Indicee » data quality

Changing the B.I. World Whether They Like it or Not!

Geoff Devereux — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:13:01 +0000

For anyone who already knows who Gary Vaynerchuk is, the title of this post will be a not-so-subtle homage to his mission of changing the wine world whether they like it or not.

Here at the office, we’re big fans of his show, Wine Library TV.

Gary’s intro sets the tone from the word go. He warns Gretzky before the start of Episode #660, “careful, I’m about to get real loud“. One might respond, no lie, no lie.

Gary’s got a fantastic take on wine tasting. Whether it’s describing a wine as “fresh catcher’s mitt” or “dark, no moon, in a cave, I’m scared, kinda dark”, his illustrations get the experience of wine across to people in a way that’s easy to understand. But, not dumbed down. There’s play in there as well, always good. He takes the burden off of understanding wine in a more meaningful way.

Here at Indicee, we’re all about increasing understanding so we thought we would have some fun with Gary’s Ratings Spreadsheet. “Vayniac” Chris Stanisci (SS Chris) created and maintains the spreadsheet that details all of the wine tasted on the show with rating. (Based on my understanding of the numbers, you’ll generally want something high 80’s or above.)

I uploaded the spreadsheet into Indicee and managed to generate the following reports on a lark.

Then, with the help of Scott Pledger, our new VP of Marketing, we came up with a value calculation.

Gary’s Score / Price = Value Score

And lastly, here’s a report showing the PRICIEST wines that have been on the show.

Gary’s at the big South by Southwest (#SXSW) Conference this weekend in Austin. We’re sorry to be missing the party down there, but maybe these reports can be our contribution. I’m sure the information contained could make for a good conversation!

And a big shout out to SS Chris for being the Spreadsheet Jockey on this! Good on ya! But, we do gotta talk about Data Quality at some point. Ping me. There’s a ton of potential to generate more reports, but we need to clean up the Data. Don’t make me unleash the DataFlux crew on you. Maybe we can farm out some of the grunt work for you.

Want to see the Data live? Join our free public group here!

Enjoy!

Software Implementation by the Book

Geoff Devereux — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:30:57 +0000

Caught in the echo chamber of twitter, Linkedin, Blogs, and our little software technology company here, it’s easy to spend a lot of time preaching to the converted. I don’t feel like we’re a huge community out here. I’m talking predominantly about accounting and finance, but it could actually extend to the larger conversations about technology. The consumer technology business is ubiquitous, but getting into the B2B space things change. We’re covering a lot of the same ground over and over within our small circles, but how do we take the ~~fight~~ conversation to the rest of the DOS-based population?

I had a few experiences this past week reminding me that it’s still very much early both in social media adoption and in understanding new technology. Maybe “DOS-based” is a bit of a strong term. Granted, I did help someone set up their 1st email account this week; but, that’s a rare, rare, rare case of a thirtysomething who never went online… until now. Actually, the jury’s still out on that; 3 to 1 the account goes dormant. That’s not one of the experiences that got me thinking (although it could).

What got me thinking was speaking with another accounting professional about using the Groups in Linkedin for following industry-related discussions and content. I had the chance to provide some insight about twitter; felt good about that. I was informed that it’s still a bit of a big deal to raise a voice online. I guess that should be obvious, but I forget because the conversation IS happening… despite the fact tons of people aren’t here. It’s kind of like turning the much-quoted phrase “Your customers are talking about you whether you participate or not” on its head. When the accounting and finance conversation is isolated, things get considerably quieter.

In a tech-friendly industry like Business Intelligence, it’s similarly insulated but in a different way. There they have been having pretty much the same conversation for the last 50 years. The only difference between then and now is, it’s online now. Don’t even get me started on Data Quality! ← sorry guys

The other experience that got me thinking was with respect to course content in my professional organization’s (CGA) Information Systems Strategy course. There seems to be a real bias in the material relating to custom-built software over purchased applications. This is surprising to me. What was more surprising is; through discussions with students, there was unquestioning belief in it! The fact is, there’s a level of trust there between student-teacher telling them they are getting the right information. I think it shows how difficult changing technology makes it for academics (outside tech) to keep up. That said, it’s a problem.

When they say “custom-built”, they are talking about in-house, from scratch software – think some proprietary system no one’s ever heard of. Purchased applications would range from Quickbooks to SAP. Imagine. I feel like this is something that entered the course curriculum at its inception back when code was being written using Hieroglyphics. Am I wrong?

This actually ties nicely in with my last post about Legacy IT Systems. We’re still dealing with them. We’re also dealing with a Legacy Education System. This could explain some of the continuing difficulties between CFOs and CIOs.

There are lots of folks in accounting doing the right things though. Look at AICPA and CPA2Biz’s just-announced alliance with the software as a service accounting package, Intacct. Here’s an example of keeping current! Of course, in general it’s tough for professional bodies to do this kind of endorsement. What I like about it though is the endorsement of the technology. Maybe the question is, does that validation extend to the course curriculum for prospective accountants?

What do you think?

I think it also exemplifies the Echo Chamber analogy. Who’s in your Echo Chamber? Who’s not?

Asset or Expense: How do you account for Data Quality?

Geoff Devereux — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:30:01 +0000

Similar to my initial thoughts on my Spreadsheet Nation post, I jumped into this topic of Data Quality without really testing the waters. In this case, I thought I could just jump in, rhyme off some platitudes about Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO), and go on my merry way. Instead, what opened up to me was a vast sea and I was a fish out of water. I was standing on shore clueless about what lay beneath the surface.

Malaspina Strait, British Columbia, Canada

Data Quality really is one of those topics that tends to lurk under the surface – elusive to capture. We are talking about “the state of completeness, validity, consistency, timeliness, and accuracy that makes data appropriate for a specific use” (definition courtesy of the Government of British Columbia). Or if you prefer, there’s the Dragnet definition: “Just the facts”. For accountants, we are talking about all that stuff we enter into our systems (or gets generated by other systems) that we need to access later for producing reports and analysis. The Data Quality refers to how effectively we can gain access to and generate meaning from these volumes.

A great deal of energy tends to go into our design of ways for inputting data. How much thought has gone into the processes designed for getting the data back out?

According to IDC, a leading technology research firm, very few companies have systems in place to make use of their data, and [they] often struggle to classify data in order to find it again. There’s a great quote on the V3 blog from Benjamin Woo at IDC:

“The key is to take the data and make money from it”

I think that this frames the issue in language we can understand. We incur costs for gathering, processing, and storing data. We may even incur further costs cleansing, reworking, and managing the stores of data. What does the data do for us? Are we developing an asset that creates future value? Or, are we plugging an expense?

As I alluded to with my “fish out of water” comment, the answers to these questions are deeper than can be fathomed in this brief forum. Today, I would like to simply skip a stone across the surface from the safety of shore.

An introduction to the formal world of Data Quality is the real goal for this post. I’m not the expert. These guys are the experts (a couple of them anyways):

TDWI: The Data Warehousing Institute is where business and technical professionals come together to gain knowledge and skills through education and research programs relating to the Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Industry. These guys are leaders in the field and have a ton of resources you may find useful.
IAIDQ: The International Association for Information and Data Quality is a not-for-profit, vendor-neutral professional society of people passionate about improving information and data quality. They have a fantastic glossary of terms you may find very useful!

These two groups provide a jumping off point. I don’t think, as accountants, we can be expected to become Data Quality experts. The constraints of time and inclination stack up against it as well they should. But, I do think that it’s in our best interest to familiarize ourselves with their world a bit so we can speak intelligently about these matters and gain some measure of insight that can help produce more value from the data we compile.

One quick example

Domain Value Redundancy: A dysfunctional characteristic of an attribute or field in which the same fact of information is represented by more than one value. For example, unit of measure code having domain values of “doz,” “dz,” and “12″ may all represent the fact that the unit of measure is “one dozen.” (Larry English)

What input fields in your systems give the user discretion with respect to the input values?

I live in Mount Pleasant.

I live in Mt. Pleasant.

I live in Mt Pleasant.

You can see how, once these various spellings get into the database, it becomes much more difficult to generate aggregate data without going in and mucking around. Getting it right the first time is a key issue, but that’s a topic for another post.

Parting Shot

Here are some fun facts to leave you with today, just to give you an idea about the nature of the Data Quality professional:

Wednesday, November 11, 2009 was World Quality Day. I bet you didn’t know that. World Quality Day was established by the United Nations in 1990 to raise awareness of how quality approaches can have a tangible effect on business success.
Right now among the Data Quality community, they are engaged in a “Blogging Olympics” dubbed, “Three Single Versions of a Shared Version of the Truth”. My favourite post so far is the one arguing that the “single version of the truth” mindset is inherently flawed and should be considered the “one lie strategy”.

These are the guys we need to engage. Enjoy!

Spreadsheet Nation

Geoff Devereux — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:17:05 +0000

The idea was simple enough, write a short post about the role of spreadsheets in organizations. More accurately, write about the role of Excel in organizations. I’m trying to provide a frame of reference from which readers can gain perspective on what Indicee does. My thinking was, I could provide a bit of historical context (background of VisiCalc and Lotus 1,2,3 – the original electronic spreadsheets from the days when you actually had to use the word “electronic” in order to differentiate the thing from a paper spreadsheet), then a colourful anecdote about one or two of my favourite “Excel moments”(to illustrate some of the benefits and drawbacks to spreadsheet use), some stats on spreadsheet proliferation, end off with an introduction to the concept of datamarts, and Bob’s Your Uncle, point made. Readers could use the comfort and familiarity of the spreadsheet concept to relate to the new concept of Indicee I figured the most difficult part of the whole exercise would have been choosing just one title for the post.

I was contemplating something like:

Confessions of an Excel Jockey
Fathers of Invention; The Mother of All Spreadsheets
or Ghosts of Spreadsheets Past

What is difficult, complex, or nuanced about that?

What I found, as I started digging into a bit of cursory research (what is a blog post without links?), was that the debate about the relative value of spreadsheets has been raging with a fair bit of intensity for some time. It wasn’t long before I had compiled literally pages of links that espoused support for or against their use. There’s a term out there describing the exponential growth in the number of spreadsheets in a company as “spreadmarting”. Well, my links on the spreadsheet question were spreadmarting!

My web journey ran the spectrum of views! There are those that dig excel to the point of self-applying a moniker like “Mr.Excel”; and on the opposite side of the spectrum, you have an actual institute dedicated to studying the dangers inherent in spreadsheet use. There are web pages dedicated to compiling links to other excel resources [I randomly chose one here], and articles detailing some of the greatest business blunders attributed to spreadsheet errors. If you feel you may have a spreadsheet problem, for the small fee of $1749 Forrester Research will provide you with a white paper (complete with a money-back guarantee) that promises to explain spreadsheet best practice for you – let’s assume it’s really great. Or for the more frugal-minded, there’s Truth To Power’s practical Top Ten list.

Games have been developed based on excel in case you don’t get quite enough during the course of your work day (actually, I highly recommend this one!). There are even spreadsheets designed to compare other spreadsheets. Surprisingly, excel formulae only made it to #4 on the “Stuff Accountants Like” blog (#1 is Not Sleeping – sadly, the blog itself has recently gone to sleep). And since I don’t want to leave out the rest of the blogosphere, here is a link to a list of other excel-related blogs.

What all of this tells me is that the role of spreadsheets in organizations is up for debate.

With that in mind, I encourage you to weigh in. What is the role of spreadsheets in your organization? How do you feel about it? What are your best (and worst) “Excel moments”?

Regardless, there is little doubt about one thing. The business world, collectively, relies heavily on this little piece of technology that grew out of Dan Bricklin’s need 30 years ago for a souped up calculator when he and Bob Frankston came up with Visicalc. So, although I haven’t made much headway in relating Indicee to our good friend the spreadsheet just yet, hopefully this post will get you thinking more actively about this ubiquitous business tool. We can tackle the Indicee connection soon enough as I plan to revisit this topic regularly.

We are Spreadsheet Nation!