Got a Problem? We Can Solve it.

The Silver Bullet Solution

Many companies want that silver bullet that solve all of their big data problems quickly, easily, and completely. This is true for many of our clients. It’s a very seductive concept, and one that oftentimes is not realistic.

While silver bullet solutions may be few and far between, what does work is implementing proven approaches for iterative and incremental problem solving. CliIntel’s approach is just that. With the big picture in mind, we focus on iterative solutions that are self-funding. In other words, we tackle one problem at a time to maximize ROI.

The Cube of Opportunity

It’s been said that a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.  CliIntel takes that single step by analyzing a small component of a business, documenting the opportunities, and presenting a conservative ROI calculation for capitalizing on one or two of the most feasible opportunities.  We calculate the feasibility based on the best ROI for the least effort with the least disruption (we call this the ‘cube of opportunity’).

Solutions are implemented one step at a time in order to maximize ROI for each iterative step completed.  Then the changes in performance levels are measured, presented and verified. The cube of opportunity represents small, incremental changes that yield results in days, not months. Results like these allow companies to make decisions swiftly and determine the next critical change to be implemented.

This incremental approach allows companies to protect their investment. Incremental investments are met with incremental returns, oftentimes far exceeding predictions. Funny thing with big data – once you can wrap your arms around the little things, the big things get easier.

Self-Funding

We call this a self-funding model because the first project pays for itself quickly, and continued ROI pays for the next project.  You get to play with ‘house money’.  The second project pays for itself (even though the first project also paid for the second project) and the next project as well.  The third pays for the fourth, and so on.

Business Intelligence (BI)

This model is predicated on the fact that companies have the ability to quickly monitor their performance data.  Many companies already have ‘system of truth’ type BI system which provides time appropriate access to actionable data.  For companies that either don’t have this kind of system, or can’t ingest new data quickly enough to meet the measurement needs, we plug in IGNITE Lite, our low-investment easy-to-implement BI tool.  This tool allows for creation of baseline performance levels, and  timely access to the actionable data companies need to verify that optimization projects meet their goals.

Summary

Your business problems (or shall I say opportunities) probably don’t all look the same, and certainly can’t be solved with a silver bullet.  With a repeatable process that can be applied to a wide variety of challenges, incremental  insights add up to impressive results.

Three Rules for Making our Company Truly Great

As companies are always striving for better, we at Cliintel are striving for great. Often times, it can be tempting to try and make the company’s results look better by declining assets and investments to reduce costs. Since this is not the way to make a company truly great, there are three rules that can serve as corrective measures to the leadership all-too-fallible intuition.

1. Better before cheaper
   1. Look to competing on other options and desires than price
2. Revenue before cost
   1. Prioritize and follow a process to increase revenue, prior to reducing costs amongst the company
3. There are no other rules 
   1. We are a change company. In order to fall in line with what we do for our clients, we must first follow rules 1 and 2

Truly great companies accept higher costs as a price of excellence, which creates a non-price value and generates higher revenue; leading back to our mission of: “Happy Employees, Happy Clients.”  Outstanding performance is created and executed by grander value, not by lower price. Companies that seek sustained profitability should pursue strategies consistent with these three rules and avoid those that aren't. Cliintel values our employees; our people are our product. Our cultural approach and attitude holds success in balance for Cliintel, especially when our leadership team upholds following the three rules to making our company truly great. At the end of the day, everyone is responsible for making Cliintel great. An individual department does not drive success without interlinking other departments and brilliant individuals. We cannot create a truly great company by only following these three rules, but also through: teamwork, innovation, communication, and selflessness. 

Onward,

Richard Batenburg Jr., CEO

Can I Ever Trust Again?

You’ve been hurt.  Perhaps badly.  You researched, cross checked, and still the data wasn’t right.  You presented some numbers in a critical meeting, and got called on the carpet right there.

Nothing derails a conversation or presentation quite like someone not trusting your numbers.  The rest of your brilliant work is shoved aside, and all focus shifts to the faulty numbers.

Your Business Intelligence software can be the hero or the heel when it comes to supporting the larger aspects of your business all the way down to the micro details of your presentations and reports.  The signs are easy to read if you know where to look:

• Can you use your data ‘as is’ without having to alter it?  If you export data out of your BI Tool into Excel and then massage the data to create the message you need, you have a trust issue.
• Can your users get fresh data right away?  If you have to wait for the right data to be incorporated into the BI tool, you have a delay issue.
• Is your data ‘beautiful’, but unusable in a practical manner?  Fantastic looking data is important, but you may have a ‘true but useless’ issue.  A strong BI solution will allow you to take corrective action to solve problems within your sphere of influence.
• When you do encounter errors in the data, can you identify what’s wrong?  Telling your BI support team that the data is wrong (without specifics) won’t give them a real opportunity to fix the problem, and you may have a granularity issue.  Your solution should allow you to drill down to a single transaction to verify calculations.
• Are the measurement techniques clear and consistent regarding the calculation of your metrics?  You may have an ‘apples & oranges’ issue.  Measuring everyone the same way is critical to fair and objective performance comparisons.

Our experience leads us to believe the following about BI solutions:

• The presentation should be sexy, but not at the cost of accuracy.  Sooner or later the beauty of the charts and graphs gives way to right or wrong data.
• You should be able to prove, or disprove, the accuracy of any metric quickly and easily.
• When you do find an error, your BI Support team should be able to isolate and fix the problem.  Communicating to users what the problem was and how it was fixed is core to lasting trust.  This kind of openness and transparency is rare.
• The data needs to be fresh enough for you to do your job without being distracted.  Real time data is cool, but is it really needed?  Two-week old data, on the other hand, may make it impossible for you to adjust your methods effectively.
• The data needs to have purpose.  Each metric should have meaning to the business, and a specific set of solution paths when performance doesn’t measure up.

In general, if your data is fresh, easily accessible, relevant, and correct, you’re well on your way to building trust.

Cliintel works with companies who are battling their own internal trust issues, showing you how and when to retrieve the right data, from the right place, at the right time, for meaningful answers to some of your most difficult questions. When a large body of users start referring to the BI solution as the ‘system of truth’, that’s when you know you can trust again!

Defining Everyday Culture and Environment

Much has been written about Zappos and their founder Tony Hsieh as his company is recognized as a leader in customer-centric, employee-centric, culture-based management. But what does all of that really mean, and most importantly, does Zappos operate the way Tony describes it in his best-selling management book, Delivering Happiness?

I first visited Zappos in April 2010 and found the experience exhilarating from a management perspective. At the time, Cliintel was looking for new office space and an effective way to use that space. I took many ideas from Zappos; multiple small conference rooms, brightly colored walls and open “funky” cube group work environments.

My company operates from a set of nine values; Judgment, Curiosity, Passion, Communication, Innovation, Honesty, Impact, Courage, and Selflessness. Many people believe that nine is just too many, and I was pleased and felt vindicated to see that Zappos had 10! During my first visit, the company was in the midst of being assimilated by Amazon.com as they had been acquired for over $1B. At the time the very animated, heavily tattooed and pierced tour guide talked about how a condition of the deal was that Amazon would leave the Zappos culture alone, bringing only their logistical prowess to bear; Zappos would be allowed to retain its “weirdness” and its unique employee/customer-centric philosophy. Having been through many mergers and acquisitions in my career, I was skeptical, to say the least.

In April 2013, I returned from my second visit to Zappos and am pleased to report that after 2 years, Amazon.com has indeed left the Zappos culture intact. In fact, Amazon.com and the gigantic war chest of money that came along with it enabled Tony Hsieh and his team to extend their customer/employee-centric philosophies in several meaningful ways. The commitment to new hire training during my first visit was along the lines of two weeks; currently new employees spend over four weeks in training – not on-the-job training but in-classroom. This training not only involves the technology aspects, but centers on their customer service philosophy and most importantly: the culture. Another unique feature of the company that remained intact is that new hires are offered the equivalent of approximately one month’s salary to leave after two weeks of training. This is not a punitive or PIP offer, it’s an open offer every employee who is hired regardless of where they are on the performance scale in the first couple of weeks. This commitment helps ensure employee engagement and reduces employee turnover to levels unheard of in the call center space, which is essentially the core of Zappos’ business structure.

Even more profound than during my first visit, it was clear that every employee, regardless of their level, was able to repeat, and most importantly connect, with the company’s 10 values in their daily work - everything from customer service to expense reporting. The empowerment the employees exuded and the obvious connection to the company’s values was simply astonishing. The tour provided me not only with proof that the ideas in Tony’s book were being carried out at Zappos, but more importantly, gave me a profound sense that the embodiment of values in a company have a powerful impact on culture.

Newly minted ideas were being executed with typical “Zappos flair” and weirdness. One idea was a professional development program that gave employees access to a personal goals coach, allowing them to take ownership of a component of the performance appraisal system by making them responsible for the achievement of 30-day goals. The weirdness was apparent when walking through a stairwell connecting the first and second floors of the Henderson, Nevada facility where employees were invited and encouraged to write on the walls with markers. The weirdness soon turned into empowerment when I read some of the thoughts people shared on the walls about their goals and the date they achieved them, and by signing their names, released all anonymity. In many cases, these were very personal achievements - which ranged from weight loss to education and empowerment through exiting dangerous domestic situations.

I highly encourage you to visit www.zapposinsights.com and arrange for a tour to see this magic for yourself. They’ll schedule the one hour tour and arrange for a shuttle to pick you up at your Las Vegas hotel, feed you while you’re on the tour and take you back to your hotel – all free of charge. The tour really begins when you get in the shuttle, since it’s driven by a team member who is more than happy to answer questions and demonstrate their company values from the moment they meet you. If you’re staying on the Las Vegas strip it’s about a 2 ½ hour investment and if you’re a business person open to a little weirdness and new ideas, it could change your life – and the way you do business.

Richard Batenburg, Jr., President and CEO

The Value of Sharing Data

Should you share your performance data throughout your organization?  This can be a vexing question, and all too often the answer is ‘only when absolutely necessary’.  Fortunately, organizations are slowly coming to the realization that while data is power, shared data is powerful.

There are many reasons for taking a position of secrecy regarding performance, some of which include:

1. I’m not meeting my goals, and I don’t want this to be generally known.
2. My performance goals have not been clearly established, so I don’t really know if I’m performing or not.
3. I know I’m performing well, and I don’t want other managers to hire away my best talent.
4. In general my team performs well, and I don’t want the emphasis to be placed on the few areas where we are underperforming.

Certainly all of these are real concerns.  The good news is that there is an answer for each of these situations that leads to great solutions for all involved.

The first major shift an organization can undertake is to move away from using data as a tool for punishment, and towards a mentality of inspect what you expect, and train for success.  Each area of underperformance can be successfully turned around when an organization takes a positive stance on identifying, deconstructing, and resolving problems.  Let’s face it – we all have places we can improve.  This is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of healthy recognition.  Using data to punish your team makes everyone want to shy away from the realities of doing business, whereas having an open conversation focused on specific ways to improve is good for everyone.

Another key use of data is to more tightly integrate the various levels of management in an organization.  If you don’t have and share the data related to performance throughout the various tiers in your organization, you won’t be able to identify best practices and share them ubiquitously.  Sharing performance data allows you to know which players are top notch in various areas, so that under-performers can seek out over-performers, and learn from them.  If I’m having trouble with something, it’s very reassuring to know that I can reach out to a teammate for assistance, especially when that teammate has a proven track record of success that’s verified by the data.  But I can’t identify my potential mentors if performance data is kept a closely guarded secret.

Performance data can also expose areas of uncertainty, so that you can dig deeper for root cause.  Poor performance may be very difficult to explain, and putting that performance under scrutiny should allow for better research into the exact causes.  This requires a culture of openness to discussion, sharing, and true problem solving.  The benefit of understanding root cause is that you can then bring resources to bear directly on the previously unclear problems.

One of the most powerful results of sharing performance data is healthy ‘coopetition’ which is the combination of cooperation and competition.  Organizations that both compete and cooperate can bring about tremendous transformations in surprisingly short periods of time.  Again, this requires full exposure of performance data so that teammates can share expertise in their areas of strength, and learn from others in their areas of weakness.

It should be known that truly sharing performance data is more of a cultural issue than a technical one.  Today’s software will easily allow you to share your data, but can your organization survive the honesty?

In today’s global economy, perhaps you should ask yourself if your organization can survive anything but honesty.

Slowly Changing Dimensions

One of the more interesting aspects of BI is being able to track an entity (person, place or thing) that undergoes a name change.  How do you ensure that all of the activity and measurements are properly correlated before and after that name change?

Business Intelligence parlay calls this type of entity a ‘Slowly Changing Dimension’ (SCD). Perhaps a simple example can clarify the issue:

1. Your company has grown through acquisition, and your divisions have non-standardized codes that identify the source of a sale (Internet, Direct sales, word of mouth, etc).
2. This created a lot of reporting problems because you weren’t able to compare apples to apples, so you underwent a major standardization process so that every division now uses the same code value to equate to the same code outcome.
3. Unfortunately, the standardization process did not include changing all of your historical transactions to reflect the standardized codes, so when you run a report including dates before the standardization, the initial problem remains.

Why didn’t the standardization solve the problem, and how do you solve the new problem that now exists?

The solution can be pretty simple when you plan properly for these slowly changing dimensions.  The data required to solve a simple SCD issue like the one above might include something like this:

Division ID	Current Code ID	Master Code ID	Start Date	End Date
1	2B	1A	2000-01-01	2012-12-31
1	3A	1A	2013-01-01	9999-99-99
1	2B	2X	2013-01-01	9999-99-99

This simple table allows your BI functions to:

1. Associate code 2B in Division 1 to master code 1A during the active dates of January 1, 2000 through December 31, 2012.  Transactions during this time period can be coded correctly by joining from the transaction [c1] to the SCD table on division, current code, and start/end date range.  This is the old code that is being replaced (by 3A).
2. Associate code 3A in Division 1 to master code 1A during the active dates of January 1, 2013 through the current date.  In this example, non-standardized code 2B has been replaced with corporate standard code 3A.
3. Associate code 2B in Division 1 to master code 2X during the active dates of January 1, 2013 through the current date.  9999-99-99 indicates the code does not have an end date, and all transactions for division 1, code 2B, for dates after January 1, 2013.  In this example, code 2B in division 1 has taken on a whole new meaning as of January 1, 2013.  2B hasn’t been used in this devision prior to January 1, 2013.
4. The Master code in each example allows a many-to-one relationship, so multiple current codes can ‘roll-up’ to a single master code.  You may have more than one code in a division that fundamentally means the same thing at the corporate level.

Of course this example is a simple one, and there are many circumstances of much greater complexity.  Hopefully this example will serve to illustrate the problem, and help you to solve the simple problems now, and move to more difficult ones over time.

SCD’s are a fact of life in BI implementations, and having a practical solution is critical to your data accuracy!

One final thought – standardizing your codes across a large organization can be a truly painful project.  If you can properly use SCD’s, you may find that standardizing all your codes is not required after all!

Do you Walk the Walk?

Everyone talks about the importance of developing and implementing a solid strategy, but who really walks the walk? I think of strategy as nothing more than a playbook that helps your business beat the competition. In a nutshell, it’s about winning. While no two winning strategies are exactly the same, a successful strategy includes an objective, a scope, and a competitive advantage that sum up the outcome a company intends to achieve, the arena in which it will compete, and the methods it will use to win.

A strategy also typically sets a time frame for achieving the objectives. Although new strategies ultimately will be required as a company’s business environment changes, a good strategy will provide guiding principles for the long-term despite the short—and even medium-term changes a company faces.

I’m obviously a big proponent of winning. I talk about it regularly to our employees – the people that make Cliintel tick. They, in turn, talk about it with our clients. Strategy must start at the top, but in order to work, must be communicated to every level of the company and implemented by all. This means that from the “chiefs” to the front line employees, a clear objective must be known. If it’s not, things get lost in translation, people move in a multitude of directions, and the strategy gets off course. When objectives are clear, each silo, each department, and each individual contributor knows what their part is in the big picture.

Cliintel helps bring all of it together by showing companies how to look at disparate data in ways that are meaningful to their overall strategy. If you aren’t looking at your data in terms of how it directly impacts your strategy, what’s the point of looking at it? To win in business, we have to be smart. Cliintel can help you improve operations, reduce waste, and achieve your company objectives. To find out more, explore our website or give us a call to set up a complimentary consultation. You have nothing to lose. And everything to win!

Onward,

Richard M. Batenburg Jr. CEO, Cliintel