Facing the Human Side of Business Intelligence

Is your business intelligence environment going far enough to deliver on its objectives? Maybe not.

A large part of data and BI initiatives are founded on a clear vision - the delivery of data and insight to the right people at the right time to create exponential ROI impact. Yet, this journey from data to impact is fraught with many challenges, some of them technical (such as data processing and visualization) and some of them are social (working together to make decisions and take action). While most business intelligence initiatives focus on solving the technical challenges, they generally provide few answers for the human/social side of the equation.

This is where HiveWise comes in. HiveWise is designed to manage key human/social challenges beyond the scope of your current business intelligence platform (such as DOMO, Tableau, or Power BI). With HiveWise, your team will be far better equipped to overcome many of the barriers standing between you and the clear, measurable impact you have been looking for. Let’s take a closer a look:

Turn Data Into Action

HiveWise delivers:

1. Step-by-Step Heuristics
2. Best Practice Processes
3. Explainable Artifacts

Have you ever noticed how so few “actionable analytics” actually turn into action? Business users are often uncomfortable navigating the process of determining what different data reports are telling them and what they should do about it. Even so-called “self-service” analytics still often require hand holding from limited data analyst resources in order to create positive action and results. So, how can we truly enable business users to consistently and confidently turn business intelligence into positive business results?

HiveWise acts as a guide. When equipped with HiveWise, your managers use pre-defined heuristics to efficiently diagnose problems. They leverage best practice processes for developing and assessing recommended solutions. And they automatically generate explainable artifacts that make it easy to present the "how, why and what" of key decisions to executives and key stakeholders.

Avoid Past Mistakes

HivWise delivers:

1. Searchable Decision Archive
2. Decision Process Template Library
3. Continuous Optimization of Speed and Quality

So if we can overcome the inertia leading to inaction, let’s look at another potential challenge. The inability to leverage past experience. Far too many organizations act like the goldfish that has no memory. Each challenge that arises is treated as new - even if the organization itself has addressed similar challenges dozens of times before. This is because there is no central system of record to collect and store how past decision were made. Decision experts often site the ability to learn from past decisions - and to recognize and leverage hard-won best practices - as a competitive advantage.   

With HiveWise acting as an extension of your existing BI ecosystem, your decision makers won’t be going it alone. HiveWise establishes a searchable archive of past and current decisions. Managers can quickly look up similar decisions from across time and organizational barriers to understand past approaches, questions explored, alternatives considered, final decisions and rationale, and the results achieved. And they can leverage best practices by customizing their own decision process via the Template Library. By refining and creating new templates, your team can continuously optimize the speed and quality of decision making across the organization.

Manage Stakeholders

HiveWise delivers:

• Scalable, Input Gathering
• Advanced Reporting Dashboards

- At-A-Glance Answers

- Deeper Insights

Now, let’s look what happens when your decision touches a lot of potential stakeholders. How many useless Zoom calls and endless email / chat threads have resulted from a fruitless attempt to “include” as many people as possible? Yet the alternative is simply to leave many stakeholders out of the process entirely. While this cuts down on meetings and email, you often miss out on ideas, increase unidentified risks, and well… make people feel left out. 

HiveWise offers a better answer. Developed at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, HiveWise provides an innovative approach to gathering structured input and analysis. Deployed in meetings or asynchronously, HiveWise delivers meaningful insight from many more stakeholders with much less effort and time. 

But gathering ANY input is only important if you can easily make sense of it all. Advanced reporting in HiveWise tracks you quickly to answers while also enabling deeper understanding. For instance, decision dashboards uncover the rationale behind supported directions, compare viewpoints of different stakeholder groups, and even highlight the participants that are driving the most value as part of the process.

Minimize Politics and Bias

HiveWise delivers:

• Inclusive Ideation
• Author-Blind Analysis
• Bias Toward Logic and Reasoning

But even if we are able to include everyone… how do we ensure we are truly getting valuable input? Internal politics and other biases tend to limit the free submission of ideas and skew analysis. So how do we reduce barriers to participation associated with hierarchy, gender, and even personality?

HiveWise is designed to help level the playing field. The system helps participants distill ideas, develop rational arguments, assess the merits of their colleague's ideas and even offer improvement ideas. Informed by decades of research, HiveWise places the focus more on the ideas themselves and less on the people involved, creating a new bias toward analysis and reasoning and away from politics and personalities.

Connect the Dots to ROI

HiveWise delivers:

• Decision Making System of Record
• Real Time Visibility
• ROI Tracking

And now we come to the biggest challenge of all. How do you put all the pieces together to get visibility into the decision making process all the way through to results tracking? It’s very hard to manage what we can’t see. And with the majority of BI workflows ending with data delivery, decision making and business impact are disconnected across many different environments. Consistently connecting the dots to manage the "data-to-decision-to-ROI" business process is often nearly impossible. 

And this reason alone is why using HiveWise makes so much sense. HiveWise becomes your System of Record for data-driven decision making. You have one place to turn to for a real time view of the most important decisions your organization is facing right now. And, you can track the business impact right back to the source data. No more assumed ROI on BI. You get clear attribution of ROI back to specific BI investments. 

Summary

In summary, the journey from data to ROI requires overcoming a host of challenges. While most BI platforms are designed to defeat the technical data challenges, HiveWise is designed to take on the rest by giving you the ability to:

• Overcome The Inertia and Uncertainty Leading To Inaction
• Leverage Past Experience To Continuously Improve Decision Making
• Manage Even Large Groups of Stakeholders 
• Minimize The Role of Politics and Bias 
• And Connect The Dots From BI Investment To Business Impact and ROI

Thanks for reading Facing the Human Side of Business Intelligence. If you're intrigued to know more, here are few possible next steps:

1. Connect: If you’d like to follow more thoughts on collective intelligence and decision making, we can connect here on LinkedIn and/or here on Twitter.
2. Share your Thoughts: Have a question? Agree with something I wrote or think I'm full of bologna? Add a comment below or send me an email at mark.curtis@gethivewise.com. 
3. Set up a Meeting: Feel free to set up a 30 min. intro meeting at your convenience. These are topics I’m quite passionate about and I enjoy conversations on how these tools and best practices can best be applied to optimize different environments.