1. Business Intelligence as defined by the IT world is about process and data not about using the data to drive business value.
2. Business Analytics is and should be happening in the business units. It is the business owners who are using the data to drive decisions.  Current BI solutions are backward looking, take too long, and cost too much for what they provide.
3. There is a need to bring real analytics (Statistics, what if analysis and other forward thinking methods) into the business. Tools that enable data visualization and statistical analysis are needed.
4. Finally data warehouses will never house all the data needed for analysis.

This resonates with my experience. “Data” needs to be evaluated and presented with a business focus and a particular question.  A summary of the business presented by a sales organization might look differently than one presented by the finance group. This will be the result of different goals and control over different aspects of the business. In order for the Data Scientist (or Data Wizard) to be effective they need to understand the business well enough to know why questions are being asked and to be able to challenge both the  person asking the questions and the data.  An IT organization that is separate from the business might have wonderful technical skills but they will not be close enough to the business to add value.

What has your experience been? Are you part of the BI world or the Business Analytics community? Do you think there is a difference?

I can;

• Listen to your pain (though that is not my strength)
• Help you brain storm new ideas.
• Introduce you to lots of people, but you need to know who you want to meet by industry, company, or profession.
• Send you job descriptions if I know what you are looking for.
• Offer to hold you accountable to your search.
• Give you chocolate.

Networking is about giving and taking. It makes people feel great to give to others, I feel wonderful when I help someone get an interview, or find a job.   My network has helped me find all of my jobs. I want to help you find yours.

Please always have an “Ask”, it will make your networking more effective and it will make the people who want to help you feel better.

Most of us are familiar with SMART goals, ones that are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timely.   I could have a goal to bike 1000 miles in the next 100 days. Or reduce risk at work by reducing the number of out of spec components through a process.  This system works very well if you already know your high level goals, are you trying to get in shape, drive manufacturing quality. Often though our high level goals are not thought through and our metrics work against us.

To use exercise as an example, if my goal is to improve over all health and wellness but I only track miles run then I won’t value and do stretching, yoga, weight lifting or other exercise that I need. I might even go to the extreme of injuring myself trying to run 10 miles a day and then fall off the wagon all together. Make sure you know what is important to you and measure that.  Before setting a goal to exercise, understand what your want out of it. Are you training for a triathlon, or trying to develop a new habit, or need time to get away from stress and re-focus? Do you have a bunch of books on tape that you want to “read” while working out?

Understand your motivation and then pick a metric. If I am training for an event then the goal needs to be distance,  time and type of exercises so that I am ready for my event. If the motivation is to build a habit then what I do is less important than doing something every day.  If stress reduction is the goal then maybe weight lifting and yoga are more “valuable” than running/biking.

Don’t use other people’s motivations/ metrics to judge your goals.  If you understand the outcome that you want you are much more likely to get there and your metric system will help you. If you just simply build SMART metrics without the big picture you will be very busy but you might not get where you need to go.

1. Learn how to ask for things that people can say yes to.

Your best friend and or family member cannot get you a job, or he/she would have already. This means that you will be networking and getting help from people who don’t know you well. Not a problem, everyone wants to help. If you can ask them for something that they can say yes to, they will. Don’t ask for a job, they can’t help you and you make them bad when they need to say no. The ladders ran a great piece on this. (http://technology.theladders.com/career-newsletters/Ask-for-Reference)

2. Know what you want and ask for it.

Sean Harry (http://careeradvice4u.com/) reminded me that a good elevator speech always ends with a request. Ask the person you are talking to who they know, or which companies are they familiar with, or what networking groups they go to. If you ask focused questions you will get answers. This works in sales as well.

For one week try adding a short line to your elevator speech asking for something tangible. For example “I am looking for introductions into the energy efficiency space, do you know anyone at ECOs or Cadmus?” This requires knowing what you need help with and being focused.

3. Get focused and get branded.

Figure out who you are, what you do, and what you have to offer. Then brand yourself.  If you don’t know who or what you are how can you expect others to help you.  It took my way too long this year to brand myself as the “Data Wizard with Personality”. Is it perfect, no but it starts conversations. Branding is used to get the attention of your target audience so that you can have a conversation.

4. Web 2.0 is here to stay.

Learn how to use Linked-in, build a web presence. It will support your brand. Joshua Waldman (careerenlightenment.net) has some good videos on using linkedin and other social media tools.

5. Get help.

Humans are heard animals and we like to work with other people. Find a career coach, build a mastermind team, or an accountability partner. I my case I have done all three at least once. A good coach will help you stay focused and on task.  Mastermind teams and accountability partners work well if you put the effort into them. Find people to work and share ideas with.

All of this comes back to understanding how you add value and then “selling” that to a future employer or client.  Use social media, linked-in and your face to face networking to support your brand.

Good luck and have a wonderful 2010.

Marketing and using e-mail applies to more than just large retail chains. For small business owners often an e-mail marketing campaign is inexpensive and relatively easy to set up.

This technique also works well for someone building and maintaining a network. When you meet someone new that you want to stay in contact with, send them a hello, nice to meet you e-mail.  For your list of A-contacts, find articles, or other items of interest to send them regularly.  If service providers find that regular e-mails that respond to triggers help them, then it holds true for networking. Just follow the “spam” guidelines, make your e-mail useful to the person getting it, and always send thank-you notes.

Have you used e-mail to keep in touch with your network? What works for you? Do you use e-mailing tools and or track information off your website?   Do you take this one step further and send snail-mail instead of e-mail? Do you use both?

The upshot of the paper is that when faced with different reference points an often simple problem can become impossible. Think about projects at work that failed because you could not get buy-in from key players.  The other argument made is that knowledge jobs are often wicked problems and the stakeholders in knowledge jobs cause problems to be wicked.

Have you read the paper? Do you work on wicked problems?  What has worked for you?

The ABPMP  (Association of business process management professionals) has a local chapter and I am working on the program schedule for this year.  I want to know what you are doing? What help you want? What would make you take a few hours out of your month to attend a meeting?  How can we add value to you?

Some ideas. Build a community of practice (similar to what we were doing last year) and have local companies present case studies.  Meet for breakfast or lunch and do a round table discussion on issues, sharing ideas etc. Bring in really cool national speakers to tell us what the rest of the world is doing.

Please share, if you want to respond privately send e-mail to nechamakatan@gmail.com

It would be almost impossible not to notice the attention that twitter and other social media tools have been getting in the last week.  The fall out of the Iranian election has changed the way I look at these tools.

Yes, text-ing was important after the SE Asia, Tsunami because it was an effective way to communicate with other tools were down.

Twitter appears to be changing reporting rules and more importantly for this blog providing a leadership tool. The mainstream press is not quite sure how to deal with “amateur” news reporters and unconfirmed reports. They have valid concerns but in this situation they can’t do anything about it. Iran has shut down the mainstream press, simply by “refusing to guarantee their safety”. Iran has not yet shut down the internet, though it is trying to control it. Twitter, it turns out, is rather hard to censor.

Obama used social networking as a tool in his election. The Iranian opposition appears to have found a way to use social networking to drive a revolution.

So… Twitter is a leadership tool?  How do you use it to lead? Can you use it to change how you do business?

What lessons should the  western /”modern” world learn here?  Is social media a way for the masses to speak? Is there a need in the western world for the voice of the people?  How can we apply this to business.

6/11/09

SPIN Seminar: Using Lean for Software Process Improvement

SPIN is a local Software process group. They generally have great speakers and interesting people.

Next week I hope to attend

PDX Mindshare on Wed 6/17/09.

Where are you networking? What groups have you attended recently?

What do you like about them?

The underlying principle of the metric (as I understand it) is that it measures how “in control” and “positive” you are. It turns out that if you “feel in control” then you can manage more complexity in your life; you can eat right, exercise, take your medications, get enough sleep, etc…..  This feels “reasonable to me”.  The metric and the tools provided are all focused on helping us learn to handle more and more complexity with our health.

Why can’t we simply reduce the complexity of health care instead? There are plenty of other fields that are highly complex where the simple rules work quite well, think engineering and the whole idea of first order effects.

Maybe instead of teaching people to “manage” 15 things to control blood pressure we could figure out the top 2 or 3 key things to focus on.I know… we are all different and not everything works for everyone.

There have been some success in this though.   The 10,000 steps a day program seems to be a very simple idea that has a huge impact on many people. They are even selling pedometers for kids . It works because many of our health issues are tied to the fact that we no longer move around enough.

In your field of work is it better to manage complexity or reduce it?

Quick overview of the metric and another view of how to use it.

In brief the metric measures the ability of a patient to respond to health care.  There are 13 questions asked and they bucket you (the patient) into one of 4 groups. Groups 1 and 2 are overwhelmed by their situation and need coaching to be able to start thinking about controlling their health. Groups 3-4 are able to control their health and are looking for information. People in group 4 take a very active role in their own health care. This metric appears to be rather robust and tracks well with key cost drivers in health care.

My first take away from this metric (when I saw it last fall) was that this was a great tool for evaluating any situation where change is needed. If you were, for example, selling a product to someone who was a 1 or a 2, then you would discover that they are not in the position to buy. 4′s have already bought and your target market should be 3′s that you could train into 4′s or unhappy 4′s.