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Monday, June 8, 2009
Business Intelligence as a Professional Lifestyle
Can Business Intelligence be considered a Professional Lifestyle? What do you think?
Since Business Intelligence includes data gathering, manipulation, discovery and reporting processes - with some "intent" - let me come at this from the angle of "innovation" which is suppose to be a key element of this forum.
I was recently reading Chris Van Buiten (Sikorsky's Chief of Technology & Innovation) perspectives on Innovation on the Sikorsky website and fully agree that:
I went to your blog and find it interesting - especially the video from Dr. Hans Rosling (from one of the TED conferences). Dr. Rosling conducted a study of some of the top medical students in Sweden (and colleagues of members of the Nobel Prize committee) and discovered that one problem with Innovation was not "Intelligence" or "Knowledge" but "pre-conceived" ideas.
In other words - "knowledge" & "experience" dampened "wisdom" or clouded making "sense" of the information presented to some very "intelligent" people.
Side note - framework for the hierarchy of knowledge = DIKW - Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom ... D and I technologies are architected for transactional performance (speed and highly normalized dBs) whereas K and W systems are optimized for relational associations (highly de-normalized dBs).
There is also a hierarchy of decision making that parallels the DIKW framework - along the lines of Bloom's taxonomy ... that being:
Choice Making ... Operational Activities ... at the D and I level Decision Making ... Tactical Activities ... at the I and K level Sense Making ... Strategic Activities ... at the W level
Dr. Rosling's presentation of multivariate health statistics over the past forty years reminded me of the works of Edward Tufte (Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information) - must reads for anyone in the business intelligence field.
"Business Intelligence" - in my mind - is about making "sense" of something - the "something" being the purpose or intent of research, discovery or innovation.
For the ALW forum - we have multiple intentions or outcomes or effects (safety, financials, all of the 'ilities, ...) but a common focus on Aircraft across the entire Lifecycle of an asset AND, hopefully, with the belief that Wikinomics (global peering, sharing and collaboration) can accelerate the advancement of the various intentions and effects our eco-system desires.
If that is the case - then I'll definitely agree with you Matthew that "Business Intelligence is a Professional Lifestyle" which engineers, innovators, inventors, and investors engage in.
The data for business intelligence is around us all the time, however very few make the positive use of it. I believe the primary use of this information could be in the area of running your business the way you intent to run it, competitive analysis and for doing innovation. The biggest challenge business intelligence faces today is the awareness, and instances where the awareness is there then the second biggest challenge it faces is the misrepresentation and hence the misuse of it.
I would agree with you that Business Intelligence is a Professional Lifestyle and may go as far as saying it is a “passion”.
With respect to applying Business Intelligence practices over an Aircraft’s Lifecycle, I can easily look to what Boeing is doing with my company, Mxi Technologies, through the GoldCare program and Airplane Health Management.
GoldCare is bringing real innovation to “business intelligence” in an open / collaborative manner to in-service engineering, maintenance and logistics operations that are increasing availability, reliability, maintainability and supportability in order to reduce cost and improve efficiency throughout the lifecycle of an individual airplane and the entire fleet.
Likewise, we have developed and implemented collaborative fleet management capabilities at IAE, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce and other OEMs that take raw data and information and manipulate it to deliver the knowledge to make better “business” decisions.
Business Intelligence is definitely a lifestyle and a passion.
I am a technologist, who has made some good business decisions. Rational decisions, cost effectiveness, return on investment, critical path, various statistical analyses - all enter into it. To me the technology means that I can look at the effect of varying one variable on to the result more easily. All the same, I have found that I can look for correlations all over the place, arrive at some with high degree of correlation, but it is still a question of is it the cause or the effect. Sleeping on it somehow seems to deliver an insight, which spending more tired time in front of the graphs often does not. I have read a little about how the brain makes decisions. Recently, a book called 'How we decide' seems to be of interest.
Do we make rational decisions even if the data is there? or are our decisions still so colored by our experiences that our decision making is being hijacked by the emotional part of our brain?
I don't know. I am just trying to learn. Look forward to the learned views.
Posts
Interesting question or statement or observation.
ReplyDeleteSince Business Intelligence includes data gathering, manipulation, discovery and reporting processes - with some "intent" - let me come at this from the angle of "innovation" which is suppose to be a key element of this forum.
I was recently reading Chris Van Buiten (Sikorsky's Chief of Technology & Innovation) perspectives on Innovation on the Sikorsky website and fully agree that:
"Innovation is more than just technology"
http://www.sikorsky.com/vgn-ext-templating-SIK/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=f629e39d40a78110VgnVCM1000001382000aRCRD
I went to your blog and find it interesting - especially the video from Dr. Hans Rosling (from one of the TED conferences). Dr. Rosling conducted a study of some of the top medical students in Sweden (and colleagues of members of the Nobel Prize committee) and discovered that one problem with Innovation was not "Intelligence" or "Knowledge" but "pre-conceived" ideas.
In other words - "knowledge" & "experience" dampened "wisdom" or clouded making "sense" of the information presented to some very "intelligent" people.
Side note - framework for the hierarchy of knowledge = DIKW - Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom ... D and I technologies are architected for transactional performance (speed and highly normalized dBs) whereas K and W systems are optimized for relational associations (highly de-normalized dBs).
There is also a hierarchy of decision making that parallels the DIKW framework - along the lines of Bloom's taxonomy ... that being:
Choice Making ... Operational Activities ... at the D and I level
Decision Making ... Tactical Activities ... at the I and K level
Sense Making ... Strategic Activities ... at the W level
Dr. Rosling's presentation of multivariate health statistics over the past forty years reminded me of the works of Edward Tufte (Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information) - must reads for anyone in the business intelligence field.
"Business Intelligence" - in my mind - is about making "sense" of something - the "something" being the purpose or intent of research, discovery or innovation.
For the ALW forum - we have multiple intentions or outcomes or effects (safety, financials, all of the 'ilities, ...) but a common focus on Aircraft across the entire Lifecycle of an asset AND, hopefully, with the belief that Wikinomics (global peering, sharing and collaboration) can accelerate the advancement of the various intentions and effects our eco-system desires.
If that is the case - then I'll definitely agree with you Matthew that "Business Intelligence is a Professional Lifestyle" which engineers, innovators, inventors, and investors engage in.
The data for business intelligence is around us all the time, however very few make the positive use of it. I believe the primary use of this information could be in the area of running your business the way you intent to run it, competitive analysis and for doing innovation. The biggest challenge business intelligence faces today is the awareness, and instances where the awareness is there then the second biggest challenge it faces is the misrepresentation and hence the misuse of it.
ReplyDeleteI would agree with you that Business Intelligence is a Professional Lifestyle and may go as far as saying it is a “passion”.
ReplyDeleteWith respect to applying Business Intelligence practices over an Aircraft’s Lifecycle, I can easily look to what Boeing is doing with my company, Mxi Technologies, through the GoldCare program and Airplane Health Management.
GoldCare is bringing real innovation to “business intelligence” in an open / collaborative manner to in-service engineering, maintenance and logistics operations that are increasing availability, reliability, maintainability and supportability in order to reduce cost and improve efficiency throughout the lifecycle of an individual airplane and the entire fleet.
Likewise, we have developed and implemented collaborative fleet management capabilities at IAE, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce and other OEMs that take raw data and information and manipulate it to deliver the knowledge to make better “business” decisions.
Business Intelligence is definitely a lifestyle and a passion.
I am a technologist, who has made some good business decisions. Rational decisions, cost effectiveness, return on investment, critical path, various statistical analyses - all enter into it. To me the technology means that I can look at the effect of varying one variable on to the result more easily.
ReplyDeleteAll the same, I have found that I can look for correlations all over the place, arrive at some with high degree of correlation, but it is still a question of is it the cause or the effect.
Sleeping on it somehow seems to deliver an insight, which spending more tired time in front of the graphs often does not.
I have read a little about how the brain makes decisions.
Recently, a book called 'How we decide' seems to be of interest.
Do we make rational decisions even if the data is there? or are our decisions still so colored by our experiences that our decision making is being hijacked by the emotional part of our brain?
I don't know. I am just trying to learn. Look forward to the learned views.