Key Points and Questions

• Answer sponsored strategic questions all the time.
• Taking too long to answer a question results in lost opportunities.
• Good business leaders ask questions so they can guide their business to become great.
• Great business leaders prioritize their questions and dedicate resources to find the answers. They create and sustain the capabilities to make fact-based decisions.

In the late 1400s, wars and bandits around the key trade routes through the Middle East to Asia made it difficult for the Europeans to travel to India and China. Christopher Columbus believed there was a shorter route to Asia that could be found by traveling in the opposite direction. In order to prove his great theory, he set off in search of sponsors and support. He took his plans to the kings of Portugal, Genoa, and Venice. He was rejected by all. He even asked his brother to seek an audience with Henry VII of England, but to no avail.

In 1486, when he went to the Spanish monarchy of Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon, they were skeptical about his ideas. However, they saw the potential in Christopher Columbus and wanted to keep their options open. They kept him on a retainer with monthly allowances to prevent him from taking his plans to others.

When the Spanish army finally took over the last Muslim stronghold in Granada in January 1492, Christopher Columbus was finally given the opportunity he had been waiting for: The Spanish monarchs agreed to sponsor his voyage. In August 1492, Columbus left Spain (headed, despite what he thought, for the “New World”).

The Spanish monarchs financed the voyage of Christopher Columbus and his crew with the expectation of finding a new way to trade and new partners to trade with. If anyone had told them the return on their investment would be a new continent, gold, oil, and other bountiful natural resources, they wouldn't have believed it. In fact, the Spanish monarchs did not even expect Columbus to return.

Today, companies have a new world of data they need to discover. They need to understand the value of their data inside their four walls and the big data outside. To do so requires going on a voyage—a voyage of business discovery.

However, most companies have not even attempted this venture because:

• They do not have exploratory talent like Columbus and his small crew.
• They cannot fully envision the benefits.
• Politically, it is not typically the “good-old boy” who can deliver this but an aggressive outsider who can get past the politics and positioning to achieve the results.

And it is not even just businesses—or Spanish monarchies—that can benefit from this voyage of discovery. Most any organization can.

A friend who teaches public elementary school in Massachusetts shared with me that the drive toward data-driven education sometimes ignores the fact that data is being collected about humans—young humans. And what incents and dis-incents these humans may have nothing or everything to do with the material being taught and assessed.

For example, my teacher friend had a student who scored poorly on the state's standardized math and English language arts tests. The teacher and other staff pored over the data from the tests and other instruments to try to determine the best way to close the gap in this child's learning. What the data did not show, however, was that the student was going through a very difficult time at home. The best material and most focused instruction would not help this student learn because—it was discovered—he did not feel safe at home. The latter needed to be taken care of before the former could even be attempted.

When you think about it, teaching and learning are all about big data, and, indeed, education is moving toward a data-driven model. When a teacher gets a new classroom of students, he or she can read each student's records, examine past standardized test scores, and review work samples.

But the picture that the data draws is not really clear at all—at least, it is not complete.

“Ultimately, student achievement data alone only yield a ‘black box,'” noted Frederick M. Hess, author of Common Sense School Reform, in an article published in Educational Leadership magazine. “They illustrate how students are faring but do not enable an organization to diagnose problems or manage improvement. It is as if a CEO's management dashboard consisted of only one item—the company stock's price.”¹

Indeed, teachers have to explore further—go on a voyage of discovery. For example, do low standardized test scores reflect a low academic ability, or do they reflect the fact that the student's father lost his job, that his mother is working the second shift and so isn't home when the student gets off the bus, and that the student was hungry the morning of the standardized assessment?

A teacher who looks only at quantitative data—with little or no regard for the human being who is behind the data—will never fully realize the benefits that new teaching practices or units of study will uncover. The teacher needs to go on a voyage of discovery—he or she needs to speak to the student's family, his friends, past teachers, the administration, and—of course—the student himself.

Only then will the teacher begin to see and truly understand the student. The teacher can try new teaching techniques and present material in different ways. The teacher may find that the student is able to effectively demonstrate understanding not in conventional ways but through drawing and play-acting.

In this example, the teacher is able to understand the value of the data within the four walls of the school but is willing to go beyond that data to get to benefits as yet unknown.

Normal assessment of students is significantly overweighted with one factor: performance on continuous assessment. Arguably, this can assess the student's ability in several areas: memorization of facts and methods, logic, reasoning, and ability to perform under time pressure. But to understand how a student may perform in arts, science, and engineering, how do we assess their ability to visualize, innovate, inspire, and perspire? Wouldn't it be wonderful if for primary school students we could:

• Match students who learn better with hands-on and practical work with teachers that provide that experience
• Create classes and exams that cater to students “on-the-move” versus those who can sit for two hours quietly writing away
• Assess the parents' ability to provide a nurturing environment and teach them their role in education

The common theme across these three ideas is having actionable intelligence on our students to enable them to excel in learning. The strategic business question is, “How we prepare the next generation to improve the economic output of a nation.”

By acquiring data on the student's, teacher's, and parents' teaching and study habits we can visualize the right matrix of factors that will drive success. As long as we can act on the findings, we will be able to deliver better learning outcomes.

What can you do for those in your life who are learning to achieve a better outcome?

Government Intelligence

In 2009, I happened to need to visit the Singapore Embassy in Washington, D.C., for a dinner hosted by the past ambassador Chan Heng Chee. My family and I drove down from New York and had a fantastic time as usual. We stayed overnight, and, during the drive back home, I saw a sign for The National Cryptologic Museum located at the National Security Agency campus.

Curious, I took the entire family on a detour. We passed the National Security Agency (NSA) building and lots of odd, space-age buildings jutting out of the ground here and there. Were they complex listening and collection devices? Who knows? I was just excited about seeing the NSA and the Cryptologic Museum.

Once inside the latter, we saw the famous red phone of presidents, encryption machines, and the Hall of Intelligence Heroes: the men and women who broke codes, deciphered communications, and changed the course of history by providing actionable intelligence at the speed the government and military required.

I was so inspired by that trip; top-performing governments have efficient information acquisition and management structures. When information is placed into the hands of the right people, the right actions happen, often just in time to save lives or protect interests.

The National Security Agency has example after example of providing actionable intelligence to visionary decision makers—in enough time to prevent catastrophes. The means and methods and depth of information may be concerning, but the fact is that to protect against future threats we need to dig into the data share. (The biggest problem now is that with the exposure of Eric Snowden by the media, the bad guys know more about what to do to avoid detection.)

The Finnish have a word, “aavistus.” In the United States, we call it intuition. Many businesses have intuition about risks and opportunities, but it can be too time-consuming or expensive to collect all the data necessary to gel the intuition into fact-based decisions.

This is the dilemma that many professionals face today: They might have the right ideas and intuition, but there is not enough financial support or resources to get to real and true answers. However, this should not be a deterring factor for you—not just yet. Do some research to find out the challenges you need to overcome and what you are in for.

For my first intelligence project, we had to deliver intelligence quickly but had zero budget and very little manpower. So I did some research as to what we should expect to achieve and how to get there—much like you are doing now.

A great place to start is a book by Jeanne Harris and Thomas Davenport, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning.² The book details many examples of how companies used analytics to beat their competitors. The commonality among these companies lies in how they were able to better connect with their customers.

For example:

• Netflix uses the previous selections of its users to suggest the movies they might like to watch in the future. This allows customers to feel they can get more out of their services because when new movies come out, they will know what to watch. For the company, a higher success rate of suggesting movies to the customer translates into higher customer satisfaction and higher ratings. This, in turn, leads to more customer references and recommendations. The data was always there (sales receipts of purchases online).
• Another example of a company that has successfully used intelligence is 1-800-Flowers. It built an online flower business that essentially replaced FTD. 1-800-Flowers got to know its customers very well. As a result, the customer gets good service and good products at a good price.
• Will Smith, the actor, uses analytics to decide what movies he will star in. He looks at the genre, the story arc, the ending, and the role he will play. He then analyzes similar movies to see what their box office performance has been. Then he selects the role carefully based on the data.

It all starts with the strategic question. Before you get to the detailed answers with analytics, you need to have a culture of storytelling. The most successful companies train people to tell stories about their data. They are able to look at a set of data, see the relationships between the data and business problems, and then relate to senior management the current situation, opportunities, and threats, and recommended actions based on the facts.

But after reading this book I was left with many questions:

• How did all those companies and Will Smith actually deliver these dreamlike capabilities?
• What was actually improved, and how much was monetized?
• What was the business case for hiring and training analysts?
• What was the business case for data management?
• How could we deliver these capabilities fast, and what would governance look like?

Ask the Questions

Business decisions are based on questions about the current situation and how that situation can be improved. Those are called strategic business questions. It can be tempting to execute business decisions without as full and fact-based an answer as one would like when the data is hard to acquire, or when the team is becoming exhausted by trying to put together a story. It is a race to deliver answers before:

• The question has changed or moved on.
• The priority to answer the question has been reduced.
• The opportunity to answer is gone.

At a chief financial officers (CFO) roundtable I asked, “What's stopping you from delivering actionable intelligence?”

One CFO said passionately, “I have enough data, but my people can't give me answers!”

All executives need to ask, “Can I, today, afford to be lacking as much visual information as I need to answer my most pertinent questions?”

There is only one answer: “No.”

Your competitors may already have the capability to answer their most important questions. Even if they do not, the marketplace is changing. Without this capability, your business may not perform as well as it could. Your business might end up in the emergency room simply by making a seemingly small wrong decision or by not taking timely action.

When you have a business question that is important enough to spend money answering, you start off gathering the data that makes sense to answer the question.

One tip, however: Control your scope/control the investment. You do not have to gather data from around the whole world. You do not have to build a huge vault, nor invest in all sorts of computing power-scaling analysis right off the bat. You just need the precise data necessary to answer your question.

Controlling scope and working from strategic business questions will be a central theme throughout the discussion of implementing actionable intelligence.

Answer the Questions: Business Discovery

The crucial step that follows asking questions is—you guessed it—answering the questions. That is what the efforts of gathering data and creating actionable intelligence capabilities will be all about. By answering people's (leadership-sponsored) strategic business questions as well as possible with the available data and compelling visualizations, you can obtain the money and buy-in to grow your efforts, grow your team, and develop the project.

However, what strikes me as odd is that this seemingly simple and iterative pattern of asking a question and getting an answer is often not supported by traditional business intelligence (BI) tools.

Traditional BI tools operate by answering a predetermined set of questions. In this model, IT also plays a large role in churning out the fixed reports for the rest of the business.

In contrast, there is a movement to create a set of tools allowing a free-roam approach to answering questions in which answers can be created on the go by combining any type of data that's already available in a user-friendly visualization. This approach is more user-driven and allows users to create questions while they are digging in the data and explore the data for the right answer.

Gartner calls this approach “data discovery,” and QlikView, a key proponent of this type of BI, calls it “business discovery.” The discovery part lies in the opportunity for users to discover new facts in existing data and to discover new questions while exploring the data.

Here is QlikView's definition of business discovery (see Figure 2.1):

Business Discovery is a whole new way of answering questions that puts the business user in control. Unlike traditional BI, where just a few people are involved in insight creation, Business Discovery enables everyone to create insight. It's about workgroups, departments, and entire business units having access to the data they need to make better decisions.”³

In my article published in NUS (National University of Singapore) Think Business magazine (June 3, 2013) called “Big Data: What's the Big Deal?,” I go further to define business discovery as:

Taking a complex, real-time, constantly evolving picture of a busi­ness and translating it into easily understood visuals, these tools enable us to drill into the many levels of data, understand the connections between them and open up new understanding and opportunities. This process of “business discovery” enables businesses to see a new, more complete and more encompassing business model.

I would never say a company has a lack of reports, but, rather, it is typically missing the right analytical tools. During business discovery you should be asking questions like:

• Do I have the critical business information I need to make decisions?
• Are the data management teams maintaining the data well?
• To review historical versus present and future, is my data aligned between my old systems and any new systems?
• Are my people trained and capable of using the intelligence to make better decisions?
• Is there a feedback loop that allows us to show we are using intelligence the right way?

I believe business leaders need ready answers to their business questions. Knowing the status of business can't be a monthly exercise with data from weeks or months in the past. It should be consumable enough to be a daily or weekly exercise with a view into future possibilities based on current plans. Preferably, some modeling or multiple plans can be looked at to see what happens in various scenarios.

Leaders also need to provide visibility to their teams. With visibility, the team can make better decisions; team members can spend more time executing on opportunities they see instead of spending critical hours collecting data and formatting a report in Excel.

Energy spent on collating data detracts significantly from the time and energy of analysis. That is why actionable intelligence is the logical next step in the evolution of efficiency mechanisms for any type of business.

Visual Consistency and the First Tool

We brought in a team, the MLH Group, that is very good at visualizing the strategic business questions in QlikView. Helena May and her team brought a deep knowledge of data models and visualization, without which we couldn't make the information come to life.

When you use an Apple product, your experience includes consistency, ease of use, smoothness of interaction, and fit/finish. Each tool we created was built to meet the “Apple standard” of user experience. Keep in mind: We weren't IT, so we actually had to use these tools to do work when we were done creating them. It was in our best interest to make the tools easy, fast, and effective.

Off to the Races

Now you have seen how to discover and prioritize strategic business questions, the starting point in your journey, but we're not there yet. The questions are just the theoretical foundation, the justification for your project. What you need now is a practical foundation, something tangible, to go alongside the questions. To reach a satisfying answer you need something to base that answer on. You need data. And not just any data—you need the right data. It's a race, but don't make it a rat race.

Summary and Considerations