Four steps towards bringing business intelligence to the masses

I've been working on a project with a couple of friends to bring data analysis to a broader audience. There are many Business Intelligence (BI) tools that target large businesses and require a major investment in time, money and internal resources. Surely the power of BI doesn’t need to be limited to that context! There are literally millions of people who have data that they want to summarize and visualize in ways beyond Excel’s ability, but who don’t have the IT skills required by the BI tools we are used to. But how could the functionality of the big BI vendors be made available in an appropriate format for the rest of the world – for the average individual, community organisation, church, sports club, or small business?

1. You’d need to keep it cheap and simple. 
2. Host the system in the cloud so that the users don’t have the hassle of maintaining IT infrastructure or managing software. 
3. Start with what people know. They already know about tables of numbers and graphs – though perhaps with a confused understanding of what chart type to use when. There’s a good chance they already know about the use of color-coding to distinguish between good and bad values. Thanks to Facebook they already know about online conversations. So build the simplest tool that allows them to apply that knowledge to their existing data sets. 
4. Lead people forward over time. Build additional features into that framework so that users can easily learn as they go and gradually take advantage of more advanced types of analysis. 

The initial reaction to the release of OTUS Analytics Dashboards shows that this approach is gaining traction. All sorts of people are trying out the hosted dashboard functionality of OTUS Analytics. They can securely upload data and very quickly layout dashboards to their own design. The dashboards can display any assortment of tables, charts, color-coded performance indicators and explanatory text. It's easy to create scorecards and strategy maps. Groups of users can view the same dashboards and discuss what they see.

Being a hosted system, features can easily be added over time without requiring users to perform any upgrade re-installations. We’ve recently extended the range of chart types, added heat maps, and will soon introduce gauges.

Let me know if you'd like more info.

God's Omniscience

I've just read "Defining Omniscience: a Feminist Perspective", by Daniel Farmer in Faith and Philosophy (Vol. 27 No. 3 July 2010). He draws on Lorraine Code and Jonathan Kvanvig to suggest the inadequacy of the traditional model of omniscience, viz, that God know all true propositions and believes none that are false.

Is propositional knowledge the right paradigm of knowledge, or is that perhaps a Western male philosophical bias?

Psalm 139 says:

You have searched me, LORD, and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you, LORD, know it completely.

Farmer suggests that God's omniscience is more fundamentally about people than about propositions. God knows *me*, not just facts about me. Our hope is not in a God who knows every *thing* but in an assurance that when we meet face-to-face "then I will know fully, even as I am fully known" (1 Corinthians 13:12).

I can imagine weaving that into a sermon about Mark 5:21-43 (Luke 8:40-56) -- the healing of Jairus' daughter and the woman with long-term haemorrhaging. Jesus understood that the girl needed privacy, while the woman needed a public display of her cleansing. The traditional philosophical boundaries around "God" are cold, dry and misleading. But to understand, through these acts of Jesus, that God knows each person's needs and cares for each as a beloved individual, radically changes our perception of God and inspires a similar commitment to people over facts in our own motivations.

Performance Appraisals

In Management Today (March 2011), Dr Tim Baker presents a suggestion about how to improve the employee performance appraisal process. He proposes that the following five 10-minute conversations be repeated each six months:

Topic	Content	Key Questions
Climate review	Job satisfaction, morale and communication	How would you rate your current job satisfaction? How would you rate morale? How would you rate communnication?
Training and development	Development over the next 6 months	What are some skills you would like to learn? What courses would you like to undertake?
Innovation and continuous improvement	Ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the business	What's one way you could improve your own working efficiencies? What's one way we could improve our department?
Improved performance	Improving performance and standards	What are some opportunities for improved performance? How can I assist you to do that?
Career	Career direction and guidance	What part of your job do you enjoy? What would we need to do to help you develop?

I like the idea of a continuous process rather than a scary once-a-year meeting. This needs to be balanced, however, with a couple of things. First, it is essential that these are conversations - not just the manager asking questions. The questions should lead to agreed goals. And second, the process needs to be augmented with specific times when the manager rates progress and advises about salary increases.

Ecclesiastical g-strings

In the podcast A Love Supreme: Jazz, Justice, Democracy, Otis Moss III builds a model for leadership on aspects of jazz. He makes some interesting connections, albeit extremely American. But I couldn't pass up this gem:

Church is not concerned about the love ethic any more ... but a market-driven ministry ... that turns the preacher into an theological exotic dancer, looking for someone to put a dollar in their ecclesiastical g-string.

How do illegal immigrants get into Australia

In a radio interview about her candidacy for the Australian Senate, Lin Hatfield Dodds claims that only 3 - 4% of Australia's illegal immigrants arrive via the boats that we hear so much about. The rest fly in on normal commercial planes.

If that's true, it makes a mockery of the endless political wrangling about protecting our shores from people smugglers. The few who arrive in boats are almost certainly genuine refugees who have risked their lives to escape an unliveable oppression. They deserve our compassion and care more than the other 96% who have the money to fly here in safety.

Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry

Recent research suggests that it is easier to blame someone than to praise them. Joshua Knobe shows this clearly in the following two thought experiments:

Suppose that a vice-president goes to the chairman of the board and says OK, we've got this new policy. It's going to make huge amounts of money for our company but it's also going to harm the environment. And the chairman says, look, I know this policy is going to harm the environment but I don't care at all about that, I only care about making as much money as we possibly can. So in fact they initiate the new policy and the environment is indeed harmed. Now the question is, did the chairman of the board harm the environment intentionally? So what would you say in that instance?

Like 85% of people, I say he is to blame.

The second vignette is very similar to the first one. What differs is just the moral status of what the person is doing. So suppose we keep everything exactly the same but we just change the word 'harm' to 'help'. So now suppose the vice president goes to the chairman of the board and says, OK, we've got this new policy, it's going to make huge amounts of money for our company and it's also going to help the environment. And the chairman of the board says, look, I know it's going to help the environment but I don't care at all about that, all I care about is just making as much money as we possibly can. So let's implement the new policy. And sure enough it helps the environment. In this case did the chairman of the board help the environment intentionally?

This is From Joshua Knobe (2009). The philosophy of good intentions (podcast on ABC Radio National) but see also Joshua Knobe, Adam Cohen & Alan Leslie (2006). Acting Intentionally and the Side-Effect Effect: 'Theory of Mind' and Moral Judgment. Psychological Science 17:421-427.

Frank Hindriks seeks to explain this asymmetry by saying that praise depends on being appropriately motivated, whereas blame does not. Seems to me that just generalises the phenomenon rather than explaining it. (Frank Hindriks (2008). Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry. Philosophical Quarterly 58, 233: 630-41.)

Jesus the Comedian

I recently read this section of Peter Kreeft's "Before I Go: letters to our children about what really matters" (p. 94).

Jesus had a fantastic sense of humor. Even if you don't detect it in the Gospels (but how can you miss it?), you can detect it in nature. He's the mind ("logos") of God who designed nature, after all. How can you look at a basset hound and not know Jesus is a comedian? And some of those deep-sea fish -- absolutely over the top and of the wall.

The two greatest jokes of all time were the incarnation and the crucifixion. They were the two great jokes God played on the devil. The incarnation was the great disappearing act and the crucifixion was the great judo act.

Even if you don't get it now, you will in Heaven, where you will have the last laugh forever.

I love the "great judo act" image!

With regard to humour in the Gospels, I think Kreeft is pointing to the laughs Jesus probably got from the audience when he used hyperbole like passing a camel through the eye of a needle. A web search found these ...

1. Matthew 23:24 "You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel." NIV. Now that's funny!Here's the same verse from The Message:"Do you have any idea how silly you look, writing a life story that's wrong from start to finish, nitpicking over commas and semicolons?" Living Bible:"Blind guides! You strain your water so you won't accidentally swallow a gnat; then you swallow a camel!"
2. Examples or irony, sarcasm, puns, hyperbole and situation comedy in the Old Testament
3. From Terry Goodrich 
• Jesus suggested the critic should get the log out of his eye before being obsessed with a speck of dust in someone else’s.
• When Peter told Jesus that religious leaders questioned whether Jesus paid the tax, Jesus told him to reel in a fish and check its mouth. In it was enough money to pay both Jesus’ and Peter’s tax.
4. Pictures of Jesus laughing