Category: Analytics

Just Stop with the ‘Big Data is Just’

OK, I get it. You’re sceptical. You’ve seen stuff come and you’ve seen it go. To you big data is just BI, just data, just analytics for the hip kids, just a distraction or just hype and fad.

Except it isn’t. Big data is only ‘just’ analytics in the same way that cloud is ‘just’ asp or bureau. That is to say it isn’t at all.

It ‘aint hadoop either

Others define it in terms of the technology. I get this too. New tech is making it all possible and existing databases have been a barrier. New approaches like hadoop were borrowed from those that pioneered extracting value from enormous volumes of data. To the traditional data vendors, a terabyte was a big deal. They failed to notice that this was becoming standard in a home pc and that insurgent innovators were capturing, processing and mining mountains of data. They  didn’t keep up, so others had their lunch money and now they are playing catch-up.

But it would be wrong to define big data in terms of the innovation that allows it to happen. A little like defining fine dining as an activity conducted with knives, forks and a high quality napkin. It would be the most common mistake of the Big Data muggle.

The end of transaction oriented business

So if it’s not just ‘just’ and it’s not the technology … what is it?

It’s nothing less than a profound change in our approach to data. Historically, businesses managed themselves as a series of transactions. Occasional snapshots if you will. Only the essential financial and operational interactions between them and their customers. A quotation, an order, a despatch note and most importantly an invoice. Early on-line commerce  began to change this. Every gesture a customer made on their shopping journey could be captured. An abandoned basket in a supermarket tells the store manager nothing. Online, the same shopping cart could tell us that the delivery times are too long, the accessories were out of stock or that the secure shopping statement was in the wrong place. For the first time, so much data was being generated that ‘traditional’ analytics started to creak and groan and most of this type of analysis took place outside of corporate BI. It was ‘special’ click stream, needed specialised tools and the BI specialist and vendor shook their heads at it’s lack of structure. Where were the columns, rows and indexes.

This was just the beginning. Social platforms don’t just allow the analysis of shopping behaviours but all behaviours. If a customer comments, complains, compliments or converses in general about you or your brand, it is possible to know. It’s no longer heresay or anecdote, it’s available from the blogsphere or the Twitter firehose. It’s data.

Another beginning

Actually, that was just the beginning of the beginning. New classes of devices that can generate more data than the most active surfer or shopper are boosting the on-line population. Forget smart meters and the internet fridge, at least for now. Think more about ultra-low cost devices that remind you to water the yukka, feed the guppy or take your medication. If you forget any of these, particularly the medication, they will probably tell others too. Connected asthma inhalers can provide insight into air quality and cars that connect with your insurers who adjust your insurance premiums because your acceleration and braking patterns suggest that you are driving like you are on a track day rather than on the hanger lane gyratory. Oh and my new pebble watch (when it arrives) will add to the billions of facts, snippets and streams being added to that one big database in the sky. The cloud.

Ambient Data and why Big Data is Big

Big data represents a profound change. In our book Decision Sourcing, Gower, 2013, we refer to it as ‘ambient’ rather than big data. Ambient because we have always been surrounded by our thoughts, gestures, actions and conversations but they have never been data before. They were lost (as Rutger said) ‘like tears in rain’.

Today, we are approaching an an age where it is possible and practical to know everything that there is to know. Everything that is (to use an arcane legal expression) ‘uttered and muttered’. That’s what makes it big. Really big. Teradata think a Tera is big but it’s just a walk to the shops compared to Big Data.

Oh no  it is not ‘just’ anything. It is the beginning of the most significant shift in our industry since it began. The complexities are many, the data as varied as it is voluminous but the prize is knowledge and insight much of it predictive. Indeed, everything we have done to this point has been in preparation for the age of Big Data.

If Big Data is just anything right now … it’s just the beginning.

Information Curation: 1 dot 1

Connecting the Dots

kusama3_bodyOn an uncharacteristically warm Summer evening in 2012 I made my way into the Tate Modern as everyone else was making their way out. It was part of my work to understand the curatorial process and its relevance to information management through one of the Tate’s infrequent but excellent curator talks. This one, from Frances Morris, concerned the recent and enormously popular Kusama exhibition.

 

The notion that curation is an emerging skill in dealing with information is not a new one. It is covered by Jeff Jarvis in his blog post ‘Death of the Curator. Long Live the Curator’ where Jarvis applies them to the field of journalism. It is also the subject of Steven Rosenbaum’s excellent book ‘Curation Nation’ which examines the meme more broadly.

 

Abundance

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is prolific. Her work span the many decades of her life, first in rural Japan then New York in the 60’s and in contemporary Tokyo today. It is enormously varied. Her signature style of repeating dot patterns, whilst the most famous, represents only a small part of a vast and sprawling body of work. It is the perfect artistic allegory for information overload. Kusama has too much art for any one exhibition in the same way that information professionals in the age of Big Data have too much information for any one decision.

 

Morris, I figured, must have wrestled with Kusama’s prodigious nature. The problem is not one of assembling a coherent and factual account. Instead, it is one of separating out that which is relevant and that which is extraneous. It is a process of  building a series of working hypotheses and building a story that is a reality, that is a ‘truth’.

 

Analysis and Curation

Like many managers, Morris had a vague sense of the story she wanted to tell but the final story could only be told through material facts, works or ‘data’.  At first, she considered, selected, dissected and parsed as much as possible. Over time Morris selected works through more detailed  research. She travelled extensively spending time with Kusama herself in a psychiatric institution which has (voluntarily) been Kusama’s home since 1977. She also visited locations important to Kusama including her family home and museums in Matsumoto, Chiba and Wellington, New Zealand where others had curated and exhibited her work. This parallels the analytical process. One of  starting with very few, if any assumptions, and embarking a journey of discovery. Over time, through an examination of historical and contemporary data points, the story begins to unfold.

 

In the Next Post (1 dot 2)

Already we can see that curating is a process of research and selection. It has strong parallel’s with early stages of information analysis. In the next post we will look at filtering, relevance and how the curatorial process helps us understand which comes first … data or information.

Social Media Listening, Lets Call the Whole Thing Off?

The couple in Ira Gershwin’s song Lets call the whole thing off  lamented the way they pronounced the same words differently because it exposed class differences which might eventually be their undoing. Human communication is a funny thing. If Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had met on Facebook then regardless of how they pronounced neither, either and tomato, they would have assumed that they, like the spelling, were a perfect match.

Understanding nuance in human communication is a preoccupation for those of us building social media analytic applications and specifically as it applies to the Social Listening process. Social listening is the data collection process in a social media analytics application, the point at which the vast sea of blog, editorial and social media content is collected and converted into usable analysis. The purpose of Social Listening is to collect and filter ‘mentions’, instances of the company, brand, product or marketing campaign being referenced in an item of online content. Most platforms are good at collecting mentions but many fail in their level of accuracy, not because of scale and volume but because they don’t understand the human capacity for saying the same thing in so many different ways.

Fred and Ginger were both speaking (American) English and yet still had problems because language is only one of the many considerations when we try to understand the written word. Slang, regional idioms and differences in style relating to social groupings, profession, generation and gender are just a few others.

Anyone with teenage children can tell you about generational language differences. At one time my Son and his friends frequently used the expression ‘you just got pwned’ or ‘he pwned me’ usually but not exclusively when gaming. It describes the process of being decisively and unambiguously beaten by a competitor. ‘Pwned’ is a corruption of ‘owned’ attributed to a mis-spelling by a world of warcraft map designer and for some reason it fell into common usage. Unlike much of what we deal with in information systems, there is no rule, no derivation, it is simply something which is known. Without this knowledge what would a social media monitoring platform make of the tweet ‘coke pwns pepsi’ (or the other way around, of course)?

Other differences are equally obtuse. Take emoticons. Baby boomers rarely use them, gen-X ers commonly use them and gen Y-ers use them but differently. A gen-X er is more likely to use 🙂 and a gen -Y er 🙂 Very little difference to the human eye but in traditional text filters they simply don’t match.

Many are a little surprised when I point out that the author’s gender makes a difference to the language used. Of course, women might be more likely to discuss hormone replacement therapies and men more likely to discuss male pattern baldness if they are blogging about their mid-life crisis but given a gender-neutral topic, men and women still use different language. One website, gender genie, can identify the gender of the author of a piece of text with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy.

What does all of this mean? It means that Social Media Analytics platforms have to understand the rich, inconsistent and unfathomable ways in which we all converse. To get more specific and technical, social listening must employ linguistic variant sets to accurately disambiguate language variations. Simply put, they must be able to handle a set of alternative way of saying the same thing. Social listening must be inclusive of all diversity regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, social status, profession and yes, sexuality before they can capture data suitable for the purpose of analytics. Otherwise, you might as well just call the whole thing off.

 

Also reproduced for IBM Vision for the IT expert community.

Big Data Analytics: Size is not important

There was a time when databases came in desktop, departmental and  enterprise sizes.  There was nothing larger than ‘enterprise’ and very few enterprises needed databases that scaled to what was the largest imaginable unit of data, the terabyte. They even named a database after it.

We now live in the world of the networked enterprise. Last year, according to the IDC, the digital universe totalled 1.2 zettabytes of data. And we are only at the beginning of the explosion which is set to grow by as much as 40 times by 2020. Massive data sets are being generated by web logs, social networks, connected devices and RFID tags. This is even before we connect our fridges (and we will) to the internet. Data volumes are growing at such a click that we needed a new term, Big Data (I know) to describe it.

What is meant by ‘big’ is highly subjective but the term is loosely used to  describe volumes of data that can not be dealt with by a conventional RDBMS running on conventional hardware. That is to say, alternative approaches to software, hardware or data architectures (Hadoop, map reduce, columnar, distributed data processing etc) are required.

Big Data is not just more of the same though.  Big Data is fundamentally different. It’s new and new data can present new opportunities. According to  the Mckinsey Global Institute the use of big data is a key way for leading companies to outperform their peers. Leading retailers, like Tesco, are already using big data to take even more market share.

This is because Big Data represents a fundamental shift from capturing transactions for analysis to capturing interactions. The source of todays analytic applications are customer purchases, product returns and  supplier purchase orders whilst Big Data captures every customer click and conversation. It can capture each and every interaction. This represents an extraordinary opportunity to capture, analyse and understand what customers really think about products and services or how they are responding to a marketing campaign as the campaign is running.

Deriving analytics from big data, from content, unstructured data and natural language conversations requires a  new approach. In spite of the name though, it’s less about the size and more about the structure (or absence of structure) and level at which organisations can now understand their businesses and their customers.

Informed Decisions are Fairer Decisions

I have spent a fair amount of blogspace this year discussing how good business decisions need more than information. That the evolution of Business Intelligence tools need to extend beyond crosstabs, charts, scorecards and dashboards to collect and share social intelligence. However, this does not mean that decisions should be made without information, it means that information is the absolute but mandatory minimum for a good decisions. More than that, I would argue that we have an obligation to our customers and our workforce to base our decisions about them on good, solid data.

Informed and Fair

Take consumer credit for example. In the 1920’s and 1930’s it is unlikely that you or I would get credit. Credit was awarded to businessmen. And I mean men. The decision to offer credit would be based on criteria that we would find objectionable today like race and gender. Curiously, according to Larry E Rosenberger, John Nash and Ann Graham authors of ‘The Deciding Factor’, the decision would also be based on factors that included ‘punctuality’ and highly subjective assessments of ‘honesty’. Few of us could argue that a system which assesses an individuals eligibility for credit based their previous repayment behaviour, their income and their employment history not only represents good business but fair business too. Sure, it’s not perfect. In the 1980’s I found it difficult to get a mortgage in spite of being a well paid independent IT specialist with as predictable an income as any of my peers that were ‘permanently’ employed. At the time, I might have argued that ‘it was a pain’ but a little additional dialogue and process and it was sorted. Compare this with the brick walls of the 1920’s built around the subjective prejudice of a few controlling individuals and I would conclude that we have made a step, even a leap forwards.

Informed and Innovative

Informed decisions can be the basis of innovation too. Take, for example, the Swedish Company Klarna. Klarna make it possible to shop on-line and pay only after you have received your goods. They are providing a service which means that consumers can shop on-line but can see and feel their goods before they pay for them. In order to do this, they pay the store and take on the credit risk and they can only do this by efficiently analysing mountains of data that assess creditworthiness.

Informed but Rounded

Organisational decisions do need more than hard data. They need to be openly debated, controlled and they need to be informed by tacit, hard-to-communicate knowledge as well as analytics. However, information is the first step in taking organisations closer to unbiased, objective and therefore fairer decisions.

Who makes the decision anyway?

You’re Fired

I know that anyone that watches ‘The Apprentice’ is not doing so for an insight into how a modern business is run but hearing the words ‘You’re Fired’ frequently bellowed through an office door couldn’t be further from my own experience. It represents a clichéd and caricatured view of management that I last saw to ‘comedic’ effect in Terry and June  a 70’s BBC Sitcom. I am sure it is a style that exists but hopefully in a diminishing minority of organisations that haven’t found a way to deal with the bullying and haranguing of greying and dysfunctional dinosaurs.

A New  Generation of Decision Makers

I was born in the 60’s which you have probably already worked out given the reference to Terry Scott and June Whitfield. I don’t recall being consulted by my parents on family decisions too often. Loving and supportive as they were, they were part of a generation that didn’t ask what kind of party we wanted, what cut of jeans we preferred or which destination we preferred for a day out.

Of course their choices were far narrower but this was the generation of parents that pre-dated Parenting magazine let alone Parenting.com.

Compare this with the generation entering the workforce today. Most have been involved in choices that affect them, carefully consulted in family decisions. Some, including those like Montessori educated Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have taken their progressive education and created progressive and hugely successful organisational cultures.

Waning Autonomy in Decision Making

The connection with Alan Sugar’s pantomime boss and the future of BI is this. The purpose of BI is to make better decisions. Those decisions, two decades ago, used to be made by one person (and in the main it was a man) Increasingly those decisions are made by teams, peer groups, special interest groups and the staff that are impacted by it.

Waxing Collaboration in Decision Making

The drivers for the need for increasing collaboration in decision making are largely cultural. This includes the small matter of a whole generation entering the workforce that expect to be consulted and who are sociologically predisposed to sharing responsibility for the outcomes of those decisions. This means growing engagement in successful outcomes in organisations from a much broader group.

Until very recently, this was just too difficult to do. The cultural implications aside, how do you poll groups, get their input, collate views, share opinions and establish any kind of consensus without committee’s, sub-committees and employee councils? How to you distribute the information, the hard numbers, that are needed to make a decision that aligns the needs of the business, it’s stakeholders with the needs of those that participate in the business as employees and partners?

Social business tools and their convergence with BI are an enabler. They have made collaboration in decision making possible.

The opportunity is an engaged and an informed workforce that can positively participate in the decision making process. Even if the individual did not support the outcome, they will know that their voice was heard.

No, You’re Fired

If an engaged workforce sounds ‘fluffy’ then ask yourself what’s your organisations largest cost? It isn’t usually paperclips. Estimates vary but some suggest that knowledge workers will account for 80% of the cost in the US labour force in 2012.

If 80% of costs were in a machine would we be content on it idling, running at 25% capacity which some HR studies suggest is the current average level of engagement? I doubt it.

So the manager of yore, jealously keeping information to themselves so that they can exercise power and control and ultimately make autonomous decisions without offering or taking counsel… You’re Fired.

BI and Poor Decision making

Good Decision/Bad Decision

This has been something of a preoccupation for me of late. We spend much of our time debating the technologies. We invest valuable time in deciding if we should we go with mega-vendors (IBM, Oracle, SAP) or a challenger? We agonise over should it be cloud or on-premises, mart or warehouse, dimensional or relational? And it is all, frankly academic if the businesses is not making good decisions.

There is no shortage of material that try and make sense of why good people and great businesses make monumentally bad decisions. In the book ‘Thing Again:Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions’ by Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead and Andrew Cambell the focus is on the strategic decisions that have dramatic and highly visible consequences for the organisation.

Good People in Great Organisations Can Make Poor Decisions

An example is one of the UK’s premier retailers Boots which enjoys one of the largest footfalls in the UK. Established in the 19th century, it is now a subsidiary of £20billion Alliance Boots. In September 1998, the Chief Executive, Steve Russell excitedly announced a range of healthcare offerings including dentistry, chiropody and laser hair removal. Five years later, the initiative had lost in the region of £100m and Boots needed to break open the piggy bank and look down the back of the sofa for another £50m just to close down the operation and convert that premier retail space back to being … retail. It almost goes without saying that the changes were implemented by a new CEO, Richard Baker.

Apparently, one of the chief reasons for making the move into Healthcare services was  that a slowdown in the Beauty business ‘had been detected’. However a spokesman was later quoted in the Telegraph as saying that ‘they recognised that these areas are still growing strongly’.

Let’s stop there for a second. Spotting trends in sales and revenue by product category is probably marketing and business 101. And even the most rudimentary business intelligence solution should be trending sales over time. Yet the trend in sales in a key category for Boots was diagnosed as slowdown and only a few months later as growth. Of course, the slowdown may have been a short-term blip but the point of trending is to smooth these out for the purpose of longer-term planning. And, the error in trending might be more understandable had it not been for the fact that the later growth was characterised as ‘strong’.

Of course, I am not on the board of Boots and I have an advantage shared with all those analysts and commentator that put the boot (or should that be Boots) into Mr Russell … hindsight. Indeed, it’s a testimony to the strength of Boots as a high street giant that they can make major booboo’s and still go on to survive and thrive.

The Problem with Decisions …

And organisations are complex systems of individuals and interactions. Large organisations are very complex. This is why organisational decision making doesn’t always stand up to the scrutiny of us as individuals who retrospectively try and apply the logic of rational decision making to such mistakes.

There are a number of problems associated with individuals making decisions. Individuals have bias, self-interest, pre-conceptions. There are also a number of problems with organisational decisions. Groups have to manage conflict, disagreement and there are dynamics that can produce undesirable outcomes like Groupthink.

Today BI’s only Contribution is a Report, Chart or Dashboard

So if we accept that the purpose of Business Intelligence is to help organisations make better decisions (surely there is no debate here?) then Business Intelligence applications have to be more than reports, dashboards and charts.

They need to make decisions easier to collaborate around, they need to link decisions directly to the information that is required to make them. Furthermore decisions need to be open, transparent, accountable not just for the regulators but so that the whole organisation can buy into them.

Decision Making Black Holes

 

A Funny Thing Happens at the Forum

Meetings are one of the most common decision making ‘forums’ we are all regularly involved in. In fact one in five company meetings we take is to make a decision. As a way of making decisions though, they can be problematic. Once the meeting has concluded, the connection between information shared, decisions made and actions taken can be weak even lost. It’s as if the meeting itself were a decision making black hole.

Some Decisions are More Equal Than Others

Some decision making meetings are impromptu for making a timely, tactical decision quickly. Others are regular, formal and arranged around the ‘drum beat’ or ‘cadence’ of a business to make more strategic decisions. The more strategic the decisions and longer term the impact the less frequent the forum so a Senior or Executive Management Team may only meet quarterly for a business review (QBR)

How a QBR ‘Rolls’

A typical QBR will see Senior Managers sharing results in PowerPoint, possibly with financial results in spread-sheets which I would hope have at least been extracted from a Business Intelligence application.

If the SMT are reasonably well organised, they will summarise their conclusions and actions in meeting minutes. The meeting minutes will be typed up by an assistant in a word document and then distributed in email.

Throughout, they will all have been keeping individual notes so will walk out with these in their daybooks. The most senior manager in the room might not do this particularly if it’s their assistant who’s taking the minutes.

Later, actions from daybooks and minutes are likely transferred to individuals to-do lists and all follow-up will be conducted in email and phone calls.

An Implosion of Information, Conclusion and Decision

So let’s recap. Critical decisions about how resources are going to be allocated will be discussed in a ‘QBR’ and yet the artefacts of this critical decision making forum are scattered into Word documents, excel spread-sheets, emails and outlook tasks. Tiny fragments of the discussion, information, conclusion, decisions and activities implode around the organisation. To be frank, the team are now only going to make progress because the forum was recent and can be relatively easily recalled.

Of course, once time or people move on so does the corporate memory of the decision. Conversations begin with ‘what did we agree to do about that cost over-run?’ or ‘why did we say we were ok with the revenue performance in Q1?’

Executive Attention Deficit Syndrome

Many executives complain of a syndrome that feels like ADS. This is because the more senior the manager the more things they will probably have to deal with at an increasingly superficial level. A functional head will probably spend no more than 15 minutes on any one thing. To productively make decisions they will need to be able to have the background, status and related information to hand so that they can deal with it quickly and move on to the next thing. Decision making black holes contribute to this feeling of EADS.

CDM and Corporate Memory

Corporate Decision Making platforms will be successful when they connect;

  • Decisions
  • Information on which the decision was made
  • Insight derived from the information
  • Actions taken on the decision
  • Results of the actions

This means total recall of corporate decisions good and bad so that, over time, decisions can be recalled, evaluated, re-used or improved. A far cry from current decision making forums which whilst functional are inherently flawed, fragmented and are not improving the timeliness and quality of decisions in our organisations.

BI Requirements Should not just be Gathered

There are many resources remonstrating with the IT community on the importance of gathering requirements. Failing to gather requirements, they warn, will lead to a poor solution delivered late and over budget. This is largely inarguable.

However, I would warn that simply ‘gathering’ requirement is as big a risk. Fred Brooks, author of ‘The Mytical Man Month’ once said that ‘the hardest part of building a software system is deciding what to build’. And deciding what to build is a two way process rather than the act of listening, nodding and documenting that we all too often see in Business Intelligence projects.

From time to time, I hear someone cry foul on this assertion. They argue that it seems like the tail is wagging the dog or that the business cannot compromise on the requirement. I usually point out that simply building what the user asked for doesn’t happen in any other field of engineering. Architects advise on the cost of materials when planning a major new office building, City officials take advice on the best possible location for a bridge and environmental consultants are actively engaged in deciding exactly if and what should be built in any major civil engineering project.

And this is exactly how we should approach business analytic requirements. As a two-way exploration of what is required, possible solutions and the implications of each. Incidentally, this is particularly difficult to do if business users are asked to gather and document their own requirements without input from their implementation team.

An example of why this is important is rooted in the fact that many BI technologies (including IBM Cognos) are tools not programming languages. They have been built around a model to increase productivity. That is, if you understand and work with the assumptions behind the model reports, dashboards and other BI application objects can be built very quickly. Bend the model and development times increase. Attempting to work completely around the model may result in greatly reduced productivity and therefore vastly increased development time.

So be wary of treating ‘gathering’ and ‘analysis’ as distinct and separate steps. Instead, the process should be an iterative collaboration between users and engineers. Requirements should be understood but so should the implications from a systems perspective. The resulting solution will almost undoubtedly be a better fit and it will significantly increase the chance of it being delivered on time, at the right cost and with an increased understanding between those that need the systems and those that build them.

"We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem", Russell Ackoff, 1974

Single version of the truth, philosophy or reality?

Assuming you want the truth and you can handle it then you will have heard this a lot. The purpose of our new (BI/Analytics/Data Warehouse) project is to deliver ‘a single version of the truth’. In a project we are engaged with right now the expression is one version of reality or 1VOR. For UK boomers that will almost undoubtedly bring to mind a steam engine but I digress.

I have to admit, I find the term jarring whenever I hear it because it implies something simple and  attainable through a single system which is rarely the reality.

In fact it’s rarely attained causing some of our community to ponder on it’s viability or even if it exists. Robin Bloor’s ‘Is there a single version of the Truth’ and  Beyond a single version of the truth in the Obsessive Compulsive Data Quality blog are great examples.

Much, on this subject, has been written by data quality practitioners and speaks to master data management and the desire, for example, for a single and consistent view of a customer. Banks often don’t understand customers, they understand accounts and if the number of (err, for example Hotel Chocolat) home shopping brochures I receive is anything to go by then many retailers don’t get it either. Personally I want my bank and my chocolatier to know when I am interacting with them. I’m a name, not a number, particularly when it comes to chocolate.

This problem is also characterised by the tired and exasperated tone of a Senior Manager asking for (and sometimes begging for) a single version of the truth. This is usually because they had a ‘number’ (probably revenue) and went to speak to one of their Department Head about it (probably because it was unexpectedly low) and rather than spending time on understanding what the number means or what the business should do, they spent 45 minutes comparing the Senior Managers ‘number’ with the Department Heads ‘number’. In trying to reconcile them, they also find some more ‘numbers’ too. It probably passed the time nicely. Make this a monthly meeting or a QBR involving a number of department heads and the 45 minutes will stretch into hours without any real insight from which decisions might have been made.

This is partly about provenance. Ideally it came from a single system of record (Finance, HR) or corporate BI but it most likely came from a spreadsheet or even worse a presentation with a spreadsheet embedded in it.

It’s also about purity (or the addition of impurities, at least) It might have started pure but the department head or an analyst that works in their support and admin team calculated the number based on an extract from the finance system and possibly some other spreadsheets. The numbers were probably adjusted because of some departmental nuance. For example, if it’s a Sales Team, the Sales Manager might include all the sales for a rep that joined part way through the year whilst Finance left the revenue with the previous team.

It will be no comfort (or surprise) to our Senior Manager that it is also a Master Data Management problem too. Revenue by product can only make sense if everyone in the organisation can agree the brands, categories and products that classify the things that are sold. Superficially this sounds simple but even this week I have spoken with a global business that is launching a major initiative, involving hundreds of man hours to resolve just this issue.

It’s also about terminology. We sacrifice precision in language for efficiency. In most organistions we dance dangerously around synonyms and homonyms because it mostly doesn’t catch us out. Net revenue … net of what? And whilst we are on the subject … revenue. Revenue as it was ordered, as it was delivered, as it was invoiced and as it is recognised according to GAAP rules in the finance system. By the way does your number include credit notes? And this is a SIMPLE example. Costs are often centralised, allocated or shared in some way and all dependent on a set of rules that only a handful of people in the finance team really understand.

Finally, it’s about perspective. Departments in an organisation often talk about the same things but mean subtly different things because they have different perspectives. The sales team mean ordered revenue because once someone has signed hard (three copies) their job is done whilst the SMT are probably concerned about the revenue that they share with the markets in their statutory accounts.

So is a single version of the truth philisophy? Can it really be achieved? The answer is probably that there are multiple versions of the truth but they are, in many organisations, all wrong. Many organisations are looking at different things with differing perspectives and they are ALL inaccurate.

A high performing organisations should be trying to unpick these knots, in priority order, one at a time. Eventually they will be able to look at multiple versions of the truth and understand their business from multiple perspectives. Indeed the differences between the truth’s will probably tell them something they didn’t know from what they used to call ‘the single version of the truth’.