Windows 7 est arrivé

There was a time when nothing less than a new dress from Harvey Nics would be required to cheer a girl up. These days a new operating system does the trick! And Windows 7 is about as cheerful as they come.

Although Windows 7 has been around for a couple of weeks, my new DirectX 10 graphics card only arrived today, so I had to wait to have a look at Microsoft’s latest desktop operating system. Just like the new frock, as soon as you try it on you wonder how you ever lived without it. The user interface is simpler, sleeker and of course the graphics are lovely.

The proof of the pudding will be in the stability, but first impressions are good. I’d been struggling with Internet Explorer 8 on Vista, so I’m hoping Windows 7 is going to put such problems behind me. We will see.

Windows 7 has some undeniably terrific new features, and lots of refinements that make it easier to use. The desktop is less cluttered than Vista through an opt-in approach to gadgets. I love the jump start concept which enables recently worked on documents or folders to be accessed easily. It’s all so much brighter, shinier and slightly lemon scented. In the absence of a credit card blow-out in Knightsbridge, it’s just the ticket for a grey November.

Data mining - digging for gold

Just as coal is the work-horse of modern energy production, so the relational database is the work-horse of modern business. Alright, one is black and dusty and the other is, well, virtual and clean, but the end result is the same - reserves waiting to be mined, whether the reserves are coal or data.

Reserves which may contain gold for their owners.

Before you put on your hard hat with the lamp on the front to break open the server, I’m talking metaphorical gold - metaphorical gold which could be worth a great deal more to your business than the real thing.

First – let’s consider the reserves, which unless you are actually a mining company will be the data stored in databases within your company. Then, let’s look at what the gold might be that’s hidden in the data.

There are few businesses which have not installed a database, whether for managing customers, accounts or stock. As more enterprise-wide systems are installed the amount of data being generated is phenomenal. Some of that data will be immediately accessible through reporting tools. But what could happen if those databases were joined together? What if you could see the sales information together with the customer management information? Or the training data together with sales data? At the risk of mixing enough metaphors to make soup, that would really be cooking with gas ….

But whether it’s one database, or a number joined together, how do you go about looking for gold? Indeed what does gold look like in data terms?

How you find gold is by using a technique called data mining, and what it looks like all depends on your business. It may be customers who are more likely to book a particular type of show in your theatre, or finding which products to bundle together to maximise sales and profit. Or it could be something completely different – depending on what business you are in. The applications for data mining are many and varied and are limited only by business owners' imagination and ambitions.

Data mining is now more accessible and affordable than ever. Products such as Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and 2005 put data mining within the reach of most companies – large or small.

Get in touch if you want to dig for gold in your data. Hard hats with lamps supplied.

Earth Hour - intelligence for the planet

I attended a Microsoft seminar last week and the subject of what’s in a name was discussed. Business intelligence is so much more than just business, isn’t it? It’s as relevant to business as it is to the public sector as to voluntary or charitable organisations. Business intelligence is for everyone – including, I believe, the planet.

You might have noticed that 28th March 2009 saw Earth Hour.

WWF asked 1bn citizens of the world to switch off their lights for one hour to show their concern. The campaign has generated a great deal of interest and support amongst those that care about the earth and the way we are treating it.

Yet I have to admit I was far from convinced. Yes, turning off the lights for an hour is fun and different. Yes, turning off the lights is a reminder of the enormous benefits we all take for granted with on-demand electricity. And yes, it was great to see so many people showing that they believe this issue is important.

But no, we are not debating the energy issue in a grown up way. No, people are not well informed enough about the alternatives. And no, I cannot understand why the most likely source of clean and efficient power is not higher on people's and politician’s agendas.

I guess I think the energy debate is a complicated one that affects all of us. But not all of us are being involved. At the same time as the government approves a new coal-fired power station, they also under-fund the best chance we have for clean and efficient fusion power that could be commercially viable as soon as 20 years from now – providing the right actions are taken. Yet very few people know about either decision.

As Earth Hours shows, however, they do care. They care passionately and WWF have done a wonderful job in highlighting the issue in such a fun way.

Business intelligence is about having enough data to make good decisions. Research has shown that business people make better decisions when they act on data, and not just intuition. So why are we driving the energy issue without the data? Just sitting in the dark for an hour isn’t going to help – we need better education and better information. We need intelligent data. Then maybe we will collectively make better decisions about how our children will keep their lights on.

Manage your message with conditional formatting

30 years ago Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston developed VisiCalc - the world’s first electronic spreadsheet. The basic idea of a spreadsheet hasn’t changed much since, but the functionality has improved enormously. From SuperCalc to Lotus 1-2-3 and then Excel, the spreadsheet has been an immoveable favourite on our desktops.

But as revolutionary as VisiCalc was, it was only when the spreadsheet started to get visual that it went mainstream. Charting, graphing, plotting and showing data as pictures moved the spreadsheet out of the accountant’s office and into the marketing department, and indeed most other departments.

Numbers were talking a language that people could understand.

Conditional formatting

Microsoft Excel 2007 is the latest in a long and increasingly useful line of wonder-spreadsheets. The oh-so-easy-to-use Conditional Formatting in Excel does a great deal more than Microsoft could ever fit on the box.

It is no exaggeration to say that Excel is the world’s leading Business Intelligence tool.

Anyone faced with a screen full of figures can now quickly and intelligently make sense of them. And I mean quickly. Conditional formatting is perhaps more useful as a personal sense-making tool. With a click and a sweep coloured bars show you how big the big things are and how small the small things are. I could have said that the coloured bars show you how big the big NUMBERS are and how small the small NUMBERS are, but numbers represent things: sales, people, widgets, cases, key words.

So what these graphical bars are really telling us is where the problems and opportunities are: where we should direct our energies, or who we should pick the phone up to first.
Conditional formatting tells us what’s important and where we can leave well alone.

Conditional formatting is also a great presentation tool. It enables figures and graphics to be reported in one hit – a weakness of the traditional graph. Although graphs and charts are worth a thousand words, they also needed a table below it to enable the full story to be communicated. Conditional formatting allows both actual numbers, and the visual representation, to be reported together in a very compact space. Ideal for busy managers, complex reports, and for simply getting an important message across.

Key word visualisation

Consider the key words for this blog. Each time I do a posting the numbers increment on the key words, and new ones get added. After a few postings the numbers start to build. Put conditional formatting against those numbers and they look totally different.

I begin to see areas that perhaps should be more central to my blogging, and are presently being ignored. I’m not particularly surprised by some, but importantly I start to look at the key words differently.

Visualisation is not neutral

Interestingly, the two types of conditional formatting in this example also make me look at the numbers in a different way. With the yellow bars I see a continuum – more of some and less of others. With the traffic light flags I see “high performing” key words and “poorly performing” keywords. They are the same key words, the same numbers, and it’s the same person looking at the data – I just draw different conclusions. If I were using this to explain performance, I would need to think carefully about the presentation.

What we measure gets attention, and what we show visually gets us thinking in new ways about what we are doing. As the power of visuals improves in spreadsheets, so does our ability to demonstrate a particular angle of what we want the reader to understand. It’s something to think about when presenting information, and when consuming it.

All things measurable

Does the world need another blog? Not exactly; but it’s got one anyway.

Welcome to Getting to Excellent!

Getting to Excellent will be thoughts, rants and ramblings about the world of performance management, business intelligence, key performance indicators, scorecards, dashboards, metrics, and all things measurable as well as a few things that won’t be measured.

I’m a Microsoft Certified Professional, a systems analyst and obsessive about how numbers help us to do better. I’m a Toastmaster, a yogini, and stubbornly dreadful at French. I’m also fortunate enough to have worked with and for some of the world’s most capable companies.

And for what it’s worth I passionately believe that performance does matter: both good and bad performance. I believe we all have a deep seated desire to do well in our chosen fields and that understanding how to do better is important. Important for individuals, teams, businesses, and public sector organisations.

So I’m going to write about it. Here. In Getting to Excellent. The world’s new blog. That it didn’t necessarily want. But got anyway.