CDP - New Zealand Information Management

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Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:46:16 +1200

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Why Plan? Part One

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 11:42:32 +1200

Budgeting and forecasting has been done for so many years that some organisations have forgotten why they even bother. Surely finance staff could better spend their time analysing their actual performance?

But therein lays the first benefit of planning. It provides a benchmark against which to measure actual performance. Is a revenue figure of $1m good or bad? Setting a clear standard before the fact enables meaningful analysis of how the company has performed after the fact.

A second benefit of planning is the process of setting and agreeing targets. Divisional managers are able to set their targets for revenue and spend and have them signed off by their managers. This encourages the divisional managers to plan the year ahead. It also makes the divisional managers accountable and their performance objectively measureable.

Planning in advance also helps managers control their costs. Training is a classic example – with a set budget managers are able to set training priorities to ensure the budget is met. This doesn’t just mean avoiding overspend, it also means avoiding underspend to ensure the company continues to invest in its employees.

The above benefits are briefly stated, but they are all powerful reasons to plan – they can enable staff to align their targets with the company’s strategy and provide a basis for objectively measuring performance.

What’s the Difference between a Dashboard and a Scorecard?

Wed, 04 May 2011 11:40:11 +1200

These terms are often used interchangeably, which can cause confusion. There is no rule about what each term means, but I like to make a distinction between the two to remove that confusion. The following diagram summarises what I see as the essential differences between the two:

Dashboards typically attempt to provide management with high level information about different parts of the business, in one view. This view may be:

One IBM Cognos Report Studio report, with multiple objects displayed
An IBM Cognos dashboard with dynamic content – Report Studio objects, conditional formatting, drilling through to more detailed reports

Scorecards typically provide management with metrics that they need to actively manage because they are important to the business. They assist management by:

Showing what parts of the business drive the KPIs
Show the progress over time and make a prediction about what will happen if changes are not made
Identify at what level of the business, the changes need to be made
Always have targets/budgets
Scorecards are typically based on a methodology and linked to the organisation’s strategy. The most famous example of this is Robert Kaplan and David Norton’s Balanced Scorecard. It attempts to balance the four main factors that drive a business (finance, human resources, operations and customers), without giving undue emphasis to components that are easier to measure, such as finance
IBM Cognos’ Metrics Studio is designed with this type of scorecard in mind

The overlap:

The dashboard might be the highest level of the scorecard
Some dashboards are dynamic, all scorecards should be

Planning to Perform

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 09:56:11 +1200

Failing to Plan is like Planning to Fail, but it’s difficult to plan something so nebulous as Business Intelligence. That’s why we created the “Performance Plan”.

How many times have you been in need of information but when you reached for the latest BI report you found it only met a few of your information requirements? Or since you didn't actually trust the report handed to you, you decided to trust your "gut instinct" instead – and then perhaps later knocked up some numbers in Excel to back up your version of reality? This is an on-going issue for some of the world’s top organisations, and causes heartburn at every level in the organisation. It is especially an issue at the C- level where business leaders cannot get a clear picture of reality which is backed up by trusted information.

Over the years, companies have generally managed to survive like this. However since the global economic crisis hit, organisations are finding that they actually need information they can trust to make critical decisions in order to stay in business. People are starting to see that "gut instinct" decisions, even in the best of times, can be wrong.

More recently the world has been shaken by Christchurch and Japan’s severe earthquakes that changed not only business forecasts, but lives, in just a matter of minutes. There are big decisions related to these external, unpredictable events that need to be made on an on-going basis in order to move forward, and having the right information, at the right time, in the right format can be the fundamental difference for those that survive.

These types of external events are outside of our control, no-one can plan or predict them so we have to look inwards and decide what we can do. The events often highlight for us what exactly it is that we do need to plan for, and how we would like to be more proactive with our information readiness in response.

Like the old saying goes "Failing to plan is like planning to fail"... but whose responsibility is it to plan and create the right information delivery in your organisation? The business will point to IT and IT will point to the business. To turn this finger pointing into productive engagement at CDP we have created the Performance Plan that aligns both sides and prioritises your information requirements in a proven, methodical approach. This ensures not only alignment, but on-going business value, and organisational readiness in the information management journey. The Performance Plan provides two things: a Plan and a Platform to provide proven results that impact your business performance.

So, take a step forward, plan your information requirements. Stop finger pointing, and align your organisation. Stop making a decision by not making a decision at all. Instead, start making decisions based on facts that you can trust. Create a Performance Plan that defines how you will turn your data into the strategic asset it needs to be in order to make a fundamental, on-going difference. The fact is, when you plan to take better care of your data and information, you actually do, and your organisation will thank you for it.

Elegant Dashboarding

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 15:57:32 +1300

Dashboards are a wonderful way to check how an organisation’s key indicators are tracking. They can indicate when action is required, when questions need to be asked and inject objective information into the decision making process.

The catch is how do you do it properly? There is surprisingly little written about Dashboards. Edward Tufte’s classic book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is brilliant in outlining the history of such things, how the graphical display of information has been manipulated over the years, and the most useful ways of imparting information visually. Well worth a skim.

One of the leading academics on dashboarding is Stephen Few. By nature I’m suspicious of gurus, but a dashboard guru isn’t likely to take your money and break up your family, so I’m happy to sign up as a proponent of his ideas. He is the preeminent thinker about such things and I recommend having a look at his website and books before embarking on a dashboard project.

Of course it’s difficult to condense his work into a few bullet points, but the following is a selection of his and Tufte’s suggestions that resonate with me:

It is not our job to alter or distort what the data says. The data must speak for itself. We have to work out the best way for this to happen.
The substance is what matters; don’t let decoration overshadow the data.
We need to make a large volume of data coherent, in a small space, without it looking crowded.
Ideally we will want to compare actuals with targets/forecasts/plans, or between periods.

Above all else Stephen Few suggests that we need to distil complex and voluminous data into dashboards that are elegant and simple. Too often dashboards are designed to look good or show off the technology, forgetting that the goal is to display the information to the audience in an instantly understandable fashion.

It’s not as hard as it sounds. More later…

Cognos 10 Active Reports

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 10:17:45 +1300

Active or Off-line reports

Active Reports allow for the delivery of interactive dashboards and reports that business users can work with offline. They provide the flexibility needed to access vital information even when disconnected from the network

Often one of the challenges with Dashboarding and Reporting is access to data whilst disconnected from the network or away from the office. IBM Cognos 8 and older versions of the software allowed users to receive email copies of reports, but these reports are static and don’t allow the user to interact with the data unless they are connected to the system.

The addition of Active reports in the latest version of IBM Cognos 10 Business Analytics enables users to interact with data even if they are offline or disconnected.

By leveraging existing Reports, authors are able to convert a standard Cognos report to an Active report. Because Active reports are created in Report Studio report authors are able to take advantage of their current knowledge and skills to create Active reports or to convert existing reports. This makes the time to become proficient in authoring Active reports minimal.

By using the various tools available authors are able to make report navigation an easy and engaging task for the business user, the key being to keep the report simple and attractive. Active reports focus on highly interactive and visual formats that allow the users to quickly navigate their way through the information being presented to gain a better insight into the data.

In the example below the user is able to quickly compare the Top 5 or 10 Sales Reps across Three years and then switch their focus to Regional Product Revenue

Active reports can be executed either directly through the Cognos Connection portal or via a scheduled task. Like other Cognos reports they can be burst to deliver specific data to a select target audience.

For a demonstration of Cognos 10 please speak to your normal CDP contact or email craig.simpson@cdp.co.nz (Auckland) or sarah.pomare@cdp.co.nz (Wellington)

Data Warehouse Data Quality

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 10:17:45 +1300

The Data Warehouse Institute Seminar

A couple of years ago I had the good fortune to attend a session with Arkady Maydanchik, one of the world’s leading authorities in Data Warehouse data quality.

Arkady is an accomplished speaker and the session was both informative and easy to follow. What the session did well was to simply describe the aspects of monitoring and improving data quality and how to build the mechanisms to achieve this.

What is Data Warehouse Data Quality?

For the purposes of this blog we are going to focus on monitoring and managing the quality of the data that is being loaded from the source systems in the Data Warehouse via ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) routines.

Some industry players argue that the quality of the data loaded into data warehouses can degrade by up to 2% a month. This can mean that the quality of your fresh new data warehouse can be severely compromised in a short amount of time.

There are a number of reasons why the quality of the data degrades, however one major effect is that small quality issues in the source systems can have major impacts in the data warehouse. Most ETL routines have not been designed to help monitor and manage the quality issues as they occur meaning the data quality issues remain hidden until they become large enough to be noticed. Arkady has designed monitors that measure and record change in quality of the data as it is loaded. The data warehouse administrators will then get a data quality dashboard so they can proactively identify and correct data quality issues as they occur.

Data Quality monitors

The idea is based on Demmings TQM (Total Quality Management) principles where you measure the quality throughout the process, not at the end, and then manage what you measure.

Data Quality monitors work on the principle that at certain points in the ETL load cycle measurements of quality are recorded into a centralised Audit Database. These measurements may be a simple as volumes of rows, dollar values, etc or more complex statistical algorithms depending on what is most appropriate to measure. Over time you can build up a trend of how the quality your data is progressing.

The diagram below indicates where data quality monitors could be implemented in a simple ETL routine.

There are also a number of simple algorithms that can be built into the monitors to enhance the value of the results and help you better understand the data quality.

Based on the output of the monitors you have built you can then determine what needs to be investigated, fixed and at what point in the process this needs to be done.

In most cases the overhead in building these mechanisms is very small as they are developed at the same time as the ETL, yet the payback is great.

At one of the customer sites where I have implemented these ideas the number of issues relating to data loads has been significantly reduced as we can determine very quickly where the issues are and then focus on fixing it, rather than spend time trying to follow data through the process to determine where the issue is.

Implementing Data Quality monitors is one of many ideas that will help you gain the maximum value from your data warehouse investment, while future proofing and reducing the maintenance efforts going forward.

TM1 joins the Cognos family – where to for Planning?

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:46:03 +1300

Back in October 2007 a company by the name of Applix was acquired by Cognos. Cognos rebranded the company’s flagship product, TM1, to Cognos TM1. A few months later Cognos was itself acquired by IBM.

It’s fairly old news, but has become more, rather than less, important in the world of planning as the dust has settled over the last few years.

IBM found itself in possession of two popular and very capable planning tools in Cognos TM1 and Cognos Enterprise Planning (EP). They both had the same target market, under the broad umbrella of “budgeting and forecasting” but different strengths and thus different niche positions in the market.

It didn’t make sense to maintain two formerly competing products in full R&D mode, so they took a step back and analysed what the two tools had to offer.

Cognos Planning offered a more supportive front end that guided users through the process of building and managing the system. It also offered a more mature distribution system which allowed it to focus on wide planning applications involving hundreds or thousands of users.

Cognos TM1 offered a powerful calculation engine, more flexibility in modelling and rapid connectivity with source systems like the GL or ERP system

Or, to put it succinctly, TM1’s strengths were in the back end, whereas Planning’s strengths were in the front end.

Putting the two halves together

Naturally there had to be a starting point in combining the two tools and IBM chose TM1 as their starting point. They began to replicate the front end functionality of Planning by taking the look and feel of Cognos Planning Contributor and putting that on top of TM1. That has now been available for several releases and a Planning Contributor user would not be able to tell the difference on moving to TM1 Contributor.

That was the easy part. The more difficult part is replicating the success Cognos Planning had with a large and widely distributed user base. TM1 relies heavily on its powerful calculation engine that sits server side. That strength needs to be balanced with the requirement of delivering real time results to hundreds of simultaneous users. Typical TM1 implementations would previously have only expected to deal with dozens of simultaneous users.

TM1 Contributor has eliminated one of the bottlenecks, which was TM1’s chatty protocol. However the engineers need to make write back even faster than it was previously in order to satisfy the old users of TM1 who want complex calculations and the new users from a Planning history who want a lot of users.

The exciting news is that in the next release they have made great strides in addressing this. The release is due no later than quarter two this year, so we don’t have too long to wait.

Where to for Cognos Planning users

If you’re an existing Cognos Planning user then here at CDP we’re advocating an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach. Planning is still just as a good a product as it was previously and it will continue to be supported by IBM. It will also have a limited development programme based on user requests, however it will not be in full R&D mode.

We recommend that when the next model comes up, or your existing models start to look a little dated, that you look at TM1 then. You may find that Planning will still support your requirements and we will happily assist you in building a model in Planning. Equally, you may find that TM1 offers some benefits or functionality that makes moving over an attractive proposition.

We’ll be offering the best solution to you when all things are considered, not just trying to move you to TM1 because it’s shiny and new.

CDP's site has showcased on international design websites

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 09:25:59 +1300

The CDP website recently went through a rebrand and redesigned process. Part of the promotion of the new site was to submit it to international websites that showcase web designs from around the globe. Here is a list of some of the website we have appeared on:

Design elements used throughout the site:

Contact page: The maps we designed to look like folded up street maps.

Infographics: Were used to explain concepts and ideas visually.

Call to action: Buttons used throuhout the website

Tables: Simple tables with hover interactivity to improve readability.

Rebrand & Redesign: Welcome to the new CDP website

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 09:36:11 +1300

Over the past few months CDP underwent a rebranding of their company identity. Part of that process included redesigning their corporate website to better align it with the new style. This provided an excellent opportunity to make some major changes to the current website and adding functionality that was otherwise missing.

Our old website

Old CDP website 2007-2010

Some of the changes we've made:

A Content Management System (CMS)
Official CDP blog
Ability to post vacancies
Ability for visitors to upload their resume
Training course booking system

Content Management System (CMS)

We chose SilverStripe an Open Source CMS/Framework Platform for our Content Management System (CMS). As a result we now have added control and can easily add, delete and change content on the website to ensure it is always kept up-to-date and that our clients/visitors can find the information they are looking for more easily.

Official CDP Blog

SilverStripe also has a blogging module allowing us to exchange ideas, participate in discussion and a official area where people can read about new developments with CDP. Visit the blog.

Ability to post vacancies

Because we are such a specialised company sometimes it’s hard to find people when a new position opens up. Having the ability to post jobs (and/or register interest) on our website makes it easier for national and international people looking for a new challenge to get in touch with us. View current vacancies.

Ability for visitors to upload their resume

Along with Job postings we have also added the functionality where people can upload their resume should a suitable job come up in the future. Upload your resume.

Training course booking system

Training is vital to any business so we have made it easy for people to locate information management courses and we now have ability to book a course online. View courses.