February 19, 2008
User Driven Environments
James Kobielus has an interesting post up about complex event processing and what it implies for the user interface:
The problem with the term "complex event processing" is that it seems to imply a complex UI--hence, that CEP's potential user base is limited to rocket scientists, Wall Street quants, IT industry analysts (gasp!), and other folks who are professionally obliged to handle (indeed, embrace) complexity.But complexity is part of the problem, not the solution, where CEP for I&KM is concerned. We can't stop the world of business from growing more multifaceted. But we can and should filter it all down to the simplest, most meaningful, most actionable experience, targeted specifically to each user, and contextualized precisely to each and every occasion.
Conceptually, James is clearly right--who's going to disagree with simple, meaningful, actionable and perfectly contextualized--but how do we get there?
Most obviously, this is a great opportunity for BI/CEP software to take a page from web 2.0 software and give users the freedom to customize their environments, and the tools to see how other users have done it. End users whose environments deliver precisely what they want will deal much more effectively with information than those who can only use what a developer (no matter how skilled) gives them.
However, even beyond tools for easy interaction and customization of their visual environment, in order to make users really effective--whether the context is CEP or anything else--applications should be driven by business problems, rather than the tools and technologies available to IT professionals. Users are the experts in their domains, and they will know what qualifies as "targeted specifically" and "contextualized precisely."
Ideally, you would have a platform upon which users and/or their colleagues in IT departments could build applications across the full range of business processes that exist in an enterprise. That way you could leverage IT resources and let users take advantage of a common environment, but still address their business processes in the way that best suits them.
Hmm, I wonder where I could get a platform like that...
Posted by Tim Wormus at 2:45 PM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2008
Evidence-Based Everything?
I have a short piece up over at CIO.com about how some of the difficulties candidates have in selling detailed polices mirror the troubles that can arise when trying to push an analytic initiative forward in the business world, and that the solution there, as here is to focus on the results:
Certainly, the challenges that bedevil candidates in trying to sell analytic policies are the same ones that people trying to implement analytic initiatives in the business world often face: Because numbers convey a sense of certainty, how do you use analytics without appearing to know more than you often do, while still clearly communicating the value of analytical thinking?In order to get there, people who want to bring analytics into their organization need to understand how to talk about the value of analytics to an audience which may not be interested in the behind-the-curtain details.
Effectively conveying the importance of analytics is a worthy cause, but trying to win over the uninitiated shouldn't be done to the exclusion of thinking about where we're going from here. As I mused in the last bit of the piece on CIO.com:
Politics has been on the forefront of some interesting cultural and business revolutions. Polling, cinematic television advertising and relentless "messaging" have all been part and parcel of successful political campaigns. The analytics tools exist to extend into the policy beyond the politics, and it may not be far off.
We've already stated to see the beginnings of such a change in Health Care with the advent of "Evidence-Based Medicine" and I expect it won't be long before the arrival of other areas where it's simply expected that decisions will be based upon the best available evidence.
As with most things, the public sector will likely lag the private, where we can already see the evidence- based methodology appearing in some novel places. For instance, Fog Creek software makes a bug tracking product which incorporates "Evidence Based Scheduling," a very clever method for producing reliable estimates for software development from developers who work at different rates and have different levels of accuracy in their own forecasting.
As for public policy, we already see this move to some extent in the debate over global warming, with both sides of the discussion arguing over the details of research and what it implies for policy decisions (this debate shows how important it is to have good data and lots of it, if you want to avoid the situation where the same data can be used to tell contradictory stories). I have a feeling that as the tools, and in particular, the data sources continue to develop, we'll see much more of this in the future.
Posted by Tim Wormus at 1:15 PM | Comments (0)
February 1, 2008
Seeing the Forest
The other day, a friend sent me a really interesting interview with a Hedge Fund manager (HFM), discussing, among other things, the sub-prime mortgage problems, and what it implied for rigorous analytic trading. There are some very interesting observations about what constitutes expertise, and how effective even the best analysis can be. Here's a key graf:
HFM: So I think in comparison to the overall quality of mortgage origination in the last, call it, 3 or 4 years, ours was really much better. So I think they're happy we did a better job than our competitors--but they're not happy they lost money.n 1: Is the person who ran that--is he going to get fired?
HFM: He was already fired.
But--to get back to the paradigm shifts--here was a guy who knows the market really, really well, who is a real expert in the nuts and bolts of mortgage lending, and really knew the collateral really well--but he was a true believer, and I think a lot of people were... true believers in the paradigm.
And there were other people at the firm, say, at the middle of last year, who were not mortgage experts, who were saying, you know, "I see the run-up in housing prices in some of these geographies, and I just don't really get it. I go down to Florida and see the forest of cranes, and I just really wonder, who's going to be in all those apartments... I see these commercials on TV, you know, about low-doc, no-doc mortgages--and there is no way, there is no way that this is not going to end badly... This is the perfect example of a bubble--and we should be short, we should be short sub-prime paper."
But the person who was the expert, the person who ran the sub-prime business, who traded sub-prime paper and issued the CDOs, he was a true believer in the paradigm: "In 2003, people said that the credit quality of the average sub-prime mortgage was deteriorating, and now look, those mortgages have performed fine. The sub-prime market works."
And, hey, he was the expert--you defer to the expert.
This touches on something which I've been thinking about recently: As we rely more on predictive tools and analytics, how can we avoid missing the forest for the trees? Nobody doubts the value of expertise, but what about perspective?
What if the non-expert traders in this scenario were able present a convincing data-driven case that the sub-prime mortgage was a bubble? How many tens of millions of dollars could that have saved?
It seems like traditional BI tools, which were designed by and for experts, rather than line-of business professionals, encourage the sort of tunnel vision that's described in the interview.
Posted by Tim Wormus at 3:45 PM | Comments (0)
Super Bowl Analytics
If you follow football at all, you'll know that this weekend is the super bowl. The Giants and Patriots will be playing, and there are a host of fun side events. Some of my colleagues at Spotfire have put together a cool analysis of likely score combinations and given it a cool visual representation.
Posted by Tim Wormus at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)
