Shikarishambu on Software & Related Services

About two weeks back I was at Convergence 2008 – the annual conference for users of Microsoft Business Solutions products – aka Microsoft Dynamics. During the conference I had a chance to have conversations with number of other users. Most of them were taken aback when I said our users find Microsoft Dynamics AX to be cumbersome and unfriendly. The response often was – “Have they tried using SAP or Oracle?.” I told them that our users compare it with Microsoft Excel. They often rolled their eyes.  But, let us face it – people love Microsoft Excel but they hate <<Fill in your product or application>>. Why is that?

I call Excel the “two-click” system – a click to start and a click to close. It is the ultimate in “flexibility” – you can make the data in there represent your version of the truth. Everyone can… it is very democratic. Now, I am not saying all Enterprise Applications should try to emulate Excel. I don’t think they can. The purpose of an Enterprise application is to help business process standardization and business process improvements. However, often times they fail not becuase they do not do that but because the users do not know what the business process is. So, the system does not help them get their job done. They see the system as a hinderance.

Very often businesses rolling out Enterprise Applications use the application to communicate the business process to the end user – “You do not have the approval authority because you cannot do that in the system.” The problem with this approach is the users cannot have a conversation with the system – get their queries answered or understand the logic behind the setup. In the best of the cases people manage to figure out what is their scope of work. However, most often this approach only leads to frustration – people attribute their lack of understanding of the business processes to the feature shortcomings of the system. 

 Here is a simple test – Take away the system, Do people know what are the steps in the process, what are the data elements input/ output at each point, what are the artifacts created/ used and who else is involved at each step? If yes, then you have a business process that can be supported in a system. If the answer is no, no system can help you. You see this often in real life – a system crashes or is not available and no one knows how to handle the business process.

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.