Today’s BI is reactive, strategic, casual, whenever, and reliable. With the introduction of Social Media and mobile business tools, the old walls between BI users and IT will disappear. Already BI decisions are becoming collaborative, made increasingly while on the move, making BI Actionable and agile.  Future BI will be proactive, operational, extreme, timely, and will demand accountability. How can IT help today’s BI make the shift and be ready for BI of the future? What risks are involved? What advantages will the new BI offer over the old BI?

Contributor

• • David Judson, Sr Director, Business Intelligence and Enterprise Applications, The Scott’s Miracle-Gro Company

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Transcript

Sanjog Aul:
Good morning and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. today’s topic is BI In 2011 And Beyond and our guest for today’s show is David Judson who is the Senior Director of Business Intelligence and Enterprise Applications at the Scotts Miracle Grow Company. Good morning, David.

David Judson:
Good morning. Thank you.

Sanjog Aul:
How are you doing, sir?

David Judson:
I’m doing well today. And yourself?

Sanjog Aul:
I’m doing just fine. And are you ready for this Labor Day weekend and have a long few days of fun or is it still work there?

David Judson:
It’s still work for another couple of days but certainly looking forward to having a three day weekend, especially with school starting.

Sanjog Aul:
Yes, very good. All right. So how’s work overall? Do you think the work, the way we are doing today versus what we were doing a decade ago, has that changed? And of course I’m going to tie right that into the topic since your primary role seems to be related to bringing business intelligence related competencies into an organization and actually add business value. How has that particular work changed and what are the things that are causing you to change? Is it the change in technology and more feature functions brought to you or is it the very business and the computing paradigms together forcing us to change the way we have been doing things?

David Judson:
Yeah, so there’s, I think there’s been a lot of change in the BI space. I remember back when it was called, you know, decision support back in the mainframe days through client server now and to the things that we can do today. So certainly things have changed and evolved over time. I would say that the rapid Speed of change continues to increase in BI, just like it does in other areas and it’s interesting. Today everyone has an opinion, a product, or some kind of approach to deliver BI whether it’s to anyone, anywhere and we read articles and sit through webinars that really say that BI is quick and easy, that there’s a lot of hype around the business intelligence but I think that those of us in the trenches who have lived through the evolution of business intelligence know this just isn’t true.

David Judson:
What we find is that there are definitely better capabilities in BI toolsets today, whether you’re talking about a niche player, an ERP player, or somewhere in between and I know that things are definitely better today than they were three years ago, five years, 10 years ago, and the capabilities that we can deliver to business.

Sanjog Aul:
So when you say that things are changing and people are putting a lot out there and they’re saying BI is easy, or are they saying should be easy? So is it still a holy grail or we have nailed this.

David Judson:
We have not nailed this, in my opinion. We know that data is growing at an incredible rate, and the business appetite for data will continue to grow. Companies are looking at their structured data and trying to make sense of what’s happening, whether it’s with sales or markets or consumers and what I see is, you know, the holy grail, as you describe it, is not what happened, but getting more into what’s going to happen, or do we understand why something happened and I think a lot of companies are challenged with what’s the causal data. So we may have our sales data, we may have our supply chain information, but what’s really causing consumers to buy our products or not buy our products? What is causing our supply chain to be less effective based on either commodity costs or other things? And that’s what business leadership needs to be able to see. We also see that there’s a lot more data coming through that’s less structured, whether it be social media, whether it be video or audio, where we’re trying to either understand traffic patterns in stores, or we’re trying to understand consumer sentiment within the web. So there’s a lot of different ways to look at this data, which makes it even more complicated.

Sanjog Aul:
So do you think the advent of the new technology is kind of telling people that the new normal is possible? So let’s really go gung ho. Is it tail wagging the dog here in terms of what business can do or wants to do, or do you think the problems have been age old in terms of the questions that you said business would like to know that why is my customer buying what they’re buying and what the changes in trends are? I think those are age old questions. So have we become any better with these new tools that have been offered and or we still have to look somewhere in the future, 20,050 for us to get those answers?

David Judson:
Well, no, I think that these are age old questions and I think the way we approach, you know, whether business leaders or IT leaders, the way we approach this is really the challenge. And so when you look at the proliferation of tools that are available today, many of those are aimed at the cubicle worker who now can put together some kind of presentation on top of some data that they may have in the number one BI tool in the world, which is Microsoft Excel, and be able to drive something that either looks pretty for someone or gets into a very answers a very specific question. I think what we’re still missing is the ability to answer the most important questions and then be able to adapt as those questions change.

Sanjog Aul:
So would you say the reason we are not able to answer the important questions is that a shortcoming of the tools that have been provided, the ability for them to slice and dice or we perhaps are missing the point or we don’t know how to use those tools to get those right answers or the most wanted answers? Where’s the limitation?

David Judson:
Yeah, I think it’s twofold. I think let’s talk about the business first. The ability for business leadership to know what the most important questions they need to be asking based on their products and services and have a consistent view of that, I think is one of the biggest challenges we over the past decade to two decades have really figured out how to do ERP systems, how to mold ourselves to the processes and things that are happening within our business models. What is less specific and what we can’t really shoehorn into is business intelligence because that’s where each company differentiates themselves. How they come to market, to provide services and products to their consumers, how they know their consumers, how they leverage media spend or promotions or their supply chains to get the right products to the right place at the right time. And so I think that on the business leadership side, that’s one of the biggest challenges and then beneath that is really understanding do we have the right data models and the right data flows that support this new age of thinking and trying to be as adaptable, flexible and agile as we can be. As those business questions continue to change, we tend to be almost have our feet in cement when it comes to the data.

David Judson:
And if we have that, then we’re not going to be able to get to a point where data becomes information. Information enables decisions and those decisions can generate action. The faster we can move through that chain of events, the better off we’re going to be. But that’s really where you get the people in the processes mixing in with the technology, .

Sanjog Aul:
With all that you just said, it looks like that all the analyst reports and all the latest hypes that are being put out there, or the tools and technologies that people are putting out there, everything looks like that people are trying to slap a cool tool which could pull data out from wherever the sources that you have and perhaps paint pretty pictures and perhaps also provide some insightful information based on that data. But it looks like that the foundational element, which is that very data, could be the culprit where we have to first go and fix that or perhaps start extracting or generating data at the right sources for us to really get useful information which will truly give those most wanted answers. Do you think that’s where we are for the most part across industry?

David Judson:
Yeah, I would agree that in many cases that’s where we’re at and we call that putting lipstick on the pig, right. We’ve got data that we’ve had around for a long time and we’re trying to integrate that with other data or we’re just keeping them in silos and so we’re continuing to perpetuate some of the challenges we had before we had some of the tools. Now that’s a very broad brush statement. There are companies, there are industries that are further ahead on this evolution because of the fact that they’ve got real focus and their go to market strategy is driven by data. So insurance companies, understanding how they can provide the right quote at the right time, the right coverage to be able to capture that sale may have some very deep organic analysis, but it may still be siloed in a specific area.

David Judson:
We also see that in the consumer packaged goods area where some companies have done a lot on the data modeling side to really understand things as simple as when a hurricane comes through, what are people going to buy and what are the biggest sellers so they can react. So I think that you’re going to find that across industries and then depending on the companies within those industries, varying levels of maturity but certainly the hype in the media around different capabilities of tool sets and now when you add in some of the mobility features and tablet PCs, there’s some hype there on what we can do with making a good graphical user interface, tying into some of our data.

Sanjog Aul:
Now you made an important point regarding some companies ahead of others. Now that could also be a direct, directly proportional to the amount of emphasis and importance that’s attributed or allocated to business intelligence function. So if it’s a manufacturing firm, and if they feel that I do not need to have as much BI, perhaps they will put it on that back burner or perhaps not invest as much but do you think going forward, with everything being so data and information centric, can any company say this is not my number one initiative?

David Judson:
I don’t think so. And I think if you look at any survey that’s come out in the last five years, whether it’s Forrester, whether it’s Gartner, BI has typically been at least in the top 10, if not in the top three to five every single year and so companies, CIOs, business leaders recognize that they need some degree of analytical capability in the business intelligence area. How they actually translate that into either projects or initiatives or business focus, I think is variable. And what I’ve seen in different companies that I’ve peered with, some are very far behind and are just entering into this because they’re either just finishing their ERP or they haven’t, to your point with manufacturing, haven’t figured out where the right benefit is and where the right business value is. But I also see that there are some that have been doing this for a decade or more and they’ve been looking at areas like trade promotion, management, media spend, understanding the causal factors in their industry and so therefore they may be on their third generation system. And we all know that many BI projects fail, so they’re still in the evolution of learning, but they’ve paved some ground that other companies just haven’t gotten to yet.

Sanjog Aul:
Now if we were to go back to our very initiatives, that you may be involved in your organization and so do your counterparts and others, what is the directive that’s offered that is on this BI function? What are you expected to deliver? And is that directive in line with, in your view is the right directive which will push the right budgets, it will push the right initiatives and eventually give the business what it really needs in order to get ahead and become more sustainable, profitable and grow?

David Judson:
That’s a great question. At the Scotts Miracle Grow Co. About a year ago, senior leadership came to the table and said we’re going through a change, we’re going to a regional model in how we have regional offices. But senior leadership was getting from each one of the five regions, a different set of PowerPoint slides on how their region was doing. They didn’t have a common set of KPIs and a common set of measures by which to measure everyone. And so what we’ve done is we spent some time understanding how to get to a single version of the truth as it related to specific data that everyone could agree on and that we knew was rock solid. And that ended up being our sales to customers and then the point of sale at the retailer. So we had that information as well as our inventory position and margin.

David Judson:
And so what we did was we put together a business intelligence system that allowed the senior executive to be able to see, whether by region, by customer or by brand, exactly what was happening across those categories of point of sale, sales, inventory and margin. And then we allowed the next layer down of those regional presidents, those brand presidents, to be able to see just within their areas, back to customer and back to region. And then we supplemented that with the lower level set of data that really gave the analysts the ability to answer the question of a regional president who was answering the question of the CFO of the company or the coo, and pulling that all together with data we had that was well modeled already, but still had some nuances that people were doing differently and clarifying that really made a difference. That’s how we got that started. And now we’re going to grow on that into causal data.

Sanjog Aul:
So now you basically said here is that you got some quick wins which allowed people to feel that they could trust BI or this very initiative or this new way to slice and dice data and perhaps then they started investing in it. So would your message to the folks who are still struggling to give while BI looks like a good initiative, but many of people say that they do not have the right level of investments going in. So does it really come down to again, the same trust building or doing some giving some quick wins to the business for them to get it?

David Judson:
I would absolutely say so. And I would also say that we had strong leadership, sponsorship of the project and the program of what we were trying to accomplish. And that is critical as well. It wasn’t an IT driven initiative, it was a business driven initiative.

Sanjog Aul:
Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back and look at the data that we collect. And of course we spoke about the right level and type on quantity of data that we may be collecting may not be sufficient in order for BI to really do what it’s supposed to do. So that’s one problem. But then whatever we collect how much of that truly, even after slicing, dicing and producing those cool looking reports is truly actionable and insightful and has got direct relevance to what you want to achieve. So are we just creating more reports for the sake of it or there is something more that we have to do and how that more is morphing in 2011 and beyond. We’ll discuss that more. Please stay tuned.

Sanjog Aul:
We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul:
Welcome back. So in short, what type of BI data should we be collecting and what is truly needed? How much of that is truly insightful and actionable for it to make a difference so that your investment in extracting and pulling those cool reports is worth it. And then that very definition of what’s insightful and actionable, how has that morphed now? I mean over the years and now how is expected to morph going forward?

David Judson:
Yeah, I think that we find that everyone in the business, whether they’re an analyst all the way up to a senior leader, has an opinion on how much data is enough and what’s the right information and typically the boundary line is where someone says well you don’t have everything I want right now, therefore you don’t have enough. But when you look at being a common denominator across every request, then you’re going to end up with too much and so I think what’s most important is making sure you have the data that is relevant to the business that you’re in and is specific to the questions that are being asked and that is really a double edged sword because if you get too specific, then the next question that comes up you can’t answer. But if you are and if you are too vague on what you have got, then you end up with this ocean of data that you are unable to get through to get the right answer and so as I mentioned before the break, our project that we recently completed focused on the data that we knew the best and had the most value to the business right now that they were struggling with. And then we move into what are the most important components of data.

David Judson:
So for example, when we look at or when any company looks at sales, they have to look at what other factors help me in my ability to sell more and to know my consumer. Is that media spend and where I’m spending my media and what’s productive? Is it promotions within a store? Is it in our business? Is it the effect of weather on our business and being able to understand that what are the key causal factors that help? And I think that’s how you start to clarify the data that you do have. But you really have to determine what’s that most important set of data that you’ve got for your business and then determine how you can extend it into areas that add more business value.

Sanjog Aul:
Now what you just said today is relevant today and if you were to play analyst or if you had to play a clairvoyant or futuristic, what is your prediction in terms of what needs that you anticipate coming down the pike?

David Judson:
Well, I would liken it to this and in the same way that we’ve seen people move from paper roadmaps to a GPS to now it’s on their mobile device we’re in a similar transformation of information. And whether we recognize it or not, information is being integrated everywhere on our behalf, particularly in the consumer area and therefore it’s going to bleed into the business area. So the integration of BI into the actual business fabric of decision making and the ability to take action, as you mentioned before, is really becoming the present for some, depending on their maturity and it truly is the future for others. We’ve talked about information anywhere, anytime on any device but I think we need to make, we need to expect BI to become more organic in our daily business process.

David Judson:
So what we do today and we transform into tomorrow is really the operational awareness we have. It’s fact based, it’s fluid and it’s flexible. And so I believe in the future that we should expect BI to deliver more than just the basics of what happened. We should be able to see what new markets we can move into, what new products and services are in demand and we’ll be able to do and if we get to them before our competitors do, they’ll be more profitable and also to expand our existing channels and that could be across channels that exist today as well as channels that don’t exist today that will open themselves up in the future.

Sanjog Aul:
Now you used a very good way to describe where BI is weaved in into the very fabric. So do you think there are some easy ways or achievable or actionable ways to make BI an experience versus data point or a tool as you go about doing business?

David Judson:
Yeah, I certainly don’t think that business intelligence should be a destination and I think that we often approach it that way. Today we look at it as well, I need to go to my BI report or my BI dashboard or scorecard and so what we’re doing is we’re making BI a destination as opposed to organically within how we do our jobs and how we do things and so I think part of that is because we’re used to, we’ve gotten used to big ERP systems that handle our day to day operations and so we’ve got very automated in that way. But when we think about business intelligence, when we think about analytics, whether it’s predictive or modeling or what have you, we find that we expect individuals to really understand the context of the data and the information that’s coming, but they also need to be prepared to make a decision based on that because there’s got to be some degree of action. The end result of good information gathering shouldn’t be a nice picture on a dashboard. It should be something that we can take action on that will either drive productivity, reduce costs or drive profitability into the business.

Sanjog Aul:
So if you were to go and tell the rest of the world people who are vendors or people who are adopting, what is it that they should be working towards in order to prepare themselves to definitely use BI and weave it as part of they’re doing business versus something which is standalone, which you go and pick data out as you need it, what is it that they have to do differently?

David Judson:
Yeah, I think first of all, if you’re in it, you’ve got to know the business. So if you’re an IT analyst or developer or even a manager that’s responsible for delivering some of these services and solutions, either on a daily basis as a part of production, support or building new projects, you have to know the business, you have to understand what the key decisions are and what’s most important to the business and turn that into solutions that get to that and I find so many people today just know the technology piece or just interested in building something that’s not sustainable, and they’ve really missed on what the business is trying to accomplish. When I look at the business side of things, business really needs to have a strong opinion on what they’re going to do and what’s the business value they’re going to drive before they look for a cool dashboard that IT can deliver or a financial analyst can deliver to them and I think that’s really where the best companies are doing this well, because they either have a small, medium or even large organization around what’s most important from an information perspective to drive decisions. They may have some statisticians or mathematical modelers in a team that is really churning through the data to find truths that they can then turn back into key performance indicators or key measures. They’ve got parts of their organization that are really sifting through social sentiments or looking at what’s actually happening through web traffic

David Judson:
and so they have a real sense of what’s going on that they can then bring back in and say, okay, this is how I want to measure it and they might try and measure it for three months and then throw it away, but they’ll get the data that supports that and they’ll move forward as opposed to just waiting for IT to build the next report.

Sanjog Aul:
Now, one approach is to keep looking back and hindsight is 2020, so perhaps you can get some insight. But the way the business models, the mindset, or anything else that you see with respect to how people are looking at getting BI or their business to have a virtual crystal ball and expect somehow BI to deliver, then what we do today should change as well in order to deliver that virtual crystal ball. So number one question is, can we deliver it? And if yes, watch that magic up your sleeve or anybody else, which is going to make this happen because it doesn’t look like it’s happening today.

David Judson:
Yeah, your analogy of a crystal ball is interesting. I would say that when I think about a crystal ball or when I think about the books we read or the movies we see where there’s an oracle of some sort that gives you an answer. Typically, you don’t get an answer that you can really do anything with. But in hindsight, later on, as you mentioned, you’ll be able to understand what the answer meant. I kind of look at it more as a Magic 8 ball. There’s a limited number of answers I’m going to be able to get, but those answers are going to be very directional to what I’ve put into the questions that I’m asking and so being very specific to, and we talked about this before, being specific to what is actually happening within my business. So we’re a consumer packaged goods company, so we need to understand what our consumers are doing, even though we’re selling to customers like the big box stores of the Home Depot or Lowe’s or department stores like Walmart or Independence.

David Judson:
And so we need to understand what the consumer is doing, we need to understand how the consumer is working in their yards. That is going to be very different than an online retailer who is trying to build in loyalty programs so that when someone buys one article, they are immediately offered another article at half price and so you really need to understand your business model first so that you are not trying to ask questions that are in that crystal ball area, but now they are. They’re whittled down to what makes sense for your specific business to get the most value and then be really good at that.

Sanjog Aul:
Now, in terms of accountability, we’ll take a quick break, but then before we go to the break, something to think about for listeners and for you, David, in terms of accountability all along, in many cases people say somebody who is running the BI function is like a weatherman. They can predict, but then if something doesn’t go right, they don’t lose their job going forward. How do you think that accountability will be handled? Should it be such that you cannot no longer be weatherman and try to basically take responsibility of any data, any prediction, if you will, that you’re putting out based on which a business is going to invest. You got to be held your feet to the fire if something doesn’t go right or if it does not turn out to be what you just said. So let’s discuss accountability when we come back. Please stay tuned.

Sanjog Aul:
Welcome back. So David, what do you think with respect to a BI lead, you know, seems synonymous to a weatherman and then when it comes to truly handling that accountability, how much of that should fall into this leads camp versus the very business which they are trying to help?

David Judson:
Yeah, you bring up an interesting analogy because when you think about weather prediction, to your point, we can’t it’s not 100% correct, but it certainly puts us in the right direction. And I believe that we can build models that get us part of the way there. And then as we refine them over time based on the value they return, they will get us closer and closer to predicting the future. Now at the same point in time, when we look at how business changes as the future changes, we’ll have to adapt those models and some of those models will no longer be relevant or they will lose enough of their relevance that we have to wholesale change them and I think that’s where some of the the leading companies, they have the models based on their business and they’re able to drive those into their BI and get the right information. You know, I think about Hurricane Irene that just came through in the last week and did any the exact models that were predicted didn’t all come true in all cases, but we did give enough information and get enough information to make decisions by governments, by local authorities, by people on what they should do based on what was coming and I think we can do the same thing as it relates to business as we hone those models to the specific businesses we’re in and we’re trying to do and that relates to the strategies as well because those models will be driven in some cases by the strategies we have.

David Judson:
In other cases those models will generate the potential for innovation into new strategies in new areas as we seek to understand how markets are changing.

Sanjog Aul:
Now, when you say this, the answer that you gave do you think a company which says I’m going to invest X number of dollars and not investing in BI just for the sake of bi, but they need to deliver shareholder value, they have to show profitability, they have to sustain themselves and grow all of that if it is hinging upon the information and if that quality of information is not up to the mark. So this business intelligence lead weatherman could say, oops, sorry, but that doesn’t solve the business results or the adverse impact that it will have on how the company does going forward. So somebody has to take ownership, somebody has to be accountable going forward. Given we are getting more and more, you know, we are going to be relying more and more on business intelligence because we are in information age. Who takes that responsibility or should take that responsibility?

David Judson:
Sure. Well, first of all, I think it’s a shared responsibility between the person in the role of delivering business intelligence and then the individual business partners or teams that they are working with. And the reason for that is it needs to be targeted to what that business leader or that business group is trying to accomplish and a great example of that is the Scotts company is impacted significantly by weather as people look to work in their gardens and on their lawns and so to build a model that says here’s the right way to integrate weather with our sales cycle based on historical sales and then drive that through the supply chain to determine how much inventory should be at our retailer stores. Many people are not willing to say, well I think it’s going to be a wet spring, so I will reduce the amount of product and move into stores and risk an out of stock situation where we have lost sales because of that and so certainly you have to be able to balance the intelligence and the models you have with also the appropriate level of approach, whether it be conservative or aggressive, depending on what your business is trying to accomplish. So that you either don’t end up in our case with no stock and therefore no sales or so much stock that you’ve inundated your retailer.

David Judson:
And so there are things that we can do as it relates to business intelligence, but there are also limits and we shouldn’t oversell what we can do with business intelligence, but we can get that tighter and tighter and tighter as we improve those models.

Sanjog Aul:
So if you were to really give thumbs up or thumbs down to one or more business intelligence related initiatives, what are those benchmarks, thresholds or standards based on that individual company? Yes. We cannot generalize across industries, across companies. How does one develop those benchmarks and thresholds?

David Judson:
You know what’s interesting is without business intelligence, every company, every organization has smart individuals that have a lot of experience and typically that experience will dictate to them in their gut what they feel is right. Business intelligence adds the data driven components to those gut feelings and either says your gut feeling is not right in this circumstance or should be considered as needing some adjustment, or your gut feeling is right on and the data supports it. Are we still going to make mistakes? Absolutely. Because there are still new factors that come into play that we didn’t anticipate or we weren’t aware of before, such as some of the recessionary pressures that different companies are going through now. As an example, in 2008, 2009, most companies really struggled as the recession hit. Scott’s actually did very well because people stayed home, they didn’t vacation, and they spent more time in the yards and if you look at other industries, some industries fared very well, some struggled, and now they’re faring well.

David Judson:
So these types of challenges that come in and hit any company are going to really change some of the models or impact the models in ways that weren’t expected. That’s where you just need smart people looking at the information so they can make the right decisions. That’s where BI doesn’t always deliver the exact decision, but provides that information that smart people can make good decisions and take the right action.

Sanjog Aul:
Do you think if you and I were to sit down five years from now, 2016, and discuss about BI 2016 and beyond, would we still be in this fuzzy state of what BI can deliver?

David Judson:
I think it would depend on the industry and the company. And I don’t mean that that one industry is going to be better than another. I just mean that there will be different maturities as companies go through this and as people go through this. I would say there’s a risk that we could be fuzzy and that primary risk is do we have smart people who are really dedicated to understanding what technology can do to enable the business and the business drivers, or do we continue to have this divide between business individuals wanting some degree of information and IT people still focusing on the Technology to deliver it and just kind of check in the box, or have we really integrated the two together so that as technology evolves, because you and I both know technology will evolve over the next five years. It will evolve faster than we expected but will we be able to leverage that technology in a way that makes us, all of us, business and technical side, able to deliver decisions and the right actions? And I think that the companies and the individuals that figure that out and put the right processes and people in place to do that in 2016 would come out winners and sitting at the table, they go, we figured this out.

Sanjog Aul:
So do you think any areas that you would like to see when we sit down in 2016 and talk BI 2016 and beyond, any areas that which you today are not confidently able to say we nailed it or aced it, you will like to see that happen and you see signs of that, evolution?

David Judson:
I think that a couple of areas concern me a little bit just because they’re still evolving and I don’t know what the real true value is other than some of the hype, particularly in the social media area. How do we actually mine the consumer sentiment of what’s actually happening and how do we turn that into sales? How do we turn that into organic understanding of consumers and their relationship to either our brands, to our products or our services? And I think that’s one area that there’s a lot of interesting work that’s going on, but I’m not convinced that that work is actually becoming something that companies can profit from. As I look at the whole area of mobility, the fact that a smartphone can do so much more today than it could five years ago or cell phone, could we even forget that it’s a phone? But when I look at what smartphones can do today in 2016, do I expect them to be the business intelligence tool of choice? Well, no, I think the glass size will continue to challenge us on that. But the tablet is very intriguing because as a consumer device, and when I say consumer, I mean something that you typically consume with information with, I think there will be more interactive activity in that device. It just makes people that much more mobile to make decisions in place in a store next to a consumer, as opposed to where we are today, where we’re behind, we’re in an office cubicle and the consumer and the customer is somewhere outside of our building. I think those are some really powerful things that will be changing and changing the way that we all do business.

Sanjog Aul:
So would you say that a real value of any business intelligence related output or whatever value it creates is primarily when you are at the customer touch point and that’s where you give something timely to them in order for you to further the sale, cross sell upsell or satisfy their needs or handle their grievances well. Is that we are all working towards.

David Judson:
Yes, I would say that. I’d say that in one other item, but I would certainly agree that getting more profit through better products and getting more consumers engaged with our products and services is absolutely a space that BI needs to deliver value, not can it needs to. The other piece of it is the innovation piece, the ability to take the information and data that we have, work that through models, work that through business intelligence to be able to come up with innovative new products that consumers and customers are looking for or may not even know that they are looking for today. But that’s really also where we continue to grow our pipeline of products and services both of those are critical. So it’s penetrating the market even further and getting those additional sales that happen but then it’s also innovating and bringing new things to the market.

Sanjog Aul:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and look at if we were to truly get ready for the evolution that’s coming up. What are those housekeeping and cleanup exercises we have to do within our organization so that we can make the most of what is going to happen in the BI space going forward and that we will be able to leverage it to the fullest. Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back and explore.

Sanjog Aul:
Welcome back. So as it looks like that in order for BI to be successful, it will have to be proactive, it will have to be operationalized, and then it will have to be truly extreme. We might do things which we have never done before. It will have to be really available, timely and then of course, people who will be handling all this will need to be accountable for all this. Now, given all the different expectations we have kind of set for the future, how do we get ready and start changing things? What are the set of steps that you would recommend organizations do so that they are not, you know, don’t see the opportunity come and pass by where they have not exploited it fully with respect to BI?

David Judson:
Yeah, I think there’s a couple things that everyone needs to do and the first and foremost is you really understand the data that you have today and what is the value in what you already have. Organizations should not be spending their time trying to go get something else and not leveraging what they already have. If you’ve got really good point of sale information so you know the consumer and know what they’re doing, start with that because maybe as a retailer you can look at that and look at what’s in your shopping, what else is in the shopping cart, and then expand from there. But know what you’re good at today and then also determine where you’re weak today and determine are those weaknesses, areas that matter or don’t matter. Because sometimes we get caught up in the noise of, well, we don’t have this and this and this, therefore, how am I going to be able to move forward without it? But really understand what the value of that is because there’s only so many resources that we all have to be able to apply this. So you want to apply your resources in the area that give you the biggest bang for the buck.

David Judson:
In addition to that, if you don’t know the business and if you aren’t aligned with and integrated with and partnered with business leadership and decision makers, then most likely you’re only working at the lowest level in the organization and therefore you’re not business intelligence. You’re just a reporting organization and that’s not going to cut it in the future. When we talked about that 2016 today we need to evolve out of a reporting organization and we need to truly be business intelligence organizations, that means we need to understand our data, we understand the business value of the information that’s driven from that data and stop doing things that don’t provide business value. And that’s going to be hard because sometimes the business doesn’t want to hear you say we need to consider stopping this, but really prioritize what’s going to make the biggest difference for the business.

Sanjog Aul:
Now what mistakes do you think people are making and have made in the past which have prevented them from being able to leverage BI in say 2008, what they could have done by 2011 and now going forward, they might be making the same mistakes.

David Judson:
Yeah, I think a couple of things that really strike me. The first is businesses and technology teams don’t talk about what’s next, they only talk about what’s now. And so they build, as I mentioned before, a lot of different reports that are just really different flavors of the same thing and so I think that’s one problem that we have. I think another problem is if you’re in an environment that has a high degree of change, then you’re going to be very frustrated in your ability to manage through that change. You could have been, you could be on your third or fourth iteration since 2008 to today on doing the same thing that you did five years ago and so some of the things that we’ve done here at the Scotts company are done as much as we can to operationalize and streamline the data flow process so that we don’t have to spend time on that, but we can spend time with the business. Those are the types of things.

David Judson:
If you haven’t cracked that nut, now you’ve got to crack that nutrition. There are organizations out there with many people that just spend their time loading data that is not of value compared to getting some intelligence out of that data. The other piece to consider is there are a number of people in every organization that spend their days in Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access or desktop related tools. Those tools are specific only to that individual silo and getting that intelligence and that knowledge out of that silo so that the enterprise can see it is extremely critical. And that’s what we’ve done is we found some of those real smart people that are doing things on their own and then we’ve brought that into the enterprise and we’ve made an enterprise solution based on that so that everyone can benefit from it and they can build whatever the next piece is and so we really leverage the business knowledge to do that.

Sanjog Aul:
Do you Think a business is willing to invest in something which is going to happen in future and where we do not even have a clearly defined future. And if you do not have an ROI formula, how do you go about investing on anything which is going to come in the next five years?

David Judson:
Yeah, I think ROI is always tough in any type of business intelligence arena. But just because it’s tough doesn’t mean it’s not possible and I think whenever you look at doing something in the BI space, you need to look at will this increase my sales, will this increase productivity, will this decrease my costs? And one of those three has to be a trigger in order to be able to move forward, get business buy in to what that trigger is and commitment so that you can, you don’t just build a report or two or three, you truly build something that’s transformational and helps business change both in the way they look at information as well as in the way that they do their what their productivity would be in day to day operations.

Sanjog Aul:
Now we’ve seen a lot of business BI related projects fail and we have also seen many times BI groups created and dismantled because they could not deliver. If, an organization is today having a group, what do they do to take that group to become more effective? And then if they don’t have a group, how does one about building it and with what type of people and processes and technologies for them to be really ready for the 2011 and beyond BI?

David Judson:
Yeah, I think if there’s a group in existence in your organization today, what you need to really do is make sure that group has a charter and they’re focused on the right things based on all the things we’ve talked about today and I would say that if they’re trying to boil the ocean, if they’re trying to do every single request that comes in, you’re really missing the boat. You’re missing the point of what’s most important in business intelligence. You really need to work with the business to understand what is most important and focus on it and do that preferably through an agile methodology where you’re showing some results and learning from those results on a regular basis every three to five to seven weeks. If you don’t have an organization, then get started with bringing the business to the table. If you’re an IT organization is looking to start this, but bring there are people in the business doing this today. If you don’t have it in IT and start working with those individuals and start exploring how can you break that data, that information out so that other people can see it and how can you leverage that just to make it more visible? Start with that stage of visibility to more people of that information.

Sanjog Aul:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, thank you so much David for your insights and thoughts related to how BI could truly create value and what is a potential roadmap for how BI is expected to evolve and in case you have an organization in terms of a BI group, how do you take it to the next level so that you’re ready to make the most of whatever growth that we will see in this space? Thank you so much again.

David Judson:
It’s been my pleasure. Thanks very much.

Sanjog Aul:
Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio. This is Sanjog Aul your talk show host till next week. Take care and God bless.