As you can read on this link we recently co-sponsored a very successful conference here in New York City. It was a great conference and all attendees reported very positively on the conference. We were very pleased to be a part of it.

At the conference I gave a one hour presentation about the emerging importance of the Power Data Analyst. You can read the presentation on this link.

A key part of our message is how Meta5 is ideal to support a concept we have called “The Idea Factory”. Of course, this is hardly an idea we can claim as our own. Many of our customers have something that you could rightly describe as an “Idea Factory”.

As we were preparing this presentation we wanted to give a meaningful name to this idea so that we were better able to communicate it to the audience. It is not an easy idea to communicate.

In this blog entry we are going to briefly describe this idea so that you can decide if you want to investigate the idea in more depth to perhaps implement one within your organization. Of course, we would argue that Meta5 is the perfect complement to the implementation of an idea factory!
What is an Idea Factory?

If you read any management book on how to improve your business and how to compete more effectively in your business you will read about the importance of new ideas. I have been a fan of Tom Peters for more than 25 years now.

You can’t read anything Tom writes without Tom emphasising the necessity of generating a constant stream of new ideas to carry the company forward. Sure, not all new ideas get implemented. Some get left by the wayside. Even some that would have worked and been hits.

The important thing is to generate those new ideas so that they can be evaluated. Those that make the grade are what can take the company forward.

Typically the “Idea Factory” will be staffed with a number of “Power Data Analysts”. They might be full time, they might be part time. But they are there to generate and test new ideas among their other responsibilities.

So an “Idea Factory” has the following attributes. Think of them as guidelines as you consider the questions. Do we have one of these? Do we want one of these?

1. Changes to the business environment, opportunities, even problems, are all classed as “issues looking for ideas to solve them” and are part of the remit of the Idea Factory. Most “ideas” are generated to solve “problems”.
2. PDAs have a significant level of responsibility to generate new ideas themselves.
3. PDAs have a responsibility to listen to new ideas brought to them by other employees with an open mind.
4. All ideas are good ideas! Even the ones that seem a little “crazy” at first glance.
5. All ideas are to be investigated in an unbiased and analytical manner.
6. Employees are encouraged to bring ideas to the “Idea Factory”. Perhaps even some reward is included for ideas that are implemented.
7. Those that seem reasonable are to be evaluated using the appropriate tools and data available to the PDAs.
8. Those that are evaluated to be worthy of testing are then tested by the responsible department in co-operation with the assigned PDA so that the testing can be closely monitored in a timely fashion.
9. Those that test positively will then have a PDA build a business case to be submitted to Management for decision.
10. Those that are approved and adopted by Management will be monitored on an ongoing basis to adjust the implementation of the idea as it is bedded down and to determine the overall effectiveness of the implementation of the idea.
11. Prior to final ending of the process a “Lessons Learned” session will be held to retain the lessons learned as part of the corporate memory. Too many times the lessons learned are no gleaned from the effort.

Of course, ideas range from the small to the large. Some ideas are easier to test than others. This is why you should consider this list as a “guideline” rather than the beginning of a “rulebook”.

You do not want to build too many procedures in the Idea Factory that will stifle ideas of smaller value. But you do want to have procedures and approval processes for “big ideas” that will consume large amounts of money, time and effort. All companies have limited resources and it is a part of the art of running a successful company to sort the valuable ideas from the less valuable ideas.

The most important part of the “Idea Factory” concept is to have employees enthusiastically bring ideas forward because new ideas can occur to anyone in a large organization. They do not only occur to those people ordained as “the people who think up new ideas around here”.

 

Why Have an Idea Factory?

Naturally the main purpose of an Idea Factory for a commercial company is to improve the long term sustainable shareholder value of the company. This is best done via balanced growth making sure that the profit improvements that are achieved via new ideas are sustainable.

Too often in the last 25 years I have seen companies improve short term profitability by “slashing and burning” to reduce costs with little to no attention to improving revenues. It is much easier to cut costs than improve revenues. The results look good for a year or two.

But I have seen so many cases where the “cost cutting” caused damage to the company’s ability to compete in the marketplace.

These effects were only seen 2, 3 or even 4 years later as competitors slowly took away the company’s business and the company was not able to respond because the people and systems needed to respond were not there.

Such short term thinking has been rife in the business world since the financial crisis of 2008 hit. But it was also the case in the 90-93 recession and the 01-02 recession. Cost cutting has been the knee-jerk reaction to slow downs in the overall economy and it has cost many companies dearly.

Your idea factory could be the difference between success and failure of your business.

 

Benefits of an Idea Factory?

The obvious planned benefit of an Idea Factory is long term sustained growth in shareholder value by managing long term sustained profitable growth of the company. This is easier said than done!

The more tangible every day benefits can be summarized as follows:

1. Quick turn around of ideas from idea to being discarded or being implemented.
2. A cost effective way to cull out the data and the ideas that do not contribute to the overall improved financial performance of the company.
3. Reduction of the IT backlog because PDAs are generally from the business. Some PDAs might come from IT on secondment.
4. Sets proper expectation to business people regarding governance, accuracy and speed of the overall idea management process.
5. For ideas that can be moved on quickly you gain immediate benefit from moving on the idea rather than waiting, or worse, missing the chance all together.
6. You can have a quick response to new business opportunities as well as problems that have been identified.

 

What Tools Does an Idea Factory Need?

Of course Power Data Analysts who are responsible for solving problems and testing new ideas need two things to go with their brains. They need data and they need tools to manipulate and analyse the data.

It has often been said “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. As a Power Data Analyst you need more than just a hammer in your toolkit. You need a wide variety of tools just like any other master craftsman because that is what you are.

There are many tools vendors out there who will promote their tools as “perfect” for the Power Data Analysts who are given the responsibility of performing the functions of the idea factory. The very fact that most large companies have a selection of tools is proof positive that there is no one vendor and no one tool that “does it all”. It is impossible to “do it all” because “all” is a very wide range of things to do.

We argue that for the Power Data Analyst working in the “Idea Factory” that Meta5 is a suite of tools that will make him/her about five times more productive than using sets of tools from different vendors. This five times productivity improvement is worth investigating.

So with that said? These are the sorts of functions we recommend you look for in the tools that you would deploy in the “Idea Factory” for your Power Data Analysts.

1. Ad hoc analysis of new data.This includes the ability to ingest new data into the analysis environment without the need to seek support from IT or to put it into the data warehouse environment.
2. No or little need to write computer code.Too many tools require the user to break out in to writing code too soon. The vast majority, if not all, analytical work should be able to be carried out by PDAs without the need to write any code.
3. Access to the data warehouse and all other unstructured/complex data such as Hadoop, XML, text etc.
4. Ability to integrate point applications in a re-runnable fashion.This is the ability to recognize that there are superior point applications for specific functions and the ability to integrate those point applications into analysis processing such that the processing is re-runnable without intervention. The best example of this is Excel.
5. Ability to move applications in to a “semi-production” environment when there is no economic justification for moving them in to a fully production environment. This is the case where what we have is “good enough” and we can not justify moving it in to the production environment.
6. Ability to be a “learning based environment”.This means that the tools make sharing work quick and easy. Most importantly we should remember what did not work and why.
7. SPEED of getting results.The tools must make it FAST to get the answer to questions just thought of. The tools must not discourage the PDAs from asking question by making the time it takes to get an answer too long.
8. MS Office Integration.MS Office is a reality. As much as many IT people want to work around Office the fact is that Office, or similar software, is pervasive. Everyone in the Knowledge Worker Area knows how to use it. It is time for IT to embrace Office and the tools that are provided to PDAs should embrace office. Simply downloading finished results from a tool to Office is not “integration”.
9. MS Office Automation.On top of “integration” to Office we recommend tools support “automation” of integration with Office. By this we mean that is must be possible to parametrize and re-run batches of processing that include calling Office programs, performing processing in the Office programs, and storing results from Office programs.It should be possible to perform this sort of processing with a minimum of Office macros and links so as to reduce the issues involved with these macros and links.
10. Ad Hoc Data Integration and ETL development.The ability to support “agile” development of ETL without having to break out and use the production ETL tools. This is because the average PDA can not use the production ETL tools implemented in most large organizations.This includes the ability to integrate new data sources to existing data sources without the need to use the production ETL tool so as to be able to test the value of that new data source.

Of course, we would argue that Meta5 supports these 10 features and much more. However, if you are going to use your existing tools or seek tools from other vendors you might want to keep this list of 10 features in mind.

 

Summary

In this article we have presented our take on the concept of an “Idea Factory”. We are obviously not the inventors of the idea that “it’s a good idea to generate, capture and test new ideas”. New ideas have been coming up since the wheel!

What we are suggesting is that companies take a serious look at whether they have a planned and structured way to generate new ideas that might take the company forward in the hyper-competitive business environment in which most companies now operate.

We believe that the management of the process from idea generation to implementation and monitoring is important to most companies. Certainly, the experience of the last 100 years has demonstrated that the companies that can consistently and continually come up with new ideas have been the winners.

Experience has also shown that the companies that were at once winners, who lose the ability to come up with “the next big idea”, can be relegated to “also-rans” much faster than one would generally imagine possible.

The business world is littered with the shadows of once great companies who were “out-innovated” by smaller and more agile companies over periods that are surprisingly small.

Your “Idea Factory” is not just a great way for your company to perform better in your hyper-competitive business environment. Your “Idea Factory” may be your best defense at becoming one more casualty of the hyper-competitive business world where even the most successful giants of their industry can be surprisingly quickly relegated to “also-ran” status.

Meta5: The better way

Thank you for your time and attention.