Improve Return on Effort, Reduce the Effort
A long time ago, I graduated from an engineering program with the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency held in high regard. Truly elegant solutions could produce phenomenal results with very little resource or effort. By contrast, overly large and complex designs that relied on brute force to get the job done have always seemed to be the scourge of civilization. As the computer industry developed, I saw a number of elegant solutions emerge, packaged as lean, purpose-built objects that delivered results as no other product before it. These alternatives usually took the market by storm simply because they offered a better way to get the job done; the Return-On-Effort ratio was very high. This is what attracted me to Nextanalytics.
In the business intelligence and reporting space, the various players have been battling it out for decades. Innovation has dwindled to feature creep as products have matured and grown bloated. One fact has held over the years – only 15% of the population actually have the desire and ability to conceptually analyse the data available. This has nothing to do with the ‘tools’ or making them easier to use; most people’s brains simply do not work that way (http://lsn.curtin.edu.au/tlf/tlf1995/whitefield.html). The big B.I. players have known this for a long time, and with many of the analytical types working in other roles, the few that actually use the BI tools to create new reports, dashboards and scorecards are in very high demand.
As we all know, high demand means high priced, so when it comes to generating new reports, those in control ‘do the math’ and decide where the effort ‘is worth it’ and where it isn’t. Because their effort is so expensive, a lot of potentially insightful reports never make the cut – if you don’t know the answer will be worthwhile, you’ll never do the work to prove it. That explains why there is a growing investment in analytics (http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=9269). But is spending more the right answer?
The market has shown, time and again, that when demand for complex and expensive solutions climb steadily, something disruptive usually occurs. People don’t like spending lots of money on big, complicated things they don’t understand. I feel it is time for solutions like Nextanalytics that change the rules, change how things are done, change who can do them. It’s time to reduce the effort, reduce the investment, but still get the returns.
