July 22, 2010 at 7:07 am
oh dont get me wrong - I dont like that selling point, and I 100% agree - it can't be trusted.
As part of that "5% of users" (working within "the business" rather than IT), we decided that we needed to be a step between.
We have built a data warehouse with a web front end, allowing people to choose the info they want to see, it's not everything and so we still have the cottage MI teams scattered around doing their own reports.
When someone wants to make their spreadsheet available to more people or automate it, they come to us.
We do the scripting and then ask IT to run our scripts on SQL and IIS servers.
It seems to work quite well, but as a few of you have said, we have to work hard to avoid that untrustworthy data.
July 22, 2010 at 7:30 am
I agree with your house/Formula One analogies, and I think this has been one of the big, slow realizations in our industry: that we don't get it right the first time. But it's a false dichotomy to assume that the only two ways to do it are by going off and building a highly polished BI app that you present to the user after months of labor, and letting the user build it themselves. Certainly there is a lot of tweaking involved, but why not take an agile or iterative approach? I've seen very high profile BI applications approached like houses, and you're right. They do tend to create a lot of rework and misunderstanding. But I've also seen developers work closely with users and provide incremental BI value, and these projects can deliver what the user needs without forcing them to build it themselves.
That being said, I'm cautiously optimistic about PowerPivot, but I think our industry needs to examine the lessons learned about Microsoft Access when it first came out and tread carefully.
July 22, 2010 at 7:37 am
I would absolutely love to see some of the big BI solutions worked on in an "agile" way to understand how they do it.
We find it extremely difficult because of the processes set up to protect our server environments both physically and digitally.
July 22, 2010 at 7:43 am
Steve, thank you for the article. We are looking into exactly this question right now. I have a couple of questions / thoughts (recognize we are small and growing business).
1. Thoughts: Being in the BI business (cloud based offering), we have found that even some of our strongest customers don't leverage self service. With self service based reporting and alerting, we often get calls from our clientele indicating they would like this or that....Hence, in working with Msoft, we think Powerpivot can provide a very large opportunity to a subset of users. My concern is that above and beyond that select group, Powerpivot would turn into yet another area we would be getting feedback from people that would involve creating requests on our team versus power usage.
2. Question: In looking at this solution (in example a Sharepoint 2010 / Powerpivot configuration), it is very difficult getting my hands around the cost of such a configuration. It looks rather costly for the small / medium size business as it requires a behemoth hardware configuration and it looks to introduce several moving parts for support versus something like an MSAS instance with proper components over the instance. What am I missing on the PowerPivot front (for a cloud based offering) that makes this offering easy to deploy to a wide variety of user types? Thanks.
July 22, 2010 at 7:46 am
After 20+ yrs in IT and 40+ yrs in the technology sector I have come to believe that the Agile Programming model is one of the most human oriented processes I have seen for software development. It brings us closer to the goal of delivering quality results that accurately target the real needs of the end user than anything I have seen or heard of.
This is essentially what Ben has described.
One other thing I have seen is that a few ignorant end users tend to prejudice us as developers regarding end users in general. There are a lot of really bright people out there who want to use computer systems to do their job better, and they often are short changed by IT and the development groups because of that prejudice. I have been guilty of underestimating the abilities of my end users and trying to dumb down the services I deliver to reduce the required training I have to provide.
I have to keep reminding myself that the goal is to enable my company to excel, whatever form that takes.
July 22, 2010 at 7:52 am
charlie.smith (7/22/2010)
the goal is to enable my company to excel, whatever form that takes.
Pun intended? he he
You're right though, and it's sometimes very difficult to put down your lovely powerful servers and pick up that tool you thought you'd left behind a long time ago, to build something your customers understand and can develop further for themselves.
July 22, 2010 at 8:06 am
charlie.smith (7/22/2010)
After 20+ yrs in IT and 40+ yrs in the technology sector I have come to believe that the Agile Programming model is one of the most human oriented processes I have seen for software development. It brings us closer to the goal of delivering quality results that accurately target the real needs of the end user than anything I have seen or heard of.This is essentially what Ben has described.
One other thing I have seen is that a few ignorant end users tend to prejudice us as developers regarding end users in general. There are a lot of really bright people out there who want to use computer systems to do their job better, and they often are short changed by IT and the development groups because of that prejudice. I have been guilty of underestimating the abilities of my end users and trying to dumb down the services I deliver to reduce the required training I have to provide.
I have to keep reminding myself that the goal is to enable my company to excel, whatever form that takes.
Because of the wide range of skills of the end users, if the company won't do the training for whatever reason, you are somewhat forced into this mode.
The challenge is how to get end users to work with IT so everyone can move forward.
From what I've seen, most solutions users create have been too narrowly focused - they may work for one role or business unit, but do not scale to company or a global group of companies.
No matter how agile you are, the target always moves forward. It's somewhat of how much resources can be allocated.
Greg E
July 22, 2010 at 9:28 am
Greg Edwards-268690 (7/22/2010)
They found out that this 'creative' person had started with the SO Cycle Time detail, removing some data points, and presenting it as WO Cycle time. So for almost 2 years, they had been presentling progress towards a KPI using the wrong data. They found out that our rules and the data for WO Cycle Time met the requirements and the data was cleaning measuring what they wanted to see.
As a counter point, I've seen IT do this. The analyst says something, the developer mixes them up, and this gets built into an application wrong.
July 22, 2010 at 9:36 am
Steve, I agree! It's definitely possible for the developer not to know the data and mix up two elements. In an IT project, however, I'd assume that the user would test the results as well as the developer, and so there would be a greater chance (not 100%, though) that the error would get discovered.
If a user pulls their own data themselves, how likely are they to test their results rigorously before proceeding to distribute the report?
July 22, 2010 at 9:47 am
Dirk Wegener (7/22/2010)
I think the selling point for the simple Excel and Access files is the ability to easily manipulate them.
yeah, but how can those reports be trusted?! you don't want (business) users manipulating gross profit figures for your company...
You're viewing this as black and white. Powerpivot, or self service BI doesn't mean that users are producing all reports and all data for running the business. Often they're taking data that they can get to from multiple sources and combining it, or reformatting it, or running what-if.
Often it's what they do now in Excel already and make decisions on what the business runs on. These aren't idiots. Often they're the people that already make decisions on data that they glean from places and manually put together, or have to trust their memory on combining it.
July 22, 2010 at 9:50 am
kpatrick (7/22/2010)
... Certainly there is a lot of tweaking involved, but why not take an agile or iterative approach?
I think this is the idea behind PowerPivot and it's Sharepoint integration. IT can get reports on usage of PP sheets and start to determine which ones are in fact, very useful. Then you can start to formalize these, tweak them, etc.
There's no reason that PowerPivot means only users build worksheets. IT developers can build prototypes with it.
July 22, 2010 at 10:01 am
Steve,
That was my thought - the tool might be the most useful for the IT person to be able to create something the users can see quick enough to get them an idea of what can be done. How much training IT gives the user to use it and tweak it themselves would be dependent on the user involved. It brings us back to your favorite phase - "It Depends!"
July 22, 2010 at 10:05 am
kpatrick (7/22/2010)
SIf a user pulls their own data themselves, how likely are they to test their results rigorously before proceeding to distribute the report?
It's a coin flip, but I'd like to assume that users working with data understand some of their job and would check. Or someone else would check behind them.
July 22, 2010 at 11:19 am
Couldn't agree with you more, Steve!
Ideally, and this happens quite a lot actually, a 'power-user' within the organisation stands up, or is appointed, outside the IT dept. This user knows his or her way around Access, Excel, PowerPivot or some other query tool or BI package and, with some help from the DBA (or one of his delegates), is able to produce both the standard and ad-hoc reports for management. Everybody happy.
July 22, 2010 at 1:11 pm
oh ya Power-Pivot, when our users are still struggling to use excel 😛
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