What Are Actionable Insights? In this presentation I outline what Actionable Insights are and the Operational Analytics Software that can produce them. And because Business Intelligence and the Business Intelligence Software market can be so confusing for buyers I've attempted to position where Actionable Insights and Operational Analytics fit in the Business Intelligence 'story'.

1. What are
Actionable
Insights?
Introduction to Operational Analytics Software
…and why business intelligence isn’t
‘Confused’ by Luis Argerich

2. Businesses produce
dashboards, charts, data
visuals, maps and reports
every day but is it useful…
… or is it just more stuff?
‘Cathedral of Junk’ DoNotLick

3. This presentation is about
actionable insights – what they
are and how you get them.
‘Stop Go’ by Nana B Agyei

4. Ever played with Google Analytics before?
(Fantastic huh!)
Now imagine having the same analytics
across every aspect of your business…

5. What a wonderful world!

6. …are those views of data that cause
people to think new questions about how
processes work and take action
Assimilate insights Create curiosity Invoke an action
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS

7. Actionable Insights can be generated
using a bag of different tools...
’crystal ball’ by pasukaru76

8. Spreadsheets and Websheets
The first true ‘mashup’ tool
You can gather data from different
places together on a spreadsheet
New online spreadsheets have more
sharing and data visualization tools
like GANT charts, traffic lights, trend
arrows (and other cool stuff)
PROS CONS
• Easy to Learn
• Economy
• Struggle to cope with big data volumes,
particularly map resources etc.
• Lots of manual harvesting/normalizing data
• Lack richer data visualization tools
• Difficult to share and manage versioning

9. In-Memory ‘Guerrilla BI’ Software
Dashboarding and charting platforms
that exploit in-memory processing
and web 2.0 characteristics
More nimble and responsive that
mature platform BI players
More versatile than spreadsheet tools
for creating data views
PROS CONS
• Low skills overhead
• Surprisingly affordable
• Powerful data visualization, etc.
• Remove need for dedicated BI data
repositories or expert staffing
• Web/cloud based = no install
• More expensive than spreadsheet+
• Generally smaller vendors with less
financial strength
• Lack the installed base enjoyed by mature
BI platform vendors
• Tools that demand new ways of working

10. Mashup and PaaS Platforms
Emerged when web server apps and
Web 2.0 technologies appeared
Agile, code-free, easy to design and
deploy apps with powerful data
harvesting + Web 2.0 graphics / UIs
Friendly, affordable, powerful but…
Demand new thinking/change in IT
philosophy
PROS CONS
• Instant-on cloud based
• More capable at supporting ‘big
data’ views
• Low skills overhead
• Remove need for dedicated BI data
repositories and expert staffing
• More expensive than spreadsheet+
and guerilla BI
• Generally smaller vendors with less
financial strength
• Lack the installed base of BI
platform vendors
• Tools demand new ways of working

11. Legacy Business Intelligence Platforms
The most expensive but very complete
Normally require pre-processing of
data into data warehouse (OLAP)
Powerful, scalable, secure and can do
lots as long as you have the cash
Require expert skills and systems
Not terribly agile, costly to adapt
PROS CONS
• Completeness of platform
features and capabilities
• Financial strength of vendors
• Knowledge of, and close
integration with, core operating
platforms and workflows
• Expensive – not just to buy and install but
to employ dedicated systems and people
• Slow to adapt to changing requirements
(generally but there are exceptions!!)
• Self-service capabilities can be lacking

12. But maybe I’m going too fast…
(Let’s go back)

13. First Came Business Intelligence Software
What’s that? Software that
makes your business
intelligent?? (SIGH.)
GOOD GUESS, BUT YOU SEE THAT’S THE POINT: FEW IT
VENDORS EXPLAIN TO BUSINESS PEOPLE - IN WORDS THEY
CAN UNDERSTAND - WHAT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
SOFTWARE DOES TO HELP GET THEIR JOB DONE BETTER…AND
MAKE THEIR BUSINESS INTELLIGENT
Let’s start with what it is, and then explain what it’s for ;-)

14. What is Business Intelligence?
[Business intelligence] Computer-based
techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and
analyzing business data.
Wikipedia
Pretty broad then.
So (again) what’s it for?

15. It’s much easier to understand
what ‘BI’ is for when you break it
down into chunks of capability
Everyone has an opinion. The four blobs I prefer are:
1. Enterprise Performance Management
2. Daily Operating Controls and Forecast Reports
3. Operational Analytics
4. Social, Community and Predictive Business Intelligence

16. Enterprise Performance
Management
This is where ‘BI’ began – Scorecards, dashboards and alerts that report
on progress against strategic business objectives, normally focused
around Balanced Scorecard principles and methods.
It’s about defining strategy, then objectives, then measures, then
actions… and then installing a mechanism to report on progress.
In reality, dashboards look great and swishy but the most important thing
is to setup a small number of objectives that genuinely reflect what the
enterprise should be doing and keeping tabs on them.
Can you do this with a spreadsheet? Perhaps – but it’s sometimes
important to drill-down into the detail of data to understand how a figure
has been calculated. Also, sourcing data and reporting can become
time consuming and you don’t want to make mistakes. Also, BI tools help
to share performance and embody performance management thinking
into the day-job of managers.

17. Daily Operating Controls and
Reports
This is about meeting budget and forecast targets and providing an early
warning system for managers when areas underperform while there’s still
time to do something about it.
Many of these systems today rely on spreadsheets, basic charts and
tabular reports. Creating reports and updating budget and (particularly)
forecast data can be hugely time consuming for financial managers.
BI tools can gather and share this operational data – make it available
on mobile and ‘team TV’s – so that managers and workers are
encouraging to achieve more and work together to overcome areas of
poor performance.
Levels of competition created by powerful reporting tools can
encourage every individual to achieve more.
Federated reporting systems encourage managers to report in the same
way to build a consistent understanding of ‘success’

18. Operational Analytics
These are ad hoc or structured reports designed for the purpose of
revealing ‘new questions’ that demand managers to question norms of
behavior and seek to improve processes…
This is the real ‘actionable insights’ stuff that dreams are made of.
It puts the ‘wow factor’ into BI for senior managers and leaders who
worry more about what they don’t know than the performance
indicators they’re so aware of they’ve built a KPI system around them!
Many of these views are about visualizing pipelines, or building new
connections between data that aren’t well understood. Many of the
views of data require integration with third party data or ‘big data’ that
sheds new insights on known data. Maps are used lots too!
Often, the challenge with operational analytics is that discovery of an
issue requires a new or adapted system or process to be installed and so
these platforms can take on the form of ‘half BI’ and half ‘app design’

19. Social, Community and
Predictive Business Intelligence
I could just as easily have called this ‘other stuff’ but there are a lot of
ways business intelligence is used within a social and community context.
Business intelligence is not a stand alone or silo ‘thing’.
Increasingly communities require the ability to predict or understand stuff
and then, having understood it, they want to do something about it.
Business Intelligence, that once was the domain of a small number of
senior managers is now ‘social’ and becoming ever more-so.
Companies that originally employed BI for Performance Management
are using similar tools to predict depreciation of vehicles in customer
portals or predicting journey time on customer maps!
Many systems vendors are moving away from a two-tier (transactional
and analytical) data architecture to a one-tier (checkout SAP Hana)

20. Maybe, think of it this way…
Enterprise Performance Management
•Tells me what I need to know about what I know so I know
when to worry, who to prod
Daily Operating Controls and Reports
•Tells me what I need to know in order to fix something
before I can’t fix it anymore
Operational Analytics
•Tells me what I don’t already know
Social, Community and Predictive
Business Intelligence
•Tells our community about what we all want to know

21. But while this has all been
going on the world of
business has been
changed.
Social Networking
Mobile Computing
Consumerization of IT
From Brands to Lovemarks
Online Shopping
Globalization of Markets
Cloudy IT
Rise of Individualism

22. Operational Analytics is
now center stage in the BI
arena because businesses
are looking to…
‘A view from the stage’ Joe Strupek
GROW LOYALTY
REDUCE ERRORS
GROW CAPABILITY
GROW AGILITY
REDUCE RISKS
CUT COSTSGROW COMMUNITIES
FIND CUSTOMERS

23. Grow ‘Loyalty Beyond Reason’
It’s about building more personalized, event-driven,
fine-grained communications and reasons to engage
customers and stakeholders on their terms
It’s about giving your brand over to the people that
value it and developing ‘distant deep support
relationships’
To do all this you need to understand your customer
through their digital persona – ‘customer science’

24. Grow Communities
It’s about building communities – with
customers, suppliers, workforce, industry
partners…
The noughties is a BATTLE FOR COMMUNITIES
Many companies are valued by the size of
their community
If you can gain the attention of a big slice of
the communities that matter to your enterprise,
it becomes a BIG competitive edge

25. Find Customers
It’s about creating new customers from new
connections between the data you have access to on
customers…
With operational analytics tools you can build an
understanding of who in your business knows which
customers the best and identify the most effective
person/route to engage with them
Develop your knowledge of:
• Strength of ties
• Trust lines
• Association, identity and roots
• Shared life experiences
• Frequency of interactions
• Activities and habits

26. Grow Capability
Organizations don’t work in a bubble.
Few are best placed to deliver every competency they
need to operate their economic engine and discharge
their customer value.
Realizing the capabilities of customers, suppliers,
industry partners, professional associations – workforce
– enables executives to grow their ‘gross’ capability and
competitive advantage by harnessing the capabilities
of others.

27. Reduce Errors
It’s about reducing errors by having a clearer
appreciation of how key processes and pipelines of
activity work.
Operational Analytics tooling will show you how work is
progressing through each key pipeline in your business
to reveal bottlenecks, points of resourcing constraint,
predict where shortfalls in capacity or supply are likely
to occur.
Methods like Six Sigma and Customer First are all about
reducing the errors and process variances that occur
by understanding Voice of The Customer and the
consequential impact errors have on customer
experience. It all begins with capturing actionable
insights!

28. Cut Costs
‘Exchange Money Conversion to Foreign Currency’ epSos.de
It’s about achieving economies by understanding sub-
optimal processes.
Some organizations struggle to fire poor suppliers
because they don’t have the analytics to prove poor
performance that breaks SLAs.
Other organizations waste money on activities that
happen in their enterprise that do little or nothing to
achieve strategic outcomes (managers simply aren’t
aware how staff spend their time.
Most organizations lack clear analysis of processes that
underpin their business because IT systems are
fragmented as are management responsibilities.
…. And many other areas. Improvement starts with ‘AI’.

29. Grow Agility
‘Stretching Elephant’ David W. Siu
AGILIZATION = An enterprise that possesses the ability to
react to new market opportunities faster than
competitors creates an organization that always fits its
most profitable addressable markets.
Agility has much to do with:
• Alertness to change (early warning system)
• Preparedness to change (culture and systems)
• Ability to change (infrastructure and capability)
Actionable Insights are VITAL to agile businesses. They
are the ‘food’ that creative, capable leaders depend
on.
Grow ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS and you grow AGILITY.

30. In Summary…

31. Business Intelligence is ONE huge
category of the art of IT!
• Actionable Insights aren’t a piece of software – they’re what gets
produced from (primarily) Operational Analytics tools
• Operational Analytics tools range from spreadsheets to sophisticated
Business Intelligence platforms
• It’s not just about the technology, it’s about how creative you can be
to bring data together in new ways and understand how to harness
technologies to achieve the outcomes you seek
• Operational Analytics are center stage because they have great
potential to source AI and create curiosity in management teams that
drives all of the outcomes I’ve summarized in this presentation
• Operational Analytics tools are difficult to build a case for because
you don’t know what you don’t know
• To build a compelling RoI for BI in your business you’ll probably need to
think about the four main facets of BI and how they bring value

32. Or (if you’re into Blue Ocean Strategy…)
Operational Analytics tools will help you to:
Reduce
Remove
Add
Grow
• Errors
• Operating Costs
• Operating Risk
• BI Costs (de-skill)
• Loyalty Beyond Reason
• Communities
• Capability
• Agility
• A Culture of Curiosity
• New Customer Relationships
• New Ways To Discover Actionable Insights
• IT Infrastructure Costs
• Programming Overheads/Risks

33. Thank You.
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Ian Tomlin is a management consultant and
author. He's written several books and
hundreds of white papers and articles on
the subject of customer science,
organizational growth, technology and the
evolution of the workplace.
Books by Ian Tomlin:
Agilization – The regeneration of
competitiveness
Cloud Coffee House – The birth of cloud
social networking and death of the old
world corporation
SOS - Social Operation Systems