Posts Tagged ‘Intelligence’
Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom
I have had difficulty finding words to describe the messages provided by business dashboards and KPIs. That is until I listened to Kevin Schofield’s (of Microsoft Research) keynote at Convergence 2008. He quoted from T.S. Elliot’s “The Rock” to launch into the great stuff that MSR is doing around data
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
So, now I have the hierarchy – Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom (DIKW). Turns out I am not first to come up with this. Nikhil Sharma of UMich has an article on the origin of this (see here). So, how does this DIKW manifest in Business Intelligence? The data resides in data stores (databases, files, emails etc…). The information is derived from the data and is usually delivered in reports. The knowledge is derived from reports and delivered through dashboards and KPIs (assuming you did PMA and found the right parameters). Wisdom is the actions or the business strategies you create based on the knowledge you have.
PMA… not MAP and it can never be AMP
I just returned from Convergence 2008 in Orlando i.e. the Microsoft Business Solutions conference. It is a great conference and for once Microsoft seems to have got the name right. A lot of the Convergence 2008 sessions were focused on Business Intelligence (BI). Now, don’t be cynical and call “Business Intelligence” an oxymoron. Microsoft seems to have a lot of work and products in the works in this area. Anyway, I am not here to talk about the products but what a speaker said.
During the BI roadmap session the speaker remarked that good BI requires PMA – Plan, Monitor and Analyze. You first plan on your goals, identify the parameters that will help you and define the metrics. Then, you monitor the parameters. Once you have collected you analyze it.
However, quite often businesses go about this using the MAP process. They start monitoring things and then analyzing it without a real plan. The result is they either end up monitoring wrong parameters which cannot provide answers to the questions they are looking for. Or, they are monitoring a whole lot of parameters which costs a lot of money and then result in them getting the wrong answers because in large datasets it is possible to infer patterns.
While AMP is a great acronym Business Intelligence can never be AMP – you cannot analyze without having the data. So, M has to come before A.
