Posted by George Huhn on Fri, Apr 30, 2010 @ 10:38 AM
This last paragraph caught my attention:
Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.1
Our businesses are mixtures of clocks and clouds, but it is often difficult to distinguish which parts are clouds and which parts are clocks. The clocks are things that we can measure and control but clouds are things that we can only try to predict.
Confusion begins when we try to measure and control clouds as if they are clocks or we focus only on trying to control clocks without trying to predict and mange the clouds.
Like Leher's comment on science, it is also a mistake of modern business to try to pretend everything is a clock. While I am a strong proponent of using business analytics, such as
simulation and
optimization in
project portfolio management tools, the analytical tools that we use should be able to manage data from both clocks and clouds. And when we're using these tools, we should be ever mindful of the inherent uncertainty (cloudiness!) in the data and the resulting predictions. Business analyses should rarely be
chiseled in stone. Too often, they are treated like they are.
Look around your business today. Where are your clocks? Where are your clouds?
What are the best uses of your company's dollars and resources? Optsee
® can tell you. Optsee
® is a project portfolio management and budgeting optimization tool unlike any that you've ever seen.
Click here to find out more.
Posted by George Huhn on Fri, Apr 09, 2010 @ 09:32 AM
"It’s like we said on the iPad: if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it. Users shouldn’t have to ever, ever, EVER think about that stuff."
I love that quote. Why?
Because it shows why Apple is uncompromising in trying to bring their customers the best user experience that they possibly can. It is exactly the reason that they don't launch mediocre products, in spite of media critics who think, for example, that Apple should have launched a net book or are impatient for features that other phones have, but that are poorly executed. They won't do something the way everybody else does it when they believe that they can find a better way.
We try to take the same approach in developing business software applications. For the most part, our customers are not programmers; they're not operations experts; and they're not mathematicians. But they are really smart business managers who want to use business analytics to solve important high-value problems quickly. They want to think about getting to the solution – not how to write equations or how to integrate applications or how to program a spreadsheet.
For example, when we design a
form we have certain criteria that must be met, such as:
- Minimize redundant data entry by using form objects such as drop-down menus
- Enable and disable controls based on the users selection
- Avoid the need to display "Error" screens – if we come to a point where a user might get an "Error" screen, then we try to see how they got there and how we can prevent it.
- Make sure a full description of each form's functions is one click away.
What are the best uses of your company's dollars and resources? Optsee
® can tell you. Optsee
® is a project portfolio management and budgeting optimization tool unlike any that you've ever seen.
Click here to find out more.
Posted by George Huhn on Mon, Feb 22, 2010 @ 05:25 AM
"Does it make the decision for me?"
That's a question that somebody asked me again last week, and it is a question that I hear often from people when I tell them about our software. Underneath this question there is an unspoken worry that using a decision analysis tool will somehow override their often very good subjective decision-making ability and authority. I answer it by explaining that it is something like the difference between digging a basement for a house with a hand shovel or a using back-hoe: you still get to choose where and how the basement is dug (the most important subjective decision), but the back-hoe will give you a much faster and better result.
In other words, a good decision analysis tool will enhance and support your subjective judgment by giving you a wider and more focused view of your alternatives.
Decision analysts like to say that they help people make "more objective decisions." This is true if the methodology is sound. (By the way, that is a big "if." Lousy methodology can make things worse.) But in complex and unique business decisions, objective analysis doesn't mean that you can just feed in some numbers and out pops the perfect answer. Instead, a good decision analysis tool will move the subjective analysis to a higher and more strategic level of the decision-making process while leaving the objective number-crunching to the application.
In project portfolio analysis, even using sophisticated tools like Optsee®, there is still a lot of subjectivity that enters into the analysis. For example, there's project risk assessment, budget estimates, and NPV valuations, just to name a few. Then there's assigning weights to the criteria so the project ranking reflects your company's strategy. Finally, there is trying different budget and optimization strategies to select a portfolio that brings you the highest value based on your project set, budget and resource constraints, and business goals.
How is this more or less subjective than doing it manually?
Using spreadsheets or labor-intensive "one model at a time" analyses bog you down in a very low tactical level of subjectively trying to find an optimal portfolio, one project at a time, from billions of possible portfolios. And when you're doing it as a team, this process can quickly become tedious and non-strategic as discussions focus on arguing over the subjective criteria of including or excluding individual projects while losing sight of the big picture.
In other words, when you're at the bottom of a basement digging with a shovel, it is hard to see what the whole thing looks like from the top.
With a portfolio and budgeting analysis tool like Optsee®, you move way up the strategic scale, from picking projects to build a portfolio to picking an optimized portfolio from a few already-optimized alternatives. The "objective" parts – ranking the projects based on value and optimizing against different combinations of business constraints – has already been done for you. So you get to focus your time, energy, and judgment on the most important strategic question – how you can allocate you company's resources to get the highest return from your portfolio.
Like using a back-hoe instead of a hand shovel to dig a basement, using software that moves you up from just making tactical decisions to making more strategic decisions makes sense. But are there places in your company where you're still digging basements with shovels?
What are the best uses of your company's dollars and resources? Optsee
® can tell you. Optsee
® is a project portfolio management and budgeting optimization tool unlike any that you've ever seen.
Click here to find out more.
Posted by George Huhn on Mon, Nov 09, 2009 @ 12:44 PM
Brendan Coveney, President of 4D Inc., once remarked that the business of the future will consist of a person, a dog, and a computer. The purpose of the computer will be to run the business and the purpose of the dog will be to keep the person away from the computer.
Fortunately, we’re not there – yet. But we are at a point where we could be using our computers to optimize our businesses much more effectively. Many businesses are still in the "steam shovel" era of business optimization, using only spreadsheets to track and improve business performance. Certainly, this is far better than doing it by hand but not nearly as powerful as the modern tools that they could be using.
“But what's wrong with spreadsheets?” you might ask. Nothing. Spreadsheets are great but they still require a tremendous amount of manual labor to prepare, maintain, and audit. Fall down in any one of those tasks and the value of the spreadsheet and the data quickly deteriorates. And so do the business functions depending on it.
Instead of spreadsheets, what if you were using applications that were already set up to prepare, maintain, and audit your data as well as perform complex analyses of your data in just a few mouse clicks?
So now you can move beyond spreadsheets into applications that do much of the left brain quantitative drudge work for us so we can direct our thinking to creatively extracting more valuable concepts, ideas, and wisdom from our numbers and data. And we can do that by using algorithms.
But before you say, “I don’t want to have to learn algorithms to do my business analyses,” let me assure you that you won’t have to. The idea is to have applications designed and built for you that let you focus on running your business, not on building applications or customizing spreadsheets.
For example, there’s a clever little “artificial intelligence” algorithm for finding the shortest distance between multiple points called “the ant algorithm.” The ant algorithm is based on the way an ant colony learns the shortest distance from the anthill to a food source. Now you don’t even need to know the name of this algorithm or where it originated; all you need to know is that it can help you find an optimum solution when applied to a particular business problem. An elegant and well-designed application will do this type of work for you without you needing to learn how to program or write spreadsheet macros.
In this blog, I’ll be writing about the intersection of business, science, design, and technology as a place where we can use well-designed technology to do far more than just crunch numbers and make pretty graphics. We'll explore other best practices and innovations that business are using to optimize their processes, products, and markets like we do with our own project portfolio management tool, Optsee®.
What are the best uses of your company's dollars and resources? Optsee
® can tell you. Optsee
® is a project portfolio management and budgeting optimization tool unlike any that you've ever seen.
Click here to find out more.