Are you Paralyzed by a Hoard of Big Data?

Lured by the promise of big data benefits, many organizations are leveraging cheap storage to hoard vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. Without a clear framework for big data governance and use, businesses run the risk of becoming paralyzed under an unorganized jumble of data, much of which has become stale and past its expiration date. Stale data is toxic to your business - it could lead you into taking the wrong action based on data that is no longer relevant.

You know there’s valuable stuff in there, but the thought of wading through all THAT to find it stops you dead in your tracks.  There goes your goal of business process improvement, which according to a recent Informatica survey, most businesses cite as their number one Big Data Initiative goal.

Just as the individual hoarder often requires a professional organizer to help them pare the hoard and institute acquisition and retention rules for preventing hoard-induced paralysis in the future, organizations should seek outside help when they find themselves unable to turn their data hoard into actionable information.

An effective big data strategy needs to include the following components:

1. An appropriate toolset for analyzing big data and making it actionable by the right people. Avoid building an ivory tower big data bureaucracy, and remember, insight has to turn into action.
2. A clear and flexible framework, such as social master data management, for integrating big data with enterprise applications, one that can quickly leverage new sources of information about your customers and your market.
3. Information lifecycle management rules and practices, so that insight and action will be taken based on relevant, as opposed to stale  information.
4. Consideration of how the enterprise application portfolio might need to be refined to maximize the availability and relevance of big data. In today’s world, that will involve grappling with the flow of information between cloud and internally hosted applications as well.
5. Comprehensive data security framework that defines who is entitled to use the data, change the data and delete the data, as well as encryption requirements as well as any required upgrades in network security.

Get the picture? Your big data strategy isn’t just a data strategy. It has to be a comprehensive technology-process-people strategy.

All of these elements, should of course, be considered when building your big data business case, and estimating return on investment.

BIG DATA in Healthcare? Not quite yet…

Let’s be honest with ourselves. First –

“who thinks the healthcare industry is ready for Big Data?”

Me either…

Ok, second question,

“who thinks providers can tackle Big Data on their own without the help of healthcare IT consulting firms?”

Better yet,

“can your organization?”

“Big data” seems to be yet another catch phrase that has caught many in healthcare by surprise. They’re surprised for the same reason I am which was recently summed up for me by a VP of Enterprise Informatics at a 10 hospital health system – “how can we be talking about managing big data when very few [providers] embrace true enterprise information management principles and can’t even manage to implement tools like enterprise data warehouses for our existing data?” Most people in healthcare who have come from telecommunications, banking, retail, and other industries that embraced Big Data long ago agree the industry still has a long way to go. In addition vendors like Informatica who have a proven track record of helping industries manage Big Data with their technology solutions, still have yet to see significant traction with their tools in healthcare. There are plenty of other things that need to be done first before the benefits of managing Big Data come to fruition.

Have we been here before? Didn’t we previously think that EMR’s were somehow going to transform the industry and “make everything simpler” to document, report from, and analyze? Yes we now know that isn’t the case, but it should be noted that EMR’s will eventually help with these initiatives IF providers have an enterprise data strategy and infrastructure in place to integrate EMR data with all the other data that litters their information landscape AND they have the right people to leverage enterprise data.

Same can be said of Big Data. It should be relatively easy for providers to develop a technical foundation that can store and manage Big Data compared to the time and effort needed to leverage and capitalize on Big Data once you have it. For the significant majority of the industry the focus right now should be on realizing returns in the form of lower costs and improved quality from integrating small samples of data across applications, workflows, care settings, and entities. The number of opportunities for improvement in the existing data landscape with demonstrable value should be top priority to mobilize stakeholders to action. Big Data will have to wait…for now.

Is the 1-9-90 rule for social participation dead?

It has long been an axiom that getting people to participate in online communities is hard, and the 1/9/90 rule helped explain why. 1% will be die-hard content creators, 9% will participate and 90% will be passive consumers and sit on the sidelines.

A recent BBC study claims the old rules are dead and that a whopping 77% of adults should be considered participators in some capacity. Interestingly, GigaOm pounced and claimed the old rules still apply.

I think the BBC research is on to something and that the online participation patterns have changed. Few of the things may have contributed:

• Consolidation: social networks such as Facebook and Twitter consolidate for us updates and posts from multiple communities and allow us to respond directly from there. You no longer need to go and check on 7 different communities to see what is going on.
• Ease of content creation and sharing especially from mobile devices. Probably too easy if you ask me. if you allow it, your phone will post your location, the pictures you take and more without even asking. The success of Instagram is just one example. Being connected 100% of the time allows us to interact 100% of the day.
• We are not anonymous anymore. It has been a slow change but if the late 90′s were about virtual identities and avatars, now we interact as real people. It may look like a small change but the whole nature of online interaction shifted from an outlet to interactions we wanted to have outside of our normal (and sometimes restrictive) social circle to where now most of the online interaction is with our social circle. More and more the online communities and social networks augment and extend our real relationships with people and brands.
• While some people who came to the party felt a bit out of place and stayed close to the wall for a while. After some time you realize that keeping to yourself in a social setting is not very nice and that people actually notice. If you are part of the community, participation is now expected.

So if the BBC is right and we should be expecting more participation what does it mean for businesses?

Business social participation may still be closer to the old rules because they do not reflect a close knit social group but as more people become comfortable in sharing it will start to have an impact.

Internally, collaboration and social networking with colleagues will eventually follow the same pattern of heightened participation if you allow the same enablers. Aggregate and consolidate activities and updates so they are easy to access, make it easy to respond to them and embed interaction and sharing everywhere in internal web applications, sites, tools etc. Making sharing a social norm may not be too far off.

Externally, in addition to the brand enthusiasts and deal seekers there is now a potential in making a lot more people participants

• Think about creating content that people would want to share. Too many websites and social media sites focus on the marketing side “what we have to sell”. Cool or useful things to do with the product or that are just related to the category will more easily be viral.
• Many websites have added sharing and likes to their pages but few take it to the level of actually allowing specific questions or comments through social networks on content or products.
• Think mobile sharing. From QR codes in trade show booths to special coupons for scanning or photographing in the store. Even my dentist has a promotion for getting free whitening pen if you scan a code and like him on Facebook. Brilliant.

Big Data + Small Process Thinking = Disappointing Results

Big data is in the news this week.  In a recent Forbes article describing the hidden opportunities of big data, Albert Pimentel Chief Sales and Marketing officer at Seagate quoted Mark Dean, an IBM fellow and director of the Almaden Research Center as saying, “Computation is not the hard part anymore.”  As with most big technology transformations, one of the hardest parts is always getting the process and people part right.

Big data has the potential to position businesses to outperform their competitors, as described in a recent McKinsey article that dubs big data the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity.  As businesses race to implement big data technology, there are some serious business process transformations that need to take place to fully leverage the investment in any big data initiative.

In the Big Data-driven approach to business transformation, the most important business processes are those that relate to Customer Experience Management across all fronts:

• Manage customer loyalty
• Manage customer value
• Manage customer relationships
• Manage customer feedback

These processes cross the more  traditional high level process siloes of “Manage Sales, Manage Marketing, Manage Customer Service, ” which were usually organized along departmental lines.

What actions will be taken based on the actionable intelligence that big data provides? Initiatives across departmental siloes must be closely orchestrated or the customer experience will become chaotic and confusing. Marketing campaigns have to be coordinated with activities across all customer facing roles in the organization. Effective enterprise program management is critical to this successful coordination. Marketing has to be thought of less as a department and more as a shared business responsibility.

When trying to leverage big data, it’s important to step back and answer critical questions before moving forward on multiple fronts:

• What strategies and processes do you use to influence customer behavior on your website, in your retail outlets, at virtual and real time events? Are they working synergistically, or are they are crossed purposes?
• What change management principles do you apply to shift customer attitudes towards your company, your employees, your products? Are you fully leveraging the power of third party change agents, or only applying  traditional, direct influence measures?
• Are our processes too rigid to allow us to be a world-class, big data-driven organization? Should we concentrate on defining broad strokes strategies instead?

At the end of the day, the most successful businesses will be those that harness the power of big data and big process thinking to outrun the competition. More food for thought on the intersection of big data and big process can be found at:

• Process Excellence Network
• Dashboard Insight
• Forrester