Ask the Right Questions to Find Data's Organic Roots

As a lifetime geek, I have been asked many times what I actually do. A turn of phrase I use to help enlighten many a Luddite is "I cure business cancer with technology." The question that invariably follows is "How do you do that?"

My response is philosophical. You'll never find the correct answer if the question itself is not correct. Attempting to find an answer without the right question is akin to trying to find unobtainium, a mystical mineral that lies at the heart of the perpetual motion machine and the first enlightened chipset.

From a business perspective, finding the right question is all about analyzing the right data. But you never find the right data without getting to the organic roots of the data itself. A bit lost? Let me explain.

There is a question parents often ask their teenagers on Saturday morning: "So, what did you do last night?" Any savvy parent can smell the working teenage brain sifting through the actual events of the prior night and deciding in real-time what the parent needs to know to satisfy the answer without a grounding.

Business data is much the same. All information is filtered through normal channels. Financial data comes from accounting. Employee data comes from human resources. Manufacturing data comes from line foremen and subcontractors. All these channels are inherently corrupt in the nature of their reporting structure and verbiage. That is, the data is spoken in their respective business dialect.

Business decision makers ask different questions than specific team leaders. Getting this information into the right format -- a shape that allows business leaders to make informed decisions -- is always a test for truly adept administrative assistants, who are yet another filter.

On the other side of the discussion lies data overload. Business leaders rarely have the vernacular to decipher raw data from the field in its native format. Department heads decode data with an expectation of fulfilling leadership's informational needs, often with a poor result. How do we fix this?

Professional geeks worldwide work in information technology. One would think, then, that geeks had this information filtering problem handled. Alas, this is not the case. Many IT workers do not have the business experience to understand the problem. Geeks are armed with a bevy of tools to provide reporting structure, but a translation gap still exists among IT workers, IT leadership, business workers, and C-level executives.

There is a truism in the application development space: Every great application is written by a frustrated user.

Application development is a labor of love. Only a truly frustrated user will scope and implement a real solution using current tools, of which there are many to choose from. In the new IT paradigm, all interfaces are being retooled to account for a new user interface: the touch screen. As developers rework these apps with a fresh interface perspective, they are overcoming many legacy challenges as the technology becomes appliance enabled. (Those who read my posts know of my technology appliance rant.)

The holy grail here is finding the necessary data at its organic roots. A perfect example of this is fleet management. Any business owner/leader with a fleet of vehicles (always a prevailing cost) has questioned the impact of vehicle costs on the bottom line. The company generates a sales-per-mile-per-dollar report. This data is inherently squishy. Sales guys report miles (always fudged), service reps take vehicles home, and executives bump rental car classes. The story goes on and on.

The organic root of this data is simple. How many business miles were driven, and what sales were generated with those driven miles? A bevy of inexpensive fleet management solutions are available in the marketplace. They allow for real-time tracking, maintenance tracking, miles driven reporting, hot zone updates (is my employee at a bar?), and so forth. The ROI on these solutions is sometimes immediate, perhaps received through reduced insurance overhead.

This is a perfect example of an old technology that has been made new with lower hardware costs, touchscreen applications, and SaaS (software-as-a-service) implementations. Small and midsized businesses can use this type of solution with cellphone tracking, rather than costlier car-mounted hardware.

Here is my challenge to fellow geeks: What vexing business problems have always seemed so fixable? Follow these steps, and you'll be on the road to digital and business nirvana.

1. What is the right question?
2. Where does the organic root of the data lie?
3. What new interface development lends itself to providing the bridge needed between leadership and workers.

Happy hunting!