A Bad Report Card

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A Bad Report Card

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Points: 734522
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March 23, 2008 at 9:19 pm

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Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1003875 More actions · Answer 1

Maybe it's just me... but, in most cases, I find that "Business Intelligence" is an oxy-moron with emphasis on the word "moron" 😉 ...

I worked for a Fortune 100 company for 15 years. One of the things I did was to help create their GOR "Future Casts" (was long before the acronymn "BI" was born). With just a tiny bit of analysis on my part, the reports clearly showed that there was an 86% chance that we'd have to lay off more than a half of the employees in 4 years because of lack of business unless something changed. Even after my suggestions to various Directors and the GM himself, no one did a bloody thing and the lack of business, the layoffs, and the lost profits to the stock holders occurred right on schedule. Everyone was alarmed and people from the GM on down wondered how such an event could have occurred...

... the answer is simple... even though they had the data and the BI reports clearly indicated the problem, no one did anything to improve the future.

The real scenario above is not all that uncommon... people only want to hear good news. We they see bad news, they either ignore like they did above, or they pencil-whip the BI into something that's more pleasing.

Unless you're going to take the time to collect and aggregate honest BI information and then actually use that information to control the profitable destiny of the company, the collection and maintenance of BI information is nothing more than waste of money and man-power.

I'm not surprised to see a Government Agency such as the FCC in the same bit of trouble.

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 734522 More actions · Answer 2

Hopefully they'll make some changes and we'll see.

I first saw BI, or what was called either DSS (Decision Support System) or EIS (Executive Infromation Systems) in 1990. We used those at the nuclear plant where I worked to plan outages (downtime for the reactor) and the work involved.

We had complicated scheduling systems and fed into the DSS along with costing and other information to help both the planners and executives decide when to best take the outage and refuel and fix the reactor.

By complex I mean picture a Gantt chart, normal 10pt type, printed out. Now this printout is a series of plotter pages taped together to show the schedule. This covered a wall, meaning a 10ft high wall, running for 25-30 feet, showing every action that would occur. It was constantly updated, both with new printouts and with markings as things changed. There were even a couple stepladders to read the top sections 🙂

Matt Miller (4) SSC Guru Points: 124210 More actions · Answer 3

Funny thing - I've always thought that BI solutions took a GREATER level of expertise to build than typical solutions, since you have to a. model your data correctly to begin with, b. know your userbase well enough to anticipate all of the various questions they'd like to ask, c. build the layer to make these elements easily accessible and reportable, all while trying to prevent them from drawing conclusions that aren't valid in the data.

It's actually a bit like the Oracle vs SQL Server argument: just because an interface is more APPROACHABLE doesn't make it SIMPLER, or perhaps - doesn't entail you don't need a high level of expertise to know what to do in the better interface. Just because the BI interface is "simpler" doesn't mean that a phenomenal amount of work goes into the abstraction/universe-building. It's just another one of those misunderstood areas of our extended community I think.

However - in the FCC's case - it looks to me that they just haven't built their systems up enough to even maintain their process. BI on tops of a system with NO data is, well, worthless, since you essentially don't have anything to report on.

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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1003875 More actions · Answer 4

Heh... nothing to report on... that's "Cohen's Law". Cohen is the brother of Murphy and he states that "The more time you spend on reporting, the less time you have to do anything. Stability is achieved when you are doing nothing except reporting on the nothing that you are doing."

Many government agencies and corporate departments have achieved the stability expressed in Cohen's law. 😉

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)