Project X Discussions

Personal Performance

I was pondering this week about balanced scorecards as a way to measure personal performance.  Michael when we worked together long ago took me through a balanced scorecard process to help me evaluate my performance for all the roles I take on.  These were not just about work, actually it oftened seemed to be more about everything but work.

In thinking of this I realized that it was time to get a refresher on all the items and the process to ensure I am not cheating myself.  So I have asked Michael to work with me again to help me refresh the process to ensure that I can give this the proper approach.

I think that in so doing work will be better, but more importantly I will se how I balance off the other roles I play like: Dad, son, husband, friend, uncle, member of the community, employee, employer, and the list goes on.

A great opportunity for introspection.

Data Can be Frustrating

Yesterday was very frustrating for me.  Once the day ended last night I tried to understand why.  I realized part of it was I was dealing with bad data.

Not bad data in the sense of EDW and BI, but the Metadata or context around some work we are doing and are having challenges with.  The reason I decided to call it a metadata issue was that a bunch of us could talk about the issues, but none of us had the same story or answer.  This is very similar to a datawarehousing project where we will have data, but not context and spin our wheels as we start to consume the data for our uses and hopefully action.

I found in the past that if you get some good context to the data then coming up with the actions to resolve the issue are simpler to work on.  So sometimes it is worth the time to call and discuss and when you do look for the context and capture the metadata

Data Governance Part 7 Data Stewardship

One of the key ingredients in data governance is the concept of data stewardship.  Every project should be familiar with the concept and introduce the concept on all their projects very early.  I think it is a great way to get started on data governance and will get great support from the business owners of the data. 

I must give Robert Seiner some credit for these ideas because has written some excellent material on this subject.  You can see his work at www.tdan.com

Data Stewardship is the formalization of accountability for the management of data resources.

I have asked several people on various projects recently if they knew who the owner of various data resources was on their projects and with a little thought each one said yes.  These people are the informal data stewards and our thesis is that they should be recognized formally and explained their role.  A role they are already fulfilling on an informal basis.

The next step is to create metadata for the data steward which contains the names of the stewards and the data they steward.  Seiner calls this the Stewardship Repository.  In addition the responsibility should be written in their job description.  This action simply formalizes an activity they already do.

The great news is that we now know the answer to the question "Who owns the data?"  We then know who to go to if we have questions about the data and its status.  I bet everybody in the data warehousing business would welcome a place to go to find out who owns what data. 

My suggestions is that early on in every project the Business Analyst be assigned the responsibility of adding to the Stewardship Repository.  I am sure its existence would save the Business Analysts a significant of time.

This is the first step in data stewardship but a really important and relatively simple step.  I invite your comments. 

Collaboration is More Than Just Talk

As most of you who follow our blog know, Project X's RapidBI Approach and Platform is linked and depends very much on Agile Development and Real Collaboration.

The challenge with the word collaboration is that often it is just talk.  I have had the opportunity to work with someone who knew how to collaborate.  He is also a Lean Six Sigma guy and that doesn't hurt either.  It was a real pleasure.  We had some bumps coming up with common frameworks, we are both type A personalities and that was often fun.

But after about 1 week I really felt he was a collaborative partner.  We got to a comfort level I felt that allowed for often open or frank discussion that hopefully he would agree that neither of us used to our advantage when things got tough.

Exit that phase in the project/program and we had new people come in.  Sadly we can not get past the 'Just Talk' phase of collaboration.  This is tell me what I need to do, I will do it and then throw whatever back at you.  Sadly not even jumping back onto our collaboration platform helped us break through.  I just did an audit of the collaboration environment and there is nothing there.

Funny how we are spinning.  Less talk, Way less oversight meetings and lets get together and do it.

How to Motivate People -- Help

How can I get people to enter their golf scores into the handicap system?  I just read Drive by Dan Pink and would like to apply the ideas of Motivation 3.0 to my problem.  I would like this to be the beginning of a discussion about motivation.  Please comment.

Pink says only intrinsic motivation works for complex tasks and I guess entering golf scores must fall into that category.  The key to intrinsic motivation according to Pink are autonomy, mastery and purpose.  So let's see how I can apply the principle to entering golf scores.

Let me give a little background for non-golfers.  In order for people of different abilities to compete against other, golf has a system that takes your scores and creates a number that you subtract from your score so that on average you all will shot the same score.  So a poorer golfer having a good day will beat a god golfer having a bad day.  The system works if everybody enters their scores into the handicap computer.

There seems to tow kinds of people who do not put their scores in the computer.  People who want to have a low handicap and do not put in bad scores and people who want to have a high handicap so do not put in low scores.  The other group may be just lazy and "forget" to put in scores.  External penalties do not work for any length of time and require a lot of work so I want to find another way.

I think I will give them autonomy by telling them it is their choice to enter scores and they can decide if the want to play by the rules in this game that depends on peoples honor.  I will explain the purpose of the handicap system and the concept of making competition between players of unequal ability fair.  Then explain that a measure of their mastery of the game is their handicap, not individual scores.  If they are not putting in all their scores they are not honestly measuring their level of mastery. 

The other purpose that I can present is being fair to their team mates and competitors.

I think that covers the principles that Pink present.  If you want to read more about Drive and Motivation 3.0, see http://www.danpink.com/drive

I would like some reaction to my dilemma and thoughts.

Data Governance Part 6 The Role of IT

I would like to discuss now the role of the IT folks in the data governance process.  In my previous blogs, I have emphasized how important it is that the process be business led.  However the IT folks have a very important role in data governance.  The role is to provide assistance and support in implementing the decision of the governing body.  In addition the IT folks have a responsibility to raise issues that require decisions.

One of the key responsibilities of the IT folks and the business is to maintain an open dialog on issues.  The challenge for the IT folks is to express the issues in plain language as opposed to talking to IT speak.  IT folks have a great tendency to talk in slang and short forms because they get tired of repeating the same words over and over again.  I think it is the responsibility of the business people to call them on this whenever it is used. 

In addition to the obvious reason of understanding each other, sometimes the IT folks often do not know the meanings of some of the terms they use.  Another thing is that some words lose their meaning through overuse.  For example, the word "system" really does not have a very specific meaning any more.  Let me give you other examples: program, software, web 1.0, web 2.0, SOA, and on and on.  However often the business people do the same thing.  Some of the worst offender are the defense, the aerospace and telecommunication industries.  These groups use so many short forms one would swear they are speaking another language. 

I am emphasizing this understanding as being important because I think it is key for effective data governance.   I will continue developing ideas on governance in future blogs. 

Productivity, Bandwidth and Social Media

I had a fun conversation on Sunday night with a business owner who was lamenting over people spending their day on Facebook and other social media venues.  He felt he had a big enough issue that he spent some money on a firewall to stop people from accessing it.

As we chatted, I realized based on some work Michael had done at a client (I asked some good probing questions), that this was just as much about bandwidth utilization as productivity.  As we talked I highlighted:

1. In today's world, people will move to smartphones if they want to really get on facebook
2. In some cases, if you see someone having facebook open all day, does not mean they are on it all day.  Often, the next generation uses this like I use email/outlook.  So not necessarily a good measurement.
3. Productivity is often abused, and social media is just the next tool to give people the opportunity.
4. Bandwidth utilization can mean that instead of stopping it, move it to a low cost, low bandwidth pipe and off the corporate communication network.

It was funny though, with all the conversation, he never thought about leveraging this interest in the social media to take it as an opportunity for his business.  He is a prime, customer facing organization that probably spends a good amount of money on print and nothing online.  He has some people in his office that understand part of the paradigm, now harness it.

Man it was a fun conversation.

A Business Intelligence Look at What Pharma is Doing with IT

 I wrote last week about business intelligence and it's application within the pharmaceutical vertical based on an article I'd read.  In my post I talked about

...pharmaceutical companies to get value from all that data, there needs to be a robust business intelligence layer that sits atop a very robust enterprise data warehouse (EDW) infrastructure....

What is important to add is that while our approach at Project X allows for companies to effectively overcome the pitfalls and realize value, there is an important nuance to take away from that statement.  The word is used is effectively.  I didn't use the word easily.  That is an important difference.  While it seems straightforward, the execution of a BI initiative needs to be managed effectively.  It isn't always easy.  It takes purposeful approaches within governance, requirements capturing, design, development, testing and deployment.  The shifting, exploratory nature of BI initiatives can easily through a project team into "spin-mode" and cause the project to enter a cycle of de-scoping & disappointment.  By partnering for an organization that employs an agile "sprint-like" approach, companies within the pharmaceutical vertical will be able to transform their data and then "they can then move on to insight."

To read my original post, feel free to click here.

Words in Context

As those who know me know, I am a great believer in power words.  But even a power word out of context is pretty useless and sometimes can be antagonizing.  I was reminded of the importance of this sort of context yesterday when dealing with a bullying incident at my son's school.

When talking to the participants in the incident at hand it was very interesting to see the context and nature of the impact the conversations that happened.  Here are my observations:

1. All the kids stories aligned - though each had gaps in what they saw happening
2. The kids took away Ownership of the situation - though the situation was complex, somewhere in the questions or educating the school did, the kids took away that they were culpable in the situation.
3. As a parent talking to your own kid does not give you the correct picture due to the words they will use to describe the situation.

All this is to say that often, kids will grab onto parts that they choose to capture, or clearly words with strong association, but often those words without context can not be understood outside of this circle.

Microstrategy Security - Part 1

There have been a lot of questions to me around what kind of security can be set in MicroStrategy.  One of the most requested is allowing access to certain users to specific reports.  The answer is Yes we can limit access to reports based on user/user groups.  The type of user/license also will determine access to objects.  For example if I have an Architect license in development I can modify all Schema as well as Application objects.  If the license is a desktop developer license they would not have access to change Schema objects.

My experience is more around setting up security at the user and application layer.  Security filters and access list allow the users to view the data they are authorized to review and at a specific level.

I looked on the MicroStrategy site to see if they had any good information on security.  Its high level but explains the different levels:

There are four main architectural layers that must be completely secure: user layer, transmission layer, application layer and data layer.

• User layer: Users must be authenticated and authorized to access data.
• Transmission layer: Data transmission must be secured and hacker-proof.
• Application layer: Only appropriate application functionality should be provided to users with associated privileges.
• Data layer: Users must have access only to data for which they have appropriate privileges.

MicroStrategy's security architecture implements tight security at every layer.

Robust Security Functionality: To ensure robust security, MicroStrategy implements industry-leading security measures at every layer of the architecture.

Some examples for each layer include:

• User layer: integration with NT and LDAP security.
• Transmission layer: 128-bit SSL transmission, 128-bit encryption of data, multiple firewall (DMZ) configuration with no database connection on web server.
• Application layer: 3-tier security system encompassing privileges, access control and security profiles.
• Data layer: security filters and database views, revolutionary connection mapping."

My experience is more around setting up security at the user and application layer.  Security filters and access list allow the users to view the data they are authorized to review and at a specific level.