Ancient Greece and modern DW, BI, and PM. - Is there a connection? (1/2)

On the surface it may seem far-fetched to see a link between ancient Greek philosophy and modern Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management. But if you reckon from the title that I will try to make that connection, then you are absolutely right!

Let's consider some characteristic features of DW, BI, and PM in turn.

First there was Data Warehousing, and, ignoring that many early DW initiatives failed for technical reasons, it is also well known that simply building a technically sound and "successful" data warehouse is rarely enough to move an organisation. Even with all the right data available just a few mouse clicks away, if that is all there is to a DW, then business users are quite likely to stay away and ignore it.

Now enter Business Intelligence, which is a somewhat fluffy term that could mean anything from ABC to CRM to something completely novel and characteristic of a particular organisation. I suggest the common denominators for a BI application, activity - or just initiative - are

• a need for focus: "This is what we are going to do [as opposed to everything else], and this is the way to go about doing it [for us as a company and for you and me as individual employees],
• a need for communication and motivation: "This is all the wonderful things we - you and me - can achieve by doing so",
• a need for the necessary means: Without a solid foundation on data and an appealing application it may all be just hot air. It can even cause the derailing of an organisation which may have been slow but was at least moving in the right direction. The necessary data may be sourced from a data warehouse, or they may come from a dedicated "stovepipe" database and application.

Finally, enter Performance Management: Now we are talking values. What are our company values, what is good and bad and everything in between? And what are personal values of employees? What is the degree of alignment? Do we have attraction and positive synergy, or the opposite? Performance Management has explosive potential depending on whether it produces alignment or alienation. For precisely that reason it is essential to be very precise in formulating company values and implementing them in a Performance Management programme. If value formulation and PM implementation is skewed, the result will be a degree of alienation with the company's most valuable employees, and vice versa.

Now consider executive attitudes towards DW, BI, and PM. It appears to me that most sponsoring executives tend to have a personal favourite among the three and a feeling that "one is enough and will have to do the job of all three. We don't want to pay several times for the same service!" The technically oriented executive may have a preference for data warehousing and is to a large extent right; after all, a well designed and implemented data warehouse will support and facilitate BI and PM activities a long way. The very matter-of-factly business oriented executive may have a preference for PM, and is also, to a large extent, right; after all, doing PM right entails coming to grips with the underlying data supply problem, and we really only want to spend time on the data necessary for PM, not to waste our efforts by including some data in a data warehouse just because it is readily available and might be needed some other time! Finally, the mainstream middle-of-the-road executive may have a preference for a suite of separate BI projects, and he or she is also, to a large extent, right; after all, is it not preferable to formulate and fund activities with a well defined, limited, and manageable scope where the ROI may be estimated and controlled?

But where does that lead us? - I will try to answer that in a couple of weeks in the sequel to this first real blog entry!

In the meantime, I owe the interested reader a hint at where I am going. Try reading about Aristotle's three modes of persuasion within the art of rhetoric and argumentation: logos, pathos, and ethos, e.g. at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion. Is there a primary connection, or affinity between Data Warehousing and logos, between Business Intelligence and pathos, and between Performance Management and ethos? I think there are such affinities, and I will return shortly to elaborate on that idea and its possible consequences. Stay tuned here at morlin's BI blog!