Tag: Business Analysis

Do we understand what Data, Information, and Knowledge are?

Written by Frank Quintana on November 8, 2023. Posted in Articles.

“Data is everywhere, but it requires CONTEXT and accessibility to be useful…”

This compelling statement by Symphony Logic immediately caught my attention. It resonates with my model of “The Intelligence Life Cycle,” whose first axiom, or postulate, is “Data is measured in context”—a notion that I expanded upon with my second axiom, “Information is organized data with a purpose.”

At first glance, it might seem trivial, but currently, there’s significant confusion in the semantics, ontology, and taxonomy of the three terms that form the building blocks of Intelligence.

Data, Information, and Knowledge are often used interchangeably as though they are synonymous, but they’re not. This confusion compromises the quality and analysis of our data.

The Delphi study titled “Knowledge Map of Information Science,” conducted between 2003 and 2005 sought to explore the foundational elements of Information Science. 130 definitions of data, information, and knowledge are documented in this study. The international panel consisted of 57 leading scholars from 16 countries, representing (almost) all the major subfields and essential aspects of the field.

Working with 130 different definitions for terms as vital as DATA, INFORMATION, and KNOWLEDGE seems excessive, and rather than providing clarity, it obscures and leads to confusion.

Therefore, I took it upon myself to find or create simple yet accurate definitions for these pivotal terms using an axiomatic approach, similar to the one used by Euclid in his fundamentals of Geometry.

Axiom 1: Data are measured in context.

Axiom 2: Information is organized data with a purpose.

Axiom 3: Knowledge is the discovery of patterns and their relationships.

Axiom 4: Wisdom is the effective use of knowledge. As Professor Drucker put it, effectiveness is doing the right thing, as opposed to efficiency, which is doing things right.

Fortunately, I did not need to introduce a fifth axiom.

I applied these axioms to develop a model that I call The Intelligence Life Cycle, which has helped me identify the limitations of AI and numerous pitfalls in Big Data models and architectures. I presented my theory about the ILC in July 2023 at Nova Southeastern University in South Florida during a presentation titled “The Intelligence Life Cycle and the Limitations of AI” at the SQL Saturday event.

More recently, I also spoke at USF during DevFest to a select audience about the ILC and the Limitations of AI, and I introduced my other model, “The 4 Pillars of Digital Transformation.” Here, I argued that Data is not the new oil nor the first block of importance; instead, it is a third-level block in a hierarchy of importance, preceded by the Cultural and Procedures and Policies Pillars.

You can learn more about The Intelligence Life Cycle and Limitations of AI in my LinkedIn article.

Have You Considered “Customer Information Needs” In Your Process?

Written by Adrian Reed on October 26, 2023. Posted in Articles.

A while ago, I was sitting in an airport where all flights were delayed due to weather. As is quite often the case in situations like this, staff at the gate initially don’t have a great deal of information available to them. In my experience, airport staff will do everything they can to keep customers updated, but sometimes they seem to know little more than the passengers (and are probably every bit as eager to know what is going on!).

What has changed in the last ten or so years is that getting information from outside sources is a lot easier. While some people were lining up to speak to the gate staff, others were accessing apps to try to piece together what was going on. For example:

Using a flight tracking app, I could see planes that were previously in a ‘holding pattern’ above had now changed direction (very likely they were diverting to other airports)
Looking at other airports’ websites, I could see flights destined for this location due to leave hours ago had not left (presumably as the weather had been forecast). I concluded this might cause a problem, as even if the weather clears, the aircraft and staff won’t be here to conduct the onward/return flights (and even if they are, perhaps the flight crew might have exceeded the number of hours they are allowed to work without a break)
Looking out of the window, I could see that the weather appeared to be getting worse, not better…
When I accessed a hotel booking app, I could see hotels in the area starting to sell out of rooms. I started to worry that if the flight was canceled, there wouldn’t be anywhere to stay

The airport and gate staff were incredibly helpful, to the extent that they could be, but the only information they could really give is “flight delayed: next update in an hour”. The irony was that a consumer had access to more information via free smartphone apps than the airport representative was able to share.

I made a decision to stick with it, but assumed that I probably wasn’t going anywhere that day. My prediction came true, and after a mad scramble I thankfully did get a hotel room for the night and flew late the next afternoon.

Customers Need Information

It will come as no surprise that for customers to have a good experience of a service, they need accurate information at key times. If you’ve ever flown on an airplane, you’ve probably found most airports are pretty efficient at managing routine information flow. There might be hundreds of other flights leaving on the same day, but it’s usually pretty easy to know what terminal and gate you’re leaving from. Airports are usually also pretty good at getting people to the gate on time (even if they occasionally pretend they are ‘boarding’ long before the plane is actually boarding in order to get people moving…). Issues sometimes occur when things aren’t going as planned. This is where you have to rely on someone announcing something over a loudspeaker system, often in a noisy airport, where everyone is desperately trying to work out what is going on…

What is perhaps less obvious is that someone has designed how and when information flows to the customer. The “happy path” (where things go well) is a well-trodden and well-designed path. Perhaps some other exceptional paths are less well-designed, meaning customers are less likely to get the prompt information that they need.

Consider Information Needs

This is an area where BAs can add significant value. Quite often, the focus will be on designing a customer journey or set of business processes. That is a perfectly good approach, but at each step in a journey or process it is worth asking “what information might the customer need here” and “how can we deliver it to them?” This applies as much to the exception flows as the main “happy path”. Often exceptions are where those “moments of truth” happen where a customer really relies on good service.

Not only this, but if a customer’s information needs are preempted, this will likely prevent queries. Imagine an announcement at an airport:

“This is an announcement for people on flight BMXXXX to Southampton. All flights are currently grounded due to weather conditions, and all incoming flights are being diverted. We currently hope to run the flights, but right now we can’t be sure. We will be updating you every hour, and a final decision will be made at 9pm. If we don’t fly today, you’ll get a free place on a flight tomorrow, which will be automatically allocated (you won’t need to take any action, you’ll get it via email). If you’d prefer to voluntarily change your flight, come and see us and we’ll explain how to do this, but please do be aware a fee may apply if you opt to change before the flight is canceled”.

This isn’t perfect but it would help a passenger make a decision. It has preempted the decision they might want to make and has provided them some context.

Of course, you probably don’t work in an airport, but you almost certainly work to define and design processes that are used by people. By considering what information those people want and need during the process, in both the “happy path” and in exceptional circumstances, we can enhance the experience. And surely that is worth doing!

The Unique Competing Space: A Framework for Evaluating the Competitive Landscape and Strategic Options

Written by Oluwakorede Asuni on October 25, 2023. Posted in Articles.

The Unique Competing Space (UCS) is a macro-level strategy visualisation framework, which enables teams to understand the broader scope of customer needs, evaluate how well their offerings are meeting customer needs, and evaluate how well their competition is also meeting the needs.

The UCS can easily be one of the tools in a firm or team’s arsenal for probing and situating “…the firm’s strategic position in its greater competitive context”^[1].

First introduced by George Tovstiga in their book Strategy in Practice: A Practitioner’s Guide to Strategic Thinking. The framework is often presented as a venn diagram consisting of three overlapping individual circles that overlap to provide a view of the firm or team’s competitive space unique to them, the opportunities open to them and the challenges on offer by the competition(s).

First each circle.

Figure: Components of the UCS framework

Customer needs:

Customers are the reasons any business is in business. They are the stakeholders whom businesses seek to serve and create value for. It is in meeting their stated, or, observed, or perceived needs that businesses indeed create value for these stakeholders, who in turn pay for the goods and or services the business has provided them. When or if satisfied, these stakeholders return to make repeat purchases as their needs may dictate and the business’ bouquet of unique offerings, prices, and customer experience may afford.

The firm’s offerings:

These are individual or collective products or services or both, that a business offers to its customers as a way of meeting the customers’ needs.

These offerings are often dictated by the alignment of the firm’s capabilities, enabling regulatory, social and cultural environments, and noted customer needs.

The competition’s offering:

Rarely is it the case that there isn’t an alternative or substitute product or service that can meet a customer’s needs other than the one offered by any one firm. This collection of offerings from one or more competing entities servicing the same market or market vertical or segment combines to make up the competitors’ offerings.

And now to the Unique Competing Space:

Figure2: The UCS framework

The UCS emerges when the customer needs overlap with the firm’s offering and, the competition’s offerings where those exist, are accounted for.

The portion of the Venn diagram where the customers’ needs uniquely overlap with the firm’s offerings is the firm’s UCS.

A firm’s strategic objective could be:

to defend that space from shrinking – if it is large enough or
to grow that space if isn’t large enough and there are potential benefits to the firm for growing the UCS or
To exit the UCS completely if it is shrinking and there isn’t any value to the business for defending or growing the space.

Using the UCS:

Figure 3: The UCS framework with conceptual labels

To use the UCS, it may be best for teams to gather around a large whiteboard with sticky notes (or an electronic equivalent – think Miro, Mural etc.) and then create the Venn diagram representation of the customers’ needs, the firm’s offerings or capabilities and the competition’s offerings.

On the sticky notes write down:

All known customer needs that both the firm and their competitors are not currently meeting: place these on the part of the Customer needs component of the UCS that isn’t overlapping with the firm’s offering or the competitor’s offerings. This portion of Figure 3 is labelled C1.
All known customer needs that the firm is currently meeting: place these on the overlapping section of Customer needs and Firm offering components of the UCS labelled C3 in Figure 3.
All known customer needs that the firm is currently addressing and that also have alternative or substitute offerings from competitors: place these on the overlapping section of Customer needs, the Firm’s offerings and Competitor offerings components of the UCS labelled C5 in Figure 3.
All known customer needs that are not being met by the firm, but are being met by the competition: place these on the overlapping section of Customer needs and Competitor offerings components of the UCS – labelled C2 in Figure 3.
All firm’s offerings (and available capabilities) that may or may not overlap with those of the competitor but which are not currently being utilised to meet customer needs: and place these on the non-overlapping section of the Firm’s offerings component of the UCS – labelled A2 in figure 3.
All of the known offerings from competitors which isn’t currently offered by the firm or meeting any known customer needs: place this in the non-overlapping portion of the Competitor’s offering component of the UCS, labelled A2 in Figure 3.
All known competitor offerings which are also offered by the firm, but meet no known need of the customers: place this in the portion of the UCS framework labelled A1, where the Competitor’s offering overlaps the firm’s offering but both are not known to be meeting any known customer needs.

What to do with the information:

In general, the UCS helps the firm see the size of their UCS relative to that of the competition(s), and can provide clear inputs into the strategic choices the firm makes.

In some cases, these options include but are not limited to:

Defend the UCS
Customers often end up churning for one reason or the other, and the goal of every business should be to retain customers for as long as they can manage and also attract new customers. When customers churn, it could only mean that the UCS shrinks one churned customer after the other, with the implication, if unarrested, of a negative impact on a business’ bottom line.So how does a firm keep customers? Listen to customers.
Observe what they love most about your products and your competition’s offerings. Ask what can come along and replace your firm’s offerings in your customer’s mind (clue – look at those things already replacing your firm’s offerings).Lock customers in (though customers protest malicious lock-ins, however, you are better off locking customers in by ensuring your offering is the most delightful to the customer). Apple had no business making watches, right? But it risks losing some iPhone users to Android OEMs who have leapfrogged the smartwatch economy and were building ecosystems between their watches and mobile devices. By introducing the Apple Watch, Apple figured out a way to lock customers into their ecosystem, whilst selling more to the same customers (people buy a phone once every two years on the average, and Apple figured out to sell to the same customers a second device which relies on the first one within the same or adjacent sales circle – both defending and growing their UCS in one fell swoop.
Grow the firm’s UCS
Growing the UCS could require selling more to the same customers, selling to more customers or both. Additionally, it could also imply meeting customers needs that were not previously a focus for the firm but that has a great potential for cementing the existing relationship between your firm and customers. You may recall that during COVID, UberEats which was a predominantly food delivery business expanded to also deliver medicines and small packages – both of which have now become additional sources of income for UBER and in a way, has expanded the UCS for Uber.

Closing notes

Whilst most strategy teams and firms understand that having a current bird’s eye view of the competitive landscape in which they compete, the UCS may be one easy-to-use framework for doing so and carrying all stakeholders within the business along for the ride.

^[1] Chapter 5 Strategic Analysis II: High-Level Sense Making: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/strategy-in-practice/9781118519271/chapter05.html (accessed: 18/09/2023)

Always Ask Why: A Practical Example

Written by Adrian Reed on October 18, 2023. Posted in Articles.

I don’t know about you, but I find that I can’t turn my business analysis brain off. I find myself wanting to improve just about every process that I experience, and I often find myself conducting business analysis on the processes that I experience as a customer.

This happened to me recently when a company asked me for a physical ‘wet signature’ on a form. This wouldn’t be unusual if I was in the same physical location as the person requesting the signature, but I wasn’t—they were literally going to email me a PDF form for me to print out, sign, scan in and email back. Even though Adobe PDF has a signature function (and I have a graphics tablet, so I can literally do the same signature electronically), this wasn’t good enough. It had to be old-school pen on paper. I eventually complied, deciding that I’d rationalize it by calling the process “retro” and “vintage”…

Badly “Improved” Processes Might Be MORE Risky:

In situations like this, I always want to ask ‘why’ to understand the underlying reasons that things work in a particular way. In this case, if we were to ask why I suspect the underlying answer would be that an old paper process had been replaced, with each step being recreated electronically. In this context, ultimately, a signature acts as a way of authorizing something to happen.

You can almost imagine the conversation with a group of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). One of them is adamant that we couldn’t possibly accept electronic signatures. The legal & compliance SME says that electronic signatures are completely valid, but there is reluctance from other stakeholders for other reasons. Perhaps there’s a perception that by getting a physical signature there is less risk… or perhaps there are other reservations. Some might be genuine, others might be founded on unsubstantiated fears or assumptions.

Left unchecked, there is a risk that ‘we’ll do things the way we’ve always done them, just in an electronic format’. This can lead to the worst of both worlds where risk is increased and customers are inconvenienced:

Alternation: I could have altered the PDF before I printed it and signed it (it’s relatively easy to edit a PDF). Unless they check it word-for-word they’ll never know, and since it’s scanned, auto-comparing will be difficult.
Verification: They didn’t actually have my signature on file. If they weren’t comparing it against anything, then really what is the point? I could have scrawled any old signature and it probably would have been accepted.
Security: Unencrypted email isn’t a secure transmission format. Even though it was relatively low-risk mundane information, it’s liable to interception en route. Plus emails can be spoofed so there’s a risk of a customer being impersonated.
Scanners: How many customers have scanners? What about people who just take photos on their phone, will that be sufficient?

These are just four examples, but they illustrate a key point: The process probably isn’t achieving what it actually set out to do. Yes, you are getting a physical signature. But if the aim is to get a secure, authenticated nonreputable authorisation for something… then the process is failing!

Always Ask Why: “Good” Questions Make A Difference

The key to avoiding situations like this is to ask why, in varied ways, lots of times. Do this and you’ll get to the core purpose of a process, or process step. In their book “Mastering the Requirements Process: Getting The Requirements Right”, James & Suzanne Robertson call this “The Essence”. In this example ‘getting physical signature’ might be the current step, but the essence is ‘authorize transaction’ (or whatever).A key point here is that if you understand the essence, you can question any underlying assumptions or business rules. It’s possible to ask “how else might we be able to do this”. If the aim is to ‘authorize transaction’ then there are countless other ways of doing this that are more secure and verifiable than a scanned PDF in an email. You could even use the Brown Cow model to question any underlying assumptions that have been made.

Asking these questions will help encourage stakeholders to think about the true essence of the process, and about how it might change in the future. A half hour discussion now might save tens of thousands of processing time later, once the process is implemented.

This is yet another area where BAs add significant value by helping to ensure things improve in a way that maximizes the benefits that will be delivered both to the organization, and to its customers.

Best of BATimes: 3 Reasons Why the BA/PM Hybrid Role is So Difficult

Written by Tiauna Ross on October 11, 2023. Posted in Articles.

There are many variations of the BA Hybrid role, but the Business Analyst/Project Manager hybrid is the most widely discussed.

While there may be disagreement on whether there should be a blended BA/PM role and where the two roles differ and overlap, I think we can all agree on one thing: this hybrid role can be very challenging. It is also a hybrid that is gaining popularity as organizations look for ways to become leaner and more flexible. In this article, I will highlight the top three reasons why this hybrid role can be difficult for many and some suggestions to overcome the challenges.

1. The BA/PM role requires expertise in both disciplines.

The BA/PM role requires highly developed competencies across both disciplines which require education and experience across both to execute well. The problem is, many organizations, whether intentionally or circumstantially, assume that a good BA can quite naturally take on project management responsibilities and the same goes for PMs being able to take on business analysis tasks. The reality is that while one person could do both, there will most likely be a marked difference in the level at which they execute if they are experienced in one and not the other.

For example, an excellent PM with limited BA experience will likely get the project done but the value delivered may be less than initially expected by the stakeholders. Why? Because project management focuses on delivering the project according to the project requirements, but business analysis looks deeper at the meaning of the requirements and how the solution will be best implemented. A PM who is inexperienced in business analysis may take the requirements as stated by the stakeholders at face value, something that a more experienced BA would look deeper at and inquire more about. A BA with little or no PM experience may produce well-defined requirements but would likely struggle when it comes to managing multiple project constraints because they do not have the experience needed to make professional judgments that will keep the project on track.

2. This role only works well with small changes.

The IIBA Competency Model states this concerning hybrid roles, “The dual hybrid role is typically associated with small or less complex work efforts, where it is possible for a single person to perform both roles effectively.” This is true when it comes to the BA/PM hybrid and those performing these roles are certainly aware of this reality. This becomes an issue when an organization is immature in either discipline or is undergoing organizational restructuring. While it may be well understood that smaller is better with this kind of role, when an organization is not mature in performing project management and business analysis, the cost of failure and the loss of value is not easily identified.

When an organization is undergoing organizational realignment, they often take an “all hands on” approach to getting things done, which may leave one person managing large or risky efforts while holding multiple responsibilities. From the outside, it can appear as a great way to maximize resources because no one truly understands the real costs of having one person doing both.

3. The role may not be well-defined or adequately supported.

Any role that is undefined or poorly defined is likely to cause problems. With the BA/PM role it can be even more evident. Many BA roles already have a lot of presumed tasks that impact the nature of their work. Many PMs have roles loaded with other responsibilities outside of project management. When the two roles are combined into a BA/PM role that is ambiguous and undefined, it can produce a lot of issues, not only for the individual in the role, but also for the organization.

Many times, the BA/PM hybrid role is not even officially acknowledged as a hybrid role and appears out of necessity where the person keeps the same job title but assumes more responsibility in the other domain. These situations can also make it hard to find the right person for the role. It is not enough to simply take two full-time job descriptions and merge them together into a double job description. There must be much thought given to what they will be asked to do and what they will not be asked to do. If this boundary is not created, it will set up the BA/PM to manage their work by urgency only, because there won’t be enough time to do everything they are assigned.

Increasing the Odds of Success

To ensure that the BA/PM role is successful, organizations must pay attention to the role and what is needed to increase the odds of success. It is not enough to merely assign additional responsibilities to an existing role. Organizations must take the time to define the role considering the value they expect to receive and the inherent limitations of the role. Once the job is defined, there must be a concerted effort to keep assignments within the size and complexity that will best enable success and have mechanisms in place to measure that.

Additionally, there must be some consideration given to what will be needed to support the BA/PM. Are there other team members who can assist with tasks that would normally be associated with one or the other function? I have been successful in BA/PM hybrid roles where I had an oversight role on the business analysis side and was expected to review and guide the work of other BAs, rather than do everything myself. A successful support structure will also include access to the education, training and mentoring needed to allow those performing the role to sharpen their skills. All of these will increase the odds for success in the BA/PM hybrid role.