Andrew WhiteWell that was a strange day (actually it was a day last week) that had it all. Most of the work day was on the telephone with back-to-back calls with clients. There were one or two briefings (where vendors present some for analytsts to listen and learn) but most of the day wasspent talking with end users about their business issues and opportunities, and how best they can use IT. It was a good day!
Then I left home around 7pm to head to the airport. I decided to take an audio CD my dad had given to me at Xmas – called Forgotten Voices of the Blitz and Battle for Britain. This was a 3-CD set of recorded interviews with people who had, first hand, experienced the Blitz and Battle of Britain. For those of you that don’t know, the Blitz was the name given to the time during WWII when the Germans dropped bombs on London and other locations around mostly central and southern Britain, killing civilians indiscriminately. The Blitz took place largely during the period when Britain stood alone against the Nazi menace. The Battle of Britain was, of course, a short period of time when “the few” defended “the many” from the Luftwaffe. Anyway, for 40 minutes I listened intently at the rasping, elderly voices of (mostly) men who had fought and defended Britain in her time of need. It was remarkable and I arrived at the airport in a strange mood. The dialog about how the Hawker Hurricanes were physically assembled was fascinating; one chap described it as “dress making” in that chaps would arrive with cloth and string and literally throw the material over the air frame and stitch it together! Anyway, I have more of the CD to listen to when I arrive home.
Interestingly there was some dialog about how Fighter Command organized the defense and utilized its resources in a tiered structure; I was listening and applying familiar business models to this, using BI, Business Applications, Business Activity Monitoring, Performance Management and so on.
I came to realize that in order to enhance performance of the entire system (Fighter Command), various aspects of BI had to be deployed, and various aspects of business applications, from strategic, tactical, operation/transactional had to be aligned. And simulation and optimization was adapted at different levels; and decision making was multi-tiered with several “nerve centers” operating at different levels (Group, Sector, Chain etc). I thought this would have been a relazing drive to the airport, but the reverse took place. My mind was working over time and I arrived at the airport my mind was brimming with ideas.
On the flight I managed to read my Economist (print edition, April 11th to 17th) – and would you believe it, I had one of those experiences (the second this year!) whereby several stories just stood out and made perfect sense; and were enjoyable in the process of inwardly digesting the content.
They key stories for me were:
- Water Rights – Awash in Waste; “…there is, globally, no shortage of water. Unlike other natural resources (such as oil), water cannot be used up. It is recycled endlessly, as rain, snow, or evaporation.” Two articles explore the idea of making a market for water (even though it is seen more as a common/public good).
- Defense Budget – A Daring Punt – read much like what the UK saw with their defense budget not 20 years ago; a slow, gradual decline and change in priorities that, once changed, can rarely be reversed…
- Charlemagne – A surfeit of Leaders; leveraging a slight embarrassing meting with Obama in Europe, the article argues for the rationalization of the European organization since too many daft politicians are let loose on the world.
- The Federal Reserve – Sacred Territory; alarming article that highlights the moving forces at work in US government that wants to overturn the independent of the Fed for political purposes – we need to know what is happening here and stop it lest the US takes too many steps backwards in economic regulation… We cannot afford to let the cronies run the place. And Bernanke steps down next January…
- Malaria – Resistance if Futile; fascinating report highlighting how the traditional approach to “kill off the mosquito” just does not work; every time a new poison is introduced, within a life cycle (some section of the population dies – sure – but another section survives now in the much less competitive market) a whole new resistant strain persists. The article explains how evolution is being used as a means to understand what part of the overall mosquito lifecycle needs to be “nipped” that would avoid such an effective evolutionary response. Clever…
- Lessons from Ants – Crowded House – book review for a book I need to get; have read a lot on ants and emergent systems and complex systems; not sure there is too much new stuff here but worth an update and refresher anyway.
After this pleasurable time, I rested for the last 30 minutes of the flight listening to my MP3 player. And before I knew it, I had some ideas about information management, BI and analytics. But I am now wondering if these are strange ideas (hence the reference to the Twilight Zone. After all, I got to the hotel at 11pm and could not sleep for hours! I had to put pen to paper and didn’t get to bed until about 2am local time. Now those ideas were inserted into a couple of presentations and research efforts looking at decision making and how to look at information.
It was a crazy day one of those that was not meant to end. I never felt tired, even when my eyes finally closed at 3am. Ah, the pleasures of being an analyst!
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Category: Business Intelligence Decision Making Tags: Business Intelligence, Decision Making
