BIG DATA - The Killer-App for Motor Dealerships

BIG DATA is a big topic at the moment in IT... and that interest is gradually working its way down the corridor to the marketing office and the boardroom.

In the Motor Retail industry new IT innovations emerge somewhat slower than other verticals because many dealers rely on partner suppliers to manage their IT.  This creates a bit of a lag in adoption of new technologies.

I doubt it will be long however before the topic of BIG DATA filters into motor dealerships because the competitive advantage it brings is compelling.  Another reason why BIG DATA technologies are likely to take off so fast in this market is because there is pent up demand in dealerships to 'get moving' with innovation.  Many of the Dealer Management Systems employed today are WAY behind the curve on technology - some are not even based on web technologies.  The fragmented information environments that dealers have to cope with day to day are embarrassing to anyone in the computer industry (on behalf of all us nerds in the software in 'sorry guys').

At NDMC we're leading the charge to introduce BIG DATA solutions into the Motor Industry and the level of interest and take-up has been rather overwhelming.  In this presentation I've provided a short summary of the role and impact of BIG DATA for anyone who's yet to encounter the technology.

I hope you find it informative and a little fun! I.

BIG DATA - The Killer App for Motor Dealers from Ian Tomlin

What Are Actionable Insights?

This What are Actionable Insights? article introduces my presentation on 'Actionable Insights'.  In it I describe what Actionable Insights are and their relationship to the world of Business Intelligence technology.
You can go straight to the presentation itself on http://www.slideshare.net/ictomlin/what-are-actionable-insights..and if you'd like the PowerPoint original just reach out to me on LinkedIn!

Understanding what Actionable Insights are and their contribution to business growth is something I’ve always been interested in.  Having produced a couple of posts on the subject I’ve had such a high level of interest in the topic that I’ve produced this simple presentation that hopefully demystifies the topic to newcomers and non-technical folk.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE has been around for many years now and yet I still attend meetings where people don’t really understand what it does to help them to grow their business or get their job done better.  And that’s not surprising.  It’s such a broad topic and BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE doesn’t do just one thing.  I find it much easier to break down BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE into the various capability areas it covers.

OPERATIONAL ANALYTICS is one facet of BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE – but it’s growing in importance because of the level of interest and opportunity that’s been surfaced by BIG DATA and CLOUD COMPUTING.  I think people will automatically assume that you need new software for operational analytics but even a spreadsheet can be used to source Actionable Insights: The secret is to focus on the business outcome, not the tools (quite so much;-).

I.

The Four Sides Of Business Intelligence

Technology folk sometimes talk about Business Intelligence as if it were a single ‘thing’ that works like a silver-bullet to solve all of the analysis woes of a business.  This can turn business professionals off.  People generally want to know of any technology ‘How will it help to get my job done better?’  

The challenge with BI is that it isn’t doing ONE thing – so it can help to break down this blob of technology into its capability areas rather than seeing it as a single lump of techno stuff. Whilst I’m no expert in IT architectures I have been involved in the sourcing and application of business insights for many years and in my experience the role of BI falls quite neatly into four capability areas that DO make sense to business people once explained. 

These are: 

• Operational Analytics and Delivery of Daily Operating Control Insights - Most businesses (I can’t think of any that don’t) have some form of economic engine that turns ‘what they produce into cash’ – whether it’s seats, units, licenses or transactions. Any good business wants to make sure its managers are on the ball and know how things are going on a near-real-time basis.  These insights are sometimes better served in alerts, notifications, scorecards and charts rather than tabular reports where the data may be more difficult to interpret.  In this area there is a distinct blur between operational reporting and BI but that’s not a problem so long as people know what the purpose of the technology is.  Traditional perspectives on what BI technology does lean towards the use of OLAP cubes and huge data pre-processing engines but more recently, in-memory processing and tools like Encanvas BusinessIntel and Qlikview make it possible for users of BI to source the answers to their operational analytical questions without needing to go to the trouble of investing in a pre-processing platform.  Instead such tools use clever middle-ware and data mashup capabilities to bring together new data views as they are needed.  The benefit of this approach is that it cuts many thousands of dollars from BI investments because users are better able to serve themselves with the views of operational data they need.  It normally means that you don’t need a BI department to access the capabilities of BI. 

• Delivery of Actionable Insights – This is the science of find answers to questions that aren’t presently known by decision makers because they don’t know to ask – but if they did know to ask they’d be able to use these insights to intervene in processes to make them work better. (get it?).  A good example of actionable insights comes from geo-mapping of customer data.  It would be weird for a marketing exec to invest marketing dollars answering the question ‘How many of our customers (and what type) are clustered around our local town?’ if there were no reason to believe the answer to such a question could increase new business opportunities or substantially quality of customer service leading to higher retention.  Nevertheless, if a marketing exec were able to analyze their data geo-spatially they might find there are clusters of customers of a particular persona or income profile in a specific locality.  This could make it appealing to introduce campaigns in this specific area rather than a broader region – making the marketing dollars go further. 

• Enterprise Performance Strategy Insights – Business Intelligence tooling plays a key role in large organizations by helping executives to formalize their business strategy to then report on their progress towards achievement of stated objectives.  You would be amazed how many actions are performed by an enterprise that don’t contribute to the small list of objectives they need to concentrate on.  Many of the original BI platform providers placed this capability as a point of focus and embedded good practice methodologies for articulating and communicating strategy like Balanced Scorecard strategy maps and scorecard views into their offerings.  The purpose of performance management strategy BI tools is to make it possible for all areas of the enterprise to embed performance management thinking and behaviours into the day-job rather than seeing ‘strategy’ as something that happens in the management off-siter meeting.

• Community Learning Insights – The most recent change I’ve seen in the BI biosphere is the introduction of socially oriented insight tools that encourage the harvesting of insights from a community that become the first step on a new journey of discovery.  For example, contributory businesses to the supply-chain of many industries like healthcare, policing, insurance and transportation find they are now unable to discharge their optimal customer and stakeholder value without the contributions of other partnering organizations.  Consider for example the role of Traffic Managers in the UK who are responsible for managing the road network of their region.  Unless they work with road works undertakers (such as utilities companies), major logistics companies (like the big supermarkets) and their neighbouring councils, they are unable to keep the traffic flowing because each contributor can make their life more or less painful depending on how they operate.  Understanding the ecosystem and value dependencies of an industry can help all parties to manage and pool their resources in better ways.  But the starting point for cooperation and re-alignment of resourcing approaches is the fundamental capture of community learning insights.  The difficulty of making such a project work is that cooperation and goodwill becomes a critical success factor and rarely in business is this a given unless stakeholders are aware of the return they will get for their contributions.  This can create chicken and egg dilemmas that are difficult to overcome. 

Fortunately, the new business intelligence tool-kits appearing on the market reduce the time-to-value of business intelligence projects so that less has to be invested prior to the ROI of rewards being qualified. Which of the above capabilities of BI offers the best ROI?  That’s very difficult to answer.  Each one of the capability areas can produce great results and give high returns but much depends on the specifics. Community learning insight projects are without a doubt harder to kick-off and there are wider political/social challenges to overcome. Operational analytics projects are easier to impress folk because the data they surface is already known to some extent and the role of BI can be to make this data more palatable – but project leads may well be presented with barriers to change because people feel they can already do what BI can offer (until they see the power of the insights!!). For organizations that haven’t previously been able to formalize and articulate their strategy, and measure their progress towards it, can find enterprise performance strategy insights deliver a major transformation in operational effectiveness. I find the most exciting area of BI is the sourcing and delivery of actionable insights because it always provides hope that executives will originate a game-changing idea, a new question or a new answer.  Honestly though, it’s without doubt the most difficult area of BI when it comes to evidencing ROI.  

How do you convince business leaders to invest in the hope that they might come across a game-changing ‘something’?  For this reason, it makes sense to harvest value from all four sides of BI when building a business case. I hope you found this article useful.  Let me know if you do ;-)

Is your business intelligence 'active'?

Business Intelligence has been around for decades but it's role is constantly evolving.  At one time the production of a scorecard or set of traffic lights was enough to excite senior managers starved of data analytics.  Increasingly the scope of Business Intelligence has moved towards real-time delivery of fine-grained operational analytics where the production of newsworthy content has become embedded into the operational systems that serves the source data up.

The activity of taking data from multiple sources and building a new suite of 'data cubes' is gradually being overshadowed by BIG DATA possibilities to harvest data on the fly and provide much richer, much more useful insights because the content is fresher and users have more versatile and intuitive tools to ask the questions THEY want to ask - instead of being served up preset report views.

In the last few years we have seen SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE becoming vogue as senior managers seek to socialize performance analysis and reporting; and have more middle-managers, industry partners and members of staff benefit from business performance and activity insights.  This has been encouraged by mobile working and mobile devices that make business intelligence tools more accessible no-matter where people work.

There is another stage on the evolution of BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE that's emerging.  Business managers are coming to realize that 'knowing what you already know' and fashioning it into pretty dashboards isn't the greatest use of BI technology.  What really makes a difference is when managers can answer NEW QUESTIONS and even CREATE QUESTIONS.  But what good is that if you don't have the means to ACT on your learning?  All too frequently, the lessons learned from Business Intelligence result in more additions to the long-tail of demand for new or enhanced applications that can be used to support improved processes, or completely new methods, platforms and processes required to support growth initiatives.

This is where platforms like Encanvas, Spotfire, Jackbe and Outlooksoft really excel becuase they provide companies with federated BI together with the tools to build or improve information systems to meet changing requirements for information.  Few processes thrive without IT to support them these days - and that means no BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE system is complete without the wherewithal to ADAPT information systems as the result of the learning phase.

I think in the next decade we're going to see data visualization tools that are characterized as 'BI' becoming shelf-ware unless they start to embrace the capabilities of agile platforms to build and shape information systems in support of the long-tail of applications demand in the enterprise (and beyond it) without the frictional costs of IT that buyers have to live with today.

I.