Empowered users know their information needs

In his seminal work In Search of Excellence, business guru and Teradata Universe keynote speaker Tom Peters identifies common denominators of America’s most successful businesses. Among others, Peter highlights customer-centred approaches and several characteristics (bias for action, autonomy and entrepreneurship) that we might refer to as “agility”. Simultaneously, Peters emphasizes the importance of sparking enthusiasm among your employees.

Peters’ call to empower employees on all levels of organization is widely considered as the blue-print for operational business intelligence as we know it. And it’s being taken another step further with the advent of “private clouds” in enterprise data warehouse environments. As business users have become increasingly adept in using BI tools, they want more and more of them. And they want them fast, to help them explore the relevant data while their freshly-conceived questions are still in their minds. Private clouds are not so much a technology trend as a response to growing demands from the business side.

This is good news because it means that those empowered and motivated employees that Peters had envisaged don’t seem to fall into the trap of making decisions based on “experience”, which would come down to pure intuition. As Stephen Brobst said in Istanbul last year, “don’t trust your guts. Your guts will deceive you.” Instead, business users at multiple organizational levels realize (and describe) their information needs. And private clouds make it easier than ever before to fulfil these needs.

The Customer comes second (crikey!)

A bit of a strong statement, what I’d actually call a provocation.
The saying “Customer first” is becoming anachronistic. Tactical even. Operational yet others would say.
No, I’ve not lost my mind, those who know me know I have a strong inclination to listen, to resolve the problems of both my external and my internal customers.
The idea for this post came to me from a presentation by that genius Tom Peters, entitled “The customers come second”. Find it here.
I like it because it chimes fully with what Collins says on fifth-level leadership and on the theme of the corporation’s and the managements’ ability to listen.
But what does Peters say in a nutshell? First you have to build the team, recruiting the right people, those with the right mindset.
Motivated and happy with their job, their role in the organization, whichever one it is.
You have to build and manage an organization capable of supporting and responding to the market’s demands, even if not called for by the procedures and convention.
And then, but only then, can you focus on the client, who, in that sense, does come next.
For the simple reason that only then will you be able to serve and respect them, to support and help them. And earn their trust so that they come back to buy even more.
And from trust, confidence is born, from confidence, loyalty.
The business will grow naturally with the client who will find it only natural to grow with the business.
The client may come “second”, but only to the company’s ability to listen to them.
That genius Peters. I will have the opportunity to listen to him again on Tuesday morning, April 13th in Berlin where he will surely spark his “unconventional views” during his Supersession: "Excellence: Continuing the Search".

Please complete: “There are things known and things unknown and in between …”

Now, guess what!? Well, if you were to ask a BI expert at the Teradata Universe Conference to complete this sentence, he’d probably say “…a Teradata data warehouse”, and, for an amazing lot of questions, this is a perfect answer. Nonetheless I suppose that if you asked Joschka Fischer, former Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister of Germany, who will be one of our keynote speakers in Berlin, he’d answer like a shot: “…there are doors” - and he’d be the winner of the quiz. I believe this is because Fischer, also known as the “godfather” of the German Green Party, was culturally conditioned in the years of the 1968 student movement to which Jim Morrison’s Band “The Doors” delivered the soundtrack.

When asked about the name of the band, Jim Morrison once said: “There are things known and things unknown and in between there are doors”. And, funnily enough, that is why even today many people believe that the Door’s singer authored these poetic words, while in fact he plainly quoted the famous British poet William Blake. Today, it will take you only a few clicks on the internet to check this out, but notably Blake is ranked only Nr. 4 of the Google search results. Jim Morrison gets the top spot with other links suggesting, for example, Aldous Huxley as the author of the quote. How do you know which source you can trust? That may be a routine question for every Google user but it also gets to the core of what data warehousing is all about: trustworthiness and quality of information are key when it comes to decision-making.

And there is another dimension, too: handling complexity. Long before the term “globalization” was coined, international relations experts formed the idea of “interdependence” to grasp the growing complexity of the modern world. Some of them have concluded that we need stronger supranational institutions if we want to have any effective governance at all. One probably wouldn’t deny that such institutions sometimes increase, not decrease the complexity of the political sphere. So how did Fischer handle the decision-making process within these frameworks, trying to influence an opaque and permanently changing outside world, without being able to tell just how reliable the information at his hand is? This makes me curious about his keynote.

A city model for the Expo?

I’m currently in Munich on a few days business. I’ve always liked the city and feel a cultural affinity.
Seeing that Munich has 1.3 million inhabitants, it’s fairly comparable with Milan.
This city has three things that I love:
- the public transport system
- the green areas
- the cycling paths
A few facts to back that up: Munich has 6 urban subway lines and 10 (yes 10!) suburban subway lines. That means living in a farmhouse and working downtown, seeing that it takes only 40 minutes to get to any part of the city.
Green areas are plentiful, clean and well-groomed.
But the cycling paths… the cycling paths are just amazing…there are a whole 900 kilometers of them (that’s right 900!) crisscrossing the city, all “cyclists only” and its bad news for you if you dare walk on one.
I’m keeping a close eye on Milan City’s plans for the Expo 2015, which include some nice projects also for cycling paths, as well as the rest of the urban system.
I’m counting on it, I really hope they come to fruition.
We deserve them.

Could this be the next big – whoops, it’s already here!

Spotting trends early-on is the ultimate challenge in marketing. It’s one of the tricks that demand chain management (DCM) solutions can do if they are fed with real-time sales data and leverage powerful analytical capabilities. What makes trend spotting so challenging is the fact that it only makes sense if you manage to do it in a relatively small time frame: the trend must be there but it mustn’t be obvious to everybody yet.

If you want to know what a trend looks like at an early stage, ask Magnus Lindkvist. He identifies trends for a living – in the old-fashioned way, actually walking the high streets and other places, watching people. Click here to see a perfect example from his website. The video demonstrates impressively the various stages in which a trend evolves:

• a trend is (usually) started a long time before you can tell whether it will ever become popular
• a handful of “first movers” does not automatically mean that there will be a massive breakthrough (albeit it makes it more likely)
• once there is a critical mass, the trend is self-sustaining and it attracts more and more attention from bystanders
• once people start joining the existent “in-crowd” in larger numbers, it turns into a stampede as nobody wants to miss out

In the video, a successful trend spotter would have to predict the popularity of the dancing at some time between 0:55 and 1:30 (because afterwards, it really is obvious to everybody.) Not so easy, don’t you agree? Well, it’s retailers’ daily business. Economic uncertainty has made consumer demand extremely volatile, which means that retailers need to identify changes quicker than ever to take full advantage of their insights. We are sure that Magnus Lindkvist’s keynote at the Teradata Universe Conference in Berlin will spark some new ideas how to enrich the existing trend analyses in retail as well as in other industries.

Here you can read my post on the Teradata Emea blog, where you'll find many other interesting posts.

A rich market, ripe for the picking: the tweens are on their way

For this post I am in a privileged position seeing that my children have just celebrated their 8^th birthday, meaning that they now are full-fledged “tweens”.

Yes, tweens, the word coined for kids aged between 8 and 12, readily identified as a new market segment, but not to be confused with a teen, who is 13, 14, etc.

America has 23 million tweens and the brands want to know their tastes, they want to launch a tween trend, one that helps them sell more and better.

That has led Disney, Sephora, Fundex Games and other groups to sponsor the National Tween Summit, organized by consulting firm Ak Tweens.

And tweens like Kiley Krzyzek – at just 12 – have become powerful corporate consultants influencing the tastes of millions of tweens.

Like when she says “Selena Gomez is my icon”. Who? But of course, she’s the new girlfriend of Kevin, the leader of Jonas Brothers, who has ditched left Miley Cyrus, alias Hannah Montana, for Selena.

Am I speaking a foreign language? Well, that just goes to show you’ve no tweens in your house.

Some info to enlighten:

- Miley’s latest CD, released July 10, has been in the top five of the US hit list for the past five weeks.

- the first High School Musical, 290 million spectators, stayed at the top of the most-watched films list for months.

- High School 3 brought in a cool $150 million.

- Forbes magazine has voted Miley Cyrus the most influential young girl in the world.

...And now, fresh and new, two First Tweens, Malia and Sasha Obama have arrived on the scene, far too exposed to the media to be ignored...the tween segment is set for growth, of that you can be sure.