for his kind words and for being willing to chat with me on the record. I appreciated his passion and insight both at the Grudge Match and afterwards in this interview.