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An interesting post from Juice Analytics on "Lightweight data exporation in Excel", which shows how to set up in-cell bar graphs using Excel's REPT function. A follow-up post has more examples and a spreadsheet you can download and play with. A must for data analysts and Excel power users.
Optimize has an interesting Q&A on looking at information flow from a supply chain perspective:
Q: What's the problem with the way companies deal with data today?
A: Companies think the way to attack the data management problem is to create a big warehouse. They presume that if they centralize the data, it'll be easier to access, but that creates obstacles as well. I think that by applying supply chain constructs to information management, we can get rid of the myth that a data warehouse will solve the problem.
Information management is a hot topic now, because of regulatory and compliance issues. Our clients are wrestling with how to take control of data. Now, it's not necessarily a new concept to apply supply chain concepts to data; there are articles that talk about applying lean manufacturing principles to information management. We're trying to figure out how the entire supply chain management perspective can be applied, initially in financial service opportunities.
Q: What are the benefits of thinking of information as a product?
A: If you look at financial services, a lot of their products are mortgages—loan applications come in and are sent off into the secondary market—and those are essentially products. That's a lot of contract data that comes through. Why can't you treat that as raw material, as a product in a manufacturing sense? The manufacturing process converts raw materials into products. Thinking along those lines could be applied to information management—start by looking at how fast your product comes through the front door and goes out the back, and if you want to increase the cycle to meet demand, you can apply these concepts to the market. It's just an implementation of information flow and cycle time.
The Top 10 IT projects of 2006, according to Baseline Magazine, include CRM, Collaboration, Supply Chain Management, and Business Analytics, among others. Plan accordingly.
Hope you were paying attention in Math class. From BusinessWeek via ZDNet:
In a world teeming with data, we ourselves become the math nerds' most prized specimens. Researchers at Aetna Health Care, Amazon.com (AMZN), and many other companies are piecing together mathematical models of customers and employees. Some models predict what music we'll buy, others figure out which worker is best equipped for a particular job. For now, these models are crude, the digital equivalent of stick figures. But over the coming decade, each of us will give birth to far more fleshed out simulations of ourselves. We'll be modeled as workers, shoppers, voters, and patients. Some of the simulations will have our names and credit cards attached, perhaps a few genetic details. In others, our identities will be shielded. Many of these models will be eerily accurate and others laughably off mark. But companies and governments will use them all the same to predict how to sell us things, steer us clear of diseases, and ramp up our productivity. And yes, they'll try to use them to keep us from hijacking airplanes or detonating bombs.
This mathematical modeling of humanity promises to be one of the great undertakings of the 21st century. It will grow in scope to include much of the physical world as mathematicians get their hands on new flows of data, from atmospheric sensors to the feeds from millions of security cameras. It's a parallel world that's taking shape, a laboratory for innovation and discovery composed of numbers, vectors, and algorithms. "We turn the world of content into math, and we turn you into math," says Howard Kaushansky, CEO of Boulder (Colo.)-based Umbria Inc., a company that uses math to analyze marketing trends online.
We've been seeing a lot of press on the the importance of right-brain thinking for technology professionals. From this it's clear that there's still plenty of future for the extreme left-brain types.
An article in CIO Magazine asserts that "the internal IT staff is back". But it also emphasizes that the game has changed:
In sum, the IT workforce is more important to business than ever before. For CIOs, it can become a full-time job to define the new business-facing IT roles, find the right candidates and use their skills in the right way. Three roles in particular have emerged as critical: the project manager, the relationship manager and the business analyst. Experienced candidates in these areas are inordinately hard to find. And some roles, like that of the relationship manager, are hard to define. And there are other difficulties: determining how to compensate these new specialists in a shifting job market, training and deploying them, and—once you've figured all that out—keeping your top talent on board. But CIOs must confront and conquer these challenges if they are to meet the increasing IT demands of today's business environment.
We've previously noted this trend here, here and here. IT professionals who previously could focus exclusively on honing their technical skills are now being asked to morph into more business-facing roles. For some, it's an opportunity to broaden their career path; for others it leads to the conclusion that their path forward is increasingly constrained and marginalized.
But the notion that IT professionals should have to have some understanding of how business operates shouldn't be revolutionary. As one commenter points out, "IT 'is the business' " and that has never stopped being true. In the first decades of the industry, it seemed enough to have people who could figure out how to implement a myriad of new technologies. In the current environment, companies are looking for people who understand how those technologies support the business. On the whole, not an unreasonable expectation. But it definitely ups the ante for IT professionals.
The launch of Google Analytics has made it an all-but-foregone conclusion that Google is getting serious about getting into CRM in a big way. From CRM News:
It's only a matter of time until Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) unleashes a free low-end hosted CRM suite. The heart of the business model for free CRM will be the potential for driving up advertising revenue while at the same time up-selling advanced CRM features. With Google Analytics launched and delivering a depth of features other free analytics packages can't touch, the progression of Google's product strategy is starting to take shape.
At New Equities, we've been using Google Analytics since its launch in mid-November and it would be vastly understating the matter to say that we are impressed that Google can provide such a robust service at no charge. So many people took Google up on its offer that it was forced to put on the brakes and declare a temporary moratorium on new users until it could get caught up, a development that must be giving other analytics vendors fits and starts.
Of course, one can only imagine all the data Google is aggregating as a result of its offering, and what it is planning to do with it. A Trojan Horse indeed, but one perfectly crafted for the Web, in which widespread use of a "free" application generates a treasure trove of data that is certainly of great use to any individual company, but grows to exponential value when viewed from the heights of Google's Olympian perspective.
UPDATE: Google CEO Eric Schmidt offers us "Ten Golden Rules" for getting the most out of knowledge workers. Among them are "Make coordination easy", "Eat your own dog food", and of course, the always-sensible guideline, "Don't be evil":
Much has been written about Google's slogan, but we really try to live by it, particularly in the ranks of management. As in every organization, people are passionate about their views. But nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike management practices used at some other well-known technology companies. We foster to create an atmosphere of tolerance and respect, not a company full of yes men.
Good advice. And it seems to be working out for them. (Hat tip: Inside Google)
Update: From the recent controversy over censoring content to gain access to the Chinese market, "Don't be evil" appears to have been replaced with a new motto: "Be semi-evil. Be quasi-evil. Be the margarine of evil. Be the Diet Coke of evil - just one calorie. Not evil enough". (Via Instapundit).
Amidst IT worker angst about job prospects, more indications of a looming talent shortage in the IT industry:
U.S. employers are scrambling to fill more skilled positions in project management, systems integration and business analysis. The ability to apply technology to business is crucial. “There’s a strong need for the coupling of basic information-technology skills with business knowledge,” said Phil Zweig, vice president of information systems at Northwestern Mutual.
Information Week reports that the IT industry is entering a "midlife crisis". It draws that conclusion from a recent Forrester survey of 53 IT executives. Of the companies who responded, some 28% reported plans to downsize IT in the next two years. But while this is gloomy news for full-time IT workers, it represents a shift towards a greater reliance on outside contractors. Among the relevant indicators:
Which IT skills are expected to be in the highest demand? Business Analysts, Strategists and Project/Program Managers. Are these jobs going offshore? Not according to a recent McKinsey report, that emphasizes that far fewer outsourced IT jobs are going offshore than is generally perceived.
Additionally, the data indicates a looming shortage of fresh talent. Last year only 1.4% of incoming college freshmen picked computer science as their major, down from 3.7% five years ago. All of which reinforces the trend towards a strong demand for contract IT workers in the coming years.
Gartner's analysts are predicting that by 2015, IT will be as "common as toast":
Over the next 10 years information technology will be as commoditized as the kitchen toaster is now, according to a Gartner paper entitled Future Worker 2015.
The researcher says the killer app of 2015 will be . . . a human, and more specifically, the way workers use technology.
Describing workers of the future as "extreme individuals", Gartner vice president Betsy Burton said companies will recognize staff as the "engine of innovation".
She said technology will be only a tool used to get work done - not an enabler.
She said smart companies will capitalize on innovative employees not just measuring them in terms of work produced.
Instead of pushing IT on to workers, users will simply pull what they need from the company's IT resources.
"Employees will approach technology like they do the toaster - they will just use it without even thinking about it," Burton said.
Based on this assessment, Gartner sees the field of Business Intelligence moving to the forefront:
IT managers agree technology will be a commodity, adding that Gartner's assessment of the future worker proves technology will clearly be human-oriented.
Michael Garas, information technology general manager at book retailer Dymocks, said computers will never replace the common sense used by IT workers.
"But software that will take over in 2015 is business intelligence," he said.
"In 2015 I think computers will just do the grunt work, but with the attributes of intelligent human beings; however, they can never replace common sense."
If this trend is borne out, it will not only be a boon to data analysts and others in the BI field, but for IT professionals in general. The value of technology workers is not that they can think like machines, but rather the ability to model business processes to gather data and then refine that data into information that supports decision-making.
In the old paradigm, technology was seen as exotic and separate from the day-to-day business it supported. In the new paradigm, IT is central to the success of the business, and IT workers are first and foremost business people.
Dave Pollard has an interesting post on the cultural factors that impede us from sharing knowledge with one another. His list is fairly comprehensive and hard to dispute. It includes the observations that "bad news rarely travels upwards in organizations" and people "accept and internalize only the information that fits with their mental models and frames".
Not content to just catalog the impediments, he also offers a list of suggestions for counteracting these tendencies. Many of these will come across as conventional such as "flattening the organization (to make it more transparent, with fewer levels for news and information to navigate)" or "keeping information tools simple and intuitive" (both easier said than done). But that said, they're still worthwhile tactics.
Overall, Pollard's main point is that it is not technology that poses the main obstacle to effective sharing of knowledge - it's us. It's hard for people working in the trenches on a daily basis to give any thought to what they know about a particular topic and how it can be shared to enable their colleagues to work faster and be more productive. Sometimes, it's difficult to know where to start. But in our own calculations of "The Total Cost of Talent", knowledge - particularly knowledge loss within an organization - shows up as the single biggest contributing factor to driving up hidden costs. It's a powerful argument for spending the extra cycles on creating processes and spaces for knowledge sharing and retention.
