James Taylor on His New Book

A few months ago, James Taylor of Fair Isaac asked me to look over a proof of Smart (Enough) Systems, a book he has co-written with industry guru Neil Raden of Hired Brains. The topic, of course, is enterprise decision management, which the book explains in great detail. It has now been released (you can order through Amazon or James or Neil), so I asked James for a few comments to share. What did you hope to accomplish with this book? Fame and fortune. Seriously, what I wanted to do was bring a whole bunch of threads and thoughts together in...

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Free Data as in Free Beer

I found myself wandering the aisles at the American Library Association national conference over the weekend. Plenty of publishers, library management systems and book shelf builders, none of which are particularly relevant to this blog (although there was at least one “loyalty” system for library patrons). There was some search technology but nothing particularly noteworthy. The only exhibitor that did catch my eye was Data-Planet, which aggregates data on many topics (think census, economic time series, stocks, weather, etc.) and makes it accessible...

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Using Lifetime Value to Measure the Value of Data Quality

As readers of this blog are aware, I’ve reluctantly backed away from arguing that lifetime value should be the central metric for business management. I still think it should, but haven’t found managers ready to agree. But even if LTV isn’t the primary metric, it can still provide a powerful analytical tool. Consider, for example, data quality. One of the challenges facing a data quality initiative is how to justify the expense. Lifetime value provides a framework for doing just that.The method is pretty straightforward: break lifetime value...

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Unica Paper Gives Marketing Measurement Tips

If the wisdom of Plato can’t solve our marketing measurement problems, perhaps we can look to industry veteran Fred Chapman, currently with enterprise marketing software developer Unica. Fred recently gave a Webinar on Marketing Effectively on Your Terms and Your Time which did an excellent job laying out issues and solutions for today’s marketers. Follow-up materials included a white paper Building a Performance Measurement Culture in Marketing laying out ten steps toward improved marketing measurement.The advice in the paper is reasonable, if...

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Plato's View of Marketing Performance Measurement

I reread Plato’s Protagoras over the weekend for a change of pace. What makes that relevant here is Socrates’ contention that virtue is the ability to measure accurately—in particular, the ability to measure the amount of good or evil produced by an activity. Socrates’ logic is that people always seek the greatest amount of good (which he equates with pleasure), so different choices simply result from different judgments about which action will produce the most good.I don’t find this argument terribly convincing, for reasons I’ll get to shortly....

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Accenture Paper Offers Simplified CRM Planning Approach

As I’ve pointed out many times before, consultants love their 2x2 matrices. Our friends at Accenture have once again illustrated the point with a paper “Surveying and Building Your CRM Future,” whose subtitle promises “a New CRM Software Decision-Making Model”. Yep, the model is a matrix, dividing users into four categories based on data “density” (volume and update frequency) and business process uniqueness (need for customization). Each combination neatly maps to a different class of CRM software. Specifically:- High density / low uniqueness...

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Hosted Software Enters the Down Side of the Hype Cycle

“SMB SaaS sales robust, but holdouts remain” reads the headline on a piece from SearchSMB.com Website. (For the acronym impaired, SMB is “small and medium sized business” and SaaS is “software as a service”, a.k.a. hosted systems.) The article quotes two recent surveys, one by Saugatuck Technology and the other by Gartner. According to the article, Saugatuck found “SMB adoption rose from 9% in 2006 to 27% in 2007” among businesses under $1 billion in revenue, while Gartner reported “Only 7% of SMBs strongly believed that SaaS was suitable for...

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Autonomy Ultraseek Argues There's More to Search Than You-Know-Who

In case I didn’t make myself clear yesterday, my conclusion about balanced scorecard software is that the systems themselves are not very interesting, even though the concept itself can be extremely valuable. There’s nothing wrong with that: payroll software also isn’t very interesting, but people care deeply that it works correctly. In the case of balanced scorecards, you just need something to display the data—fancy dashboard-style interfaces are possible but not really the point. Nor is there much mystery about the underlying technology....

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Looking for Balanced Scorecard Software

I haven’t been able to come up with an authoritative list of major balanced scorecard software vendors. UK-based consultancy 2GC lists more than 100 in a helpful database with little blurbs on each, but they include performance management systems that are not necessarily for balanced scorecards. The Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, home of balanced scorecard co-inventor David P. Norton, lists two dozen products they have certified as meeting true balanced scorecard criteria. Of these, more than half belong non-specialist companies including...

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Why Balanced Scorecards Haven't Succeeded at Marketing Measurement

All this thinking about the overwhelming number of business metrics has naturally led me consider balanced scorecards as a way to organize metrics effectively. I think it’s fair to say that balanced scorecards have had only modest success in the business world: the concept is widely understood, but far from universally employed.Balanced scorecards make an immense amount of sense. A disciplined scorecard process begins with strategy definition followed by a strategy map, which identifies the measures most important to a business and how they...

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So Many Measures, So Little Time

I’ve been collating lists of marketing performance metrics from different sources, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds. One result that struck me was how little overlap I found: on two big lists of just over 100 metrics each, there were only 24 in common. These were fundamental concepts like market share, customer lifetime value, gross rating points, and clickthrough rate. Oddly enough, some metrics that I consider very basic were totally absent, such as number of campaigns and average campaign size. (These are used to measure staff productivity...

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Ace Hardware Fits Ads to Customer Context

As you almost certainly didn’t notice, I didn’t make a blog post yesterday. For no logical reason, this makes me feel guilty. So, since I happened to just see an interesting article, I’ll make two today.A piece in this week’s BrandWeek describes a promotion by Ace Hardware that will allow people who are tracking a hurricane to find a nearby hardware store ("Look Like Rain? Ace Hardware Hopes So", BrandWeek, June 6, 2007). This is a great example of using customer context in marketing—one of the core tenets of the Customer Experience Matrix....

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eWeek: Semantic Web Shows Convergence of Search and Data Integration

This week’s eWeek has an unusually lucid article explaining the Semantic Web. The article presents the Semantic Web as a way to tag information in a structured way and make it searchable via the Web. I think this oversimplifies a bit by leaving out the importance of the relationships among the tags, which are part of the “semantic” framework and what makes the queries able to return non-trivial results. But no matter—the article gives a clear description of the end result (querying the Web like a database), and that’s quite helpful.From my personal...

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A Small But Useful Thought

I’ve been continuing my research into marketing performance measurement. Nothing earth-shattering to report, but I did come across one idea worth sharing. I saw a couple of examples where a dashboard graph displayed two measures that represent trade-offs: say, inventory level vs. out-of-stock conditions, or call center time per call vs. call center cross-sell revenue. Showing two compensatory metrics together at least ensures the implicit trade-off is visible. Results must still be related to ultimate business value to check whether the net...

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Data Visualization Is Just One Part of a Dashboard System

Following Friday’s post on dashboard software, I want to emphasize that data visualization techniques are really just one element of those systems, and not necessarily the most important. Dashboard systems must gather data from source systems; transform and consolidate it; place it in structures suited for high-speed display and analysis; identify patterns, correlations and exceptions; and make it accessible to different users within the constraints of user interests, skills and authorizations. Although I haven’t researched the dashboard products...

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Dashboard Software: Finding More than Flash

I’ve been reading a lot about marketing performance metrics recently, which turns out to be a drier topic than I can easily tolerate—and I have a pretty high tolerance for dry. To give myself a bit of a break without moving too far afield, I decided to research marketing dashboard software. At least that let me look at some pretty pictures.Sadly, the same problem that afflicts discussions of marketing metrics affects most dashboard systems: what they give you is a flood of disconnected information without any way to make sense of it. Most of...

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