Trust the Process

My son and I are really excited about the new NBA season. We are Atlanta Hawks fans, so we’re not too optimistic about this year. We know the team is young and has decided to undertake a rebuilding process. Our mantra for this season is the now familiar “trust the process”.

If you’re not aware of the phrase “Trust the Process” comes from the Philadelphia Sixers rebuilding efforts over the past couple of years. What’s most interesting to me is that the formula for team success is much broader now. It is no longer just about having great players, but free agency positioning, analytical prowess, superior facilities and developing long-term successful franchises.

It's all about the process now.

I find the same can be said for delivering customer data and dashboard solutions.

Much of the historical focus when deploying data applications (customer dashboards, embedded analytics, etc.) has been on selecting the right tool. However, despite so many more great tools and increased investment in the BI space, successful implementation rates have not improved.

In a research piece by Dresner Advisory Services from May of this year, they highlight the fact that successful BI implementations are most often tied to having a Chief Data Officer (CDO). This makes a lot of sense because the CDO is just like an NBA team’s general manager. They bring accountability and experience as well as a process to make customer data solutions successful.

Here are some elements that make process so valuable to delivering data applications and solutions.

• Launch Dates - A process is the best way to mitigate against missing the launch date. The existence of checklists, status updates, and documentation offer a means to anticipate risks that cause delays. Remember that delays to the product launch or release directly impact revenue and reputation. Missing product launch dates is not something that goes unnoticed.

• Customer Credibility - When delivery dates are missed, requirements miss the mark or dashboard designs don’t serve their audiences product confidence is lost. Its not only the customer’s confidence that we need to be concerned about, but also the sales and marketing teams. Once we lose the trust of these audiences it takes time to regain it, not unlike sports teams who fail to deliver winning teams over many years (see: New York Knicks).

• User Engagement - When there is no process that means there’s no planned effort to understand the audience and deliver the dashboard design. If users can’t understand the data you’re sharing with them, a cancelled subscription is a near certainty.

• Applications, not Dashboards - The best dashboards are purpose-driven applications. Tools don’t deliver purpose. The process undertaken to understand and solve a real problem delivers a purposeful solution.

• A Complete Platform - A dashboard solution is only a means of displaying data. A process defines ALL the requirements. Having a process recognizes that a complete solution is needed which includes security, user administration and application performance optimization.

Much like NBA success, a successful customer dashboard implementation isn’t about picking a product (player), but sustained success over many years of increased subscription (tickets) revenue, fan engagement and loyalty. The path forward for distributing and delivering on valuable data applications is all about your process.

In the event that you don’t have a process or a CDO leading your efforts, click here to learn about the Juicebox Methodologies. It's our way to design and deliver successful, on-time applications as well as wildly loyal fans. Trust the process. It works.

The Future Belongs to Purpose-Built Apps. We're Betting On It.

“Purpose-built apps”

“Low-code app development”

“hpaPaaS”

“Citizen Data Scientists”

“Data monetization”

Witness the cloud of new buzzwords floating in the air. Let me see if I can knit these concepts together to shed light on their meaning and implications for the future of analytics.

Collectively, these phrases are a reaction to the long-standing challenge of getting more data into more hands. “Democratization of data” can seem perpetually right around the corner (if you’re listening to vendor marketing) or a distant illusion (if you are in most organizations).

At Juice we have a picture that we call ‘The Downhill of Uselessness’. It shows how the usefulness of data seems to decline as you try to reach more users. On the far left, the most sophisticated data analysts and data scientists are happily extracting value from your data. But as you extend to the outer edges of your organization, data becomes distracting noise, TPS reports, and little-used business intelligence tools.

Three barriers to democratizing data

The struggle of getting data to more people in more useful ways boils down to a few unsolved problems.

First, general purpose platforms and tools (data lakes, enterprise data warehouses, Tableau) can be a foundation, but they don’t deliver end-user solutions.

"Vendors and often analysts express the idea that you can master big data through one approach. They claim if you just use Hadoop or Splunk or SAP HANA or Pervasive Rush Analyzer, you can “solve” your big data problem. This is not the case.”

— Dan Woods, Why Purpose Built Applications Are the Key to Big Data Success

Second, reporting and dashboards deliver information, but often lack impact. In our experience, most data delivery mechanisms lack: 1) a point of view as to what is important; 2) an ability to link data insights to actions in a users’ workflow.

Third, the people who truly understand the problems that need to be solved don't have the technical capacity to craft re-usable solutions. We all have that elaborate spreadsheet that is indispensable to running your business and, frighteningly, only understood by a single person.

A better path forward

Finally, there is a realization that these problems aren’t going away. There needs to be better approach. It will come in two parts:

1. Focus on creating targeted solutions (applications) that solve specific problems. Apps can integrate into how people work and the systems where actions occur. They attempt to let people solve a problem rather than simply highlighting a problem. And applications are better than general purpose tools because they can bake in complex business rules, context, and data structures that are unique to a given domain.

2. Give greater impact and influence to the people best know the problems. It has always been unfair to ask technologists to create solutions for domains that they don’t deeply understand.

This direction aligns with Thomas Davenport’s view of Analytics 3.0 (from way back in 2013). He postulated that the next generation of analytics would be driven by purposeful data products designed by the teams who understand customers and business problems. (No offense, Tom, but we were griping about ivory tower analytics back in 2007.)

And so emerges a new model and new collection of buzzwords...

Purpose-Built Applications…

Solutions that start with the problem and craft an impactful answer. Their success is measured by fixing a problem rather than in terabytes of data stored.

…built using a high-productivity Application Platform as a Service (hpaPaaS)

Cloud-based development environments requiring little coding ability (‘low-code’) — but requiring knowledge about the domain and the problem to be solved.

…to be used by Citizen Data Scientists (CDS).

the people who know the problems most intimately.

At Juice, we may have backed into this trend or cleverly anticipated it. Either way, now I can say that Juicebox is a low-code hpaPaaS designed for CDS to create purpose-built apps. Better yet, we are now fully buzzword compliant.