Oct 13, 2020
Quick, everyone get your act together, we've got a bigwig coming through: Joe Phelan, former CEO of DHL Global Mail and Swissport North America, and now (among other things) Chief Strategy Adviser at P3.
We get his valuable C-suite perspective on a number of topics, including:
Links:
Joe Phelan in Supply And Demand Chain Executive Magazine
Episode Transcript:
Rob Collie (00:00:00):
Hello, data people. For our third episode, we get a glimpse into
the inner workings of the C-suite because we brought in a ringer.
Joe Phelan has held the titles of CEO, COO and even CMO at some
very sizable corporations, organizations with names that you'll
recognize, and even if you don't, you've been a customer of them
whether you know it or not. So he is not one of those
self-proclaimed CEOs on LinkedIn. He's not a CEO in the same sense
that I am a CEO. He's a real CEO, the kind of person we think about
when someone uses that term. He sits on a number of boards today,
and we're fortunate to have him as our chief strategy advisor here
at P3. He advises me on growing our business and he helps us with
some of our strategic accounts. And of course, he's here to talk
about data.
Rob Collie (00:00:45):
Before semi retiring last year, Joe crossed paths with Power BI and
he recognized it as a turning point. As you'll hear, that's just
not me hyping it up. It's the truth. And some familiar themes
definitely emerge in the conversation. I think you'll find those
parts totally validating. And it definitely builds confidence to
hear that sort of thing from someone like him. But we also made
sure to get his advice on how to do things like how to speak data
to leadership, how to provide value, how to get noticed. We also
talk about supply chain in particular. We talk about FP&A. We
talk about the rise of automation and the internet of things and
how that drives the need for even more BI and a bunch of other
stuff that I hope you find valuable. So let's get to it and you
know how it goes. Let's start with that intro music.
Announcer (00:01:33):
Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?
Announcer (00:01:36):
This is the Raw Data by P3 podcast, with your host Rob Collie and
your co-host Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 can do
for your business, go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw Data by P3 is data
with the human element.
Rob Collie (00:01:54):
All right. Welcome. Really excited to have you here, Joe.
Joe Phelan (00:01:58):
Yeah, I'm delighted to be here, Rob. Thanks for having me.
Rob Collie (00:02:02):
As one of the intro episodes of this podcast, you're a ringer.
We're bringing in a heavy. We don't mess around here on the Raw
Data by P3 podcast. Let's speak to that, your ringerhood to get us
started. You've had a pretty interesting career. You've been in
some very, very, very interesting places. Why don't you give us a
little bit of a rundown of where you're coming from?
Joe Phelan (00:02:24):
Sure. And I'll start off with you're much too kind, Rob, but to
tell you a little bit about what I've done, I've been in business
for about 40 years, in transportation, logistics and business
services. And 25 years was with American Airlines in various
capacities, including global VP of cargo operations and managing
director of Europe where I was based in London. I was CEO for DHL
GLOBALMAIL with operations in 200 plus countries based in Bonn,
Germany. That was a great experience. And CEO for Sunbelt Rentals,
the second largest equipment rental company based in the US with
over 400 outlets in North America, primarily construction equipment
rental, and mom-and-pop do it yourself type rental.
Joe Phelan (00:03:21):
I retired mid 2019 as the global COO for Swissport International.
I'll say I kind of retired because I'm doing some other things now
as well. And we provided airport ground handling services for over
800 airlines around the world and airports. And I currently sit on
a few boards and I sit as a strategic advisor for PowerPivotPro. So
I'm happy to be here with you.
Rob Collie (00:03:54):
All right. First of all, you and I, I mean, we have the same title.
You've been CEO a lot places. I'm CEO here at P3. We're basically
the same person, right? It's just that you just happen to have had
that title at companies that we all know, we all recognize. I mean,
even Swissport, most people probably don't recognize Swissport, but
you don't really go through an airport without Swissport being
involved behind the scenes, isn't that right?
Joe Phelan (00:04:23):
That's correct. I mean, a lot of the employees at many of the large
airports are Swissport employees. You just don't know it because
they're wearing the airlines uniforms.
Rob Collie (00:04:34):
Oh, yeah. Hadn't even thought about that particular angle. And so
you said that at Swissport you served and worked with 800 airlines.
Today would that number still be 800? It seems like we might be
losing some airlines.
Joe Phelan (00:04:46):
Yeah. I mean, I'm not as close to the business as I was, but I
think we can all be rest assured that the number of airlines has
turned down quite a bit.
Rob Collie (00:04:54):
One of the things that you said at the end there which of course is
in some ways my favorite part of your intro is that you're chief
strategy advisor here at P3. This is in the industry what we would
call you're a really good get. Why was that interesting to you? Why
was that an interesting thing? Your background, it's next level. I
don't get to rub shoulders with people like you very often. And I
did back in the software world. I'm sure that everyone listening to
this that's the question on their mind as well. What brings you to
having a role with us at all? And this is a data podcast, why we
got you? What got you interested in all of this?
Joe Phelan (00:05:35):
Well, it started quite some time ago. I've always been a big
believer of information and the power of information and the value
in empowering employees by providing the best possible tools. And
I'm a believer that most employees want to do a good job for the
company. And when provided a sense of direction and vision and the
proper tools, they will excel beyond your imagination. So most
people want to do a good job. Information to me is fun and that's
why I was intrigued when you and I first talked about the
opportunity.
Joe Phelan (00:06:21):
And I see tremendous benefits in business intelligence and in
particularly Power BI because I've been a user in the past and I
really enjoyed using the tools. And I think there's a great deal of
untapped opportunity in this space as well. Several years ago I
challenged a group of executives working for me to deliver real
time information that could be accessed at various times throughout
the day, giving us a view of performance across various
departments, which included sales, operations, finance, and finance
included accounts receivable, DSO by customer and customer
service.
Joe Phelan (00:07:13):
And one specific department rose to the challenge and came up with
a solution by using Power BI. And they produce some dashboards
showing our performance relative to the KPIs that we set as an
organization. With believe it or not, hourly updates that could be
pushed or pulled to the users and drill down capabilities to
satisfy whatever level of appetite you might have for information.
And so this was created literally in just a few weeks, which I was
amazed and what's even more amazing to me now is we can do it in a
few days with the technological improvements that have been
made.
Joe Phelan (00:08:01):
So this was so powerful. We ended up implementing across the
company in every department and created a corporate consolidated
dashboard. And the return on this invest which I was always
interested in whenever we made these types of investments was
extraordinary. Literally within a few months we recaptured our
entire investment and the business was now spending much more time
on process improvements versus gathering data.
Rob Collie (00:08:33):
Now, as a long time C-suite veteran, this wasn't your first brush
with BI. It was just your first brush with Power BI. Can you speak
at all to the contrast, what was BI like from your seat before
that?
Joe Phelan (00:08:50):
It was pretty powerful, but not as powerful as Power BI. Power BI I
think gave us better access to and more user friendly access to
dashboards. And the cool thing about dashboards is we could drill
down into key KPIs at virtually every department and get to the
root of a problem. And this would allow much more time to be spent
coming up with process improvements versus compiling data. So the
dashboard would behind the scenes very rapidly access various data
sources behind each of the KPIs. So depending on your level in the
company and your appetite for quantity of information, you could
continue to drill down and access what might be most relevant for
you as a user.
Rob Collie (00:09:52):
So before this Power BI dashboard project that you're talking
about, before that, in that same role, what was your daily regime
of data consumption? What did it look like by contrast? What were
you looking at ahead of time? Were you looking at spreadsheets?
Were you looking at reports coming straight out of IT?
Joe Phelan (00:10:13):
Yeah. Typically the reports I would look at would be on a weekly
basis or a monthly basis. They could be Excel spreadsheets or
tables and the information or the data wouldn't really lead you to
what I would call information, usable information and would require
a lot more digging and compiling to get to the root of the issue.
So as an example, as the CEO I might want to just see on a
dashboard under the new environment a green, yellow, or red traffic
light for each KPI. I'm not really interested in all of the
information leading to why it was red, green, or yellow. And so if
we take a weekly sales report by key account, if it showed red as
the CEO in a meeting, the executive committee would ask, "What's
going on?"
Joe Phelan (00:11:27):
And if I wanted to I could click as the CEO and drill down into the
information, but more often than not the sales executive having
access to that report knew ahead of time that the question would be
asked and had already drilled down and had the answer. And so
that's the beauty I think of the tool, is it gives visibility to
all levels in the organization of the performance, and it helps you
anticipate problems or questions and come up a lot more quickly
with solutions to those problems, to those issues.
Rob Collie (00:12:07):
So many fascinating things to me in what you just related. So first
of all, let the record state that the C-suite at some of the
biggest companies in the world still is being handed spreadsheets
on a weekly or monthly basis. And these are organizations with a
lot of resources. Is not that they don't have BI. There is a BI
department, maybe multiple BI departments, and yet it's still so
often a spreadsheet. And not only is it a spreadsheet, which is
just funny in a way, right? And it's not uncommon. This is
everywhere. Spreadsheets still to this day, they still 100% run the
world. And we're just in the earliest, earliest stages of evolving.
But you also said that these were weekly or monthly. And so now we
get into a real inefficiency here. Because they're spreadsheets
they were taking a lot of human effort to compile.
Rob Collie (00:13:12):
And while you can't burn that amount of effort on an hourly basis,
you can really only afford to allocate that kind of labor on a
slower, less frequent rhythm. On the other side you're talking
about Power BI and how it was running multiple times a day and you
were able to... So when you say real time, I mean, it goes from
weekly or monthly down to multiple times a day. I mean, that was
actually one of my questions for you, was what does real time mean
to you? That is a dramatic difference in frequency.
Rob Collie (00:13:46):
So even if what you were getting, those spreadsheets, even if they
were perfect and they told you exactly what you wanted, the fact
that you were getting them only weekly or monthly means that you're
always looking in the rear view mirror. You're finding out things
when it's in the sense almost... The opportunity to improve in many
cases has already passed, or it feels like diminishing returns
because you're never sure if you're going to be faced exactly with
those sorts of conditions again, right? Whereas if you're
[inaudible 00:14:16] more in real time you have an opportunity to
head things off. Is that what it means to you? In real time, is
that-
Joe Phelan (00:14:22):
Absolutely. The old business intelligence environment, you were
looking in the rear view mirror and the information was so old. You
might lose customers in the process of gathering information. And
the cool thing about Power BI that I liked is we refreshed every
hour. So every hour on a daily basis we were getting fresh
information about whatever department it was that we were
interested in. And what used to be really frustrating to me is to
get a call from a customer and the customer tell me what his
performance was. I was interested to hear from the customer, but I
should know when the customer calls what the performance is.
Joe Phelan (00:15:15):
So if I've got a message to call a customer back under the Power BI
environment, I could pull up real time information about what's
going on with that customer and proactively then deal with the
issue. So I can start off with an apology, "I see that we delayed
your flight or your shipment today, and here's what we're doing
about it," rather than hearing from the customer first and then
you're on your back foot. You're on the defense.
Rob Collie (00:15:47):
Yeah. Yeah. I can absolutely see that.
Joe Phelan (00:15:50):
And I might just add the customer really appreciates that as well,
because they feel like you've got a good handle on their business
and what it is that you're doing for them, the service you're
providing. I think the worst thing is for the customer to have to
tell you and you're surprised.
Rob Collie (00:16:10):
Another thing that we were talking about that you mentioned about
the spreadsheets that you were getting was that you were almost
drowning in data rather that having actual information. This is a
mistake that analysts and people who are good at these tools...
It's a mistake that we, I think pretty frequently make, is assuming
that there's exactly the same level of curiosity, exactly the same
level of excitement at the next level up or multiple levels up the
org chart from us. We're expecting everyone to be just like us. And
so we'll very often take the data that's at our fingertips or that
we can access us and we'll produce something... In a way is almost
like about us. It's about my world.
Rob Collie (00:17:01):
And then on the other hand you said, "Sometimes all I want to see
at the top level is a red, yellow, green. Is there even anything
for me to drill into? I don't want to drill into everything just to
find out red, yellow, green. I just want to know where our problem
spots are and then I can focus attention." There's an interesting
cynicism that develops here, down amongst the data people when it
comes to executives in that there's a joke, in a way it's like,
"Oh, no, the executives, all they really want to see is a big
meatball of color like red, yellow, or green. That's all they ever
want to see."
Rob Collie (00:17:36):
Or this morphs into another misunderstanding, which is... I guess
this is true sometimes, but most of the time it's not, that, "Oh,
no, the executives really only want it to look good." I think this
is just really just a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation of
signals. And it comes back to one of the things we talk about a
lot, which is when you're building dashboards, you're building
reports of any sort, you're really building software. You're
building an application. You're not just publishing data. You're
building software.
Rob Collie (00:18:10):
At Microsoft when we were building software, as much as we could,
we tried to understand who was going to be using it, tried to walk
in their shoes. And it's hard. It's hard for someone to walk in the
shoes of the C-suite, even if we really want to. You have to start
with wanting to and understanding what your day looks like. I know
we're jumping around a little bit here, but can we talk a little
bit about that? What would be ideal for you as an executive? What
would be the advice you would give to people who are building
dashboards or reports that are going to make it to someone like
you?
Joe Phelan (00:18:51):
What I would want in an organization is my executives to have
access each morning to information about yesterday's operation and
for them to be able to access in each of the departments
information on an hourly basis during the day if they need it, if
they have an appetite. But as a minimum, to be able to start their
day knowing what yesterday looked like and what is forecasted for
today from an operating standpoint. And that could be true for just
about any department. So having access to information real time and
really understanding what's driving the organization in terms of
key KPIs I think is extremely important.
Joe Phelan (00:19:53):
And what was always important to me was our having transparency in
the organization. And so open and honest transparency. And I think
that's what information does for you, is it helps make the
organization much transparent and provides then the motivation for
the team to act in a more proactive way. I don't necessarily want
to know as a C-suite member, want to know all the details of a
problem. What I'm more interested in is what are you going to do to
resolve the issue? So I'm mostly interested in the fact that you've
identified the issue and you have a solution that you're ready to
employ to solve the problem.
Thomas LaRock (00:20:51):
I've never been a CEO, but I'm willing to try if some of these
wants to take a chance, but when it comes to those dashboards, I've
helped provide the data for these dashboards. But what I see often
is what I call the dashboard danger or danger of the dashboard in
general. You two have talked about a little bit already. You talked
about the red, the yellow, the greens, and you talked about
addressing the issues and knowing the problems. But here's why I
usually push back on, so Joe, your executives show up and you said
that dashboard should tell them what things look like yesterday and
everything's green. And I would then push to you and say, do you
know why it's green? Do you know why you're being successful? Do
you know why? Do you have that data as well?
Thomas LaRock (00:21:35):
Because when I was coaching basketball all those years ago in my
other life, when you were having success, you had to know why you
were being successful, otherwise you really didn't have that
advantage or that edge. So I would push back. When we talk about
these dashboards, I don't see that often enough. I see people, they
put their metrics in, they have their KPIs, everything's green, but
there's also a level of greenness, right? Sales is doing good, so
they're hitting their number. They beat it by 1%, but they could
have been 10%. You don't really know the because you may never
click on that little green light.
Joe Phelan (00:22:11):
Yeah. That's an excellent point, Tom. And you'd be a good CEO
because that-
Thomas LaRock (00:22:16):
Hold on. I'm updating my LinkedIn right now. Hold on.
Joe Phelan (00:22:19):
I think just not accepting the data is green is important and I
think great organizations want know why it's green, but also want
to test and drill down in the green a little bit, because what
you'll find within the green is the average has come out to be
green, but there are some spots within that particular area you're
measuring that aren't green and need some continuous improvement.
And so that's the value of drilling down. And I think most CEOs
will not just accept that... It's most good CEOs, will not just
accept that it's green.
Joe Phelan (00:23:04):
They will in fact drill down a bit to try to understand where the
weak spots are, because as the old saying is, is you're only as
strong as your weakest link. You need to be mindful of the weakest
links, understand what's driving the good performance and see if
that's applicable to other areas of the organization as well so
that you create a learning environment and you learn from each
other. That's a good point, Tom.
Thomas LaRock (00:23:36):
Thank you. I'm making note of all the good points I have on this
podcast-
Joe Phelan (00:23:39):
We'll keep score.
Thomas LaRock (00:23:40):
... for my review later at the end of the year with Rob. So that's
one.
Rob Collie (00:23:45):
Yeah. Well, Tom, just like Joe Joe said, I mean, your overall
indicator can be green, but there can still be a lot of places
where you need to work.
Thomas LaRock (00:23:53):
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I know. I can't fake it with a dashboard for
you. I get that. Yeah.
Rob Collie (00:24:01):
I think you're doing a great job, Tom, just so you know.
Thomas LaRock (00:24:03):
Again, going on my LinkedIn.
Rob Collie (00:24:07):
I'd like to continue to role play a little bit on my end. I won't
ask you to role play anything. You just get to be you, Joe.
[crosstalk 00:24:15]. Continuing this cynicism in a way, so when we
started off and you were talking about your sincere interest and
your authentic experience with using data and seeing Power BI and
turning it into an advantage, turning it into very clear ROI. And
sometimes the people in this line of work might not believe that
that's true, meaning they don't necessarily get a lot of
reinforcement that filters down to them, that the C-suite actually
truly sees the value in it.
Rob Collie (00:24:53):
So it's almost like I want to ask you and so I will, how unusual do
you think your stance is? Are there still a lot of the real old
fashion CEOs out there that, again, the cynics amongst us are
expecting to say, "Ah, I don't need no stinking data. I know how to
run a business. I know what's going on"? That is a bit of a
caricature that does exist. It doesn't mean that it's correct, but
there's reasons why that caricature exists at certain levels of the
organization.
Joe Phelan (00:25:31):
I think, Rob, the C-suite today is much different than it was years
ago. It's comprised more of individuals, I think with strong
communication skills, strong collaboration skills, the ability to
create teams and the mindset for an open environment. It used to be
information was power and amongst the C-suite it wouldn't be shared
because it gave you as an individual an advantage within the team.
But it's very different today. I think the environment is very
open. It's more collaborative. I think people value working as a
team because they recognize that it brings one plus one equals
three, it brings the team working together, allows you to create
success a lot more rapidly.
Joe Phelan (00:26:28):
There's a lot more receptivity today to providing employees with
real time, meaning information as a result, is it gets back to that
notion that I mentioned earlier, that if equipped with information
and employees, frontline employees understand the direction,
they'll excel and they'll perform extremely well for you. You just
have to have the courage to give them the information that they
need. So, yeah, I think we provide solutions for improved business
performance throughout the organization by simply making I think
information available in a real time basis.
Rob Collie (00:27:17):
It's good to hear that that's happening increasingly at the highest
levels. That's a very encouraging trend. I got to admit, I haven't
worked at a large corporation for a full decade now. I know what
it's like with our clients, but our company, we only really attach
at places where they're thinking the right way. We get a very
positively skewed sample by virtue of the lens, the filter that
gets applied to our client base. So it's really fascinating ongoing
curiosity to me, to what extent... When you hear all the hype,
data, data, data, data is the new black, you use data for
competitive advantage and you can't help but wonder to what extent
is this just a platitude that everyone is supposed to repeat,
versus how much they've walked the walk.
Joe Phelan (00:28:13):
I think the C-suite today, Rob, recognizes that having real time
information gives you a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
And so the C-suite will wake up very quickly when they realize that
they're losing market share or their unit costs are rising faster
than a competitor or unit revenue isn't going up as high as a
competitor. And so business intelligence I think will continue to
be the center for driving business performance in the future. We're
much more resilient now than in the past. And if you're not nimble
and ready to move at or before the speed of change, you'll simply
be left behind in today's business world. Things are moving very,
very quickly. And so information powered in the right way and in
the hands of the people driving your business will be I think the
recipe for success in the future. And I think CEOs in the whole
C-suite recognize that much more today that just a few years
ago.
Rob Collie (00:29:28):
Well, that certainly paints a bright future for people who are good
at data, but also people who are... As you were hinting at even at
the C-suite level, it's not enough to be good at data. You have to
be good at it. You have to understand the business and you have to
be a good communicator. I'd love to get your reaction to this, but
I personally believe that the longstanding separation between
business and IT, where watching those in a way collapse into each
other in some really important fashions. IT still very, very, very
much has a role structurally and in terms of governance, but when
it comes to BI, they used to also, in addition to those two,
infrastructure or governance, right? They also had the role of the
creators of all of the sanctioned reports.
Rob Collie (00:30:24):
It's that last part that's antiquated. And that there's a rise of
this hybrid, a hybrid professional that's actually anchored in the
business side of the house that becomes good at these tools such as
Power BI and then in collaboration with IT is able to deliver a
quality and a pace of information. It was just never seen before.
Does that align with your experience and what you've seen? You talk
about this set of Power BI dashboards, was that spearheaded
primarily by IT or was it more of that collaborative? Were there
people on the business side who actually had hands on the keyboard
during the creation process?
Joe Phelan (00:31:05):
No, I think it was more the business side was engaged with Power BI
and brought the solutions forward. And that's the beauty I think of
Power BI, is most of what an IT organization is doing today in
today's world is there's so many mergers and acquisitions. They're
putting systems together and trying to rationalize the entire IT
infrastructure. And so it was refreshing to me to see the business
bring forward, the operations department bring forward a solution
to this that didn't really require any IT support.
Joe Phelan (00:31:46):
It required an interested individual within that department to be
the go-to and to quickly become the Power BI expert who could then
train and get everybody up to speed on how to use the tools. That's
the cool thing I think about and why I like Power BI so much is you
don't have to rely on a large IT organization to put it into place
when they've got many other big, big strategic projects that they
are working on. And if you had to wait, it would simply take too
long.
Rob Collie (00:32:28):
That's why Excel shows up on your desk every day.
Joe Phelan (00:32:30):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (00:32:32):
If you're waiting, you're just going to get Excel from the
business, right?
Joe Phelan (00:32:36):
Exactly.
Thomas LaRock (00:32:38):
Hold on a second. The bottleneck isn't the use of Power BI, Excel,
Tableau, any of that. Crystal reports, I don't care. That's not the
bottleneck. The bottleneck is the data. The bottleneck is somebody
in that organization saying, "Okay, so we got to go build this data
warehouse." And these days it's not just a data warehouse. And
we've gone beyond data mart. Now I live in a data estate by a data
lake. And I shop at the data mart, we store everything in the data
warehouse, but it's made by the data factory. And it's just all the
data things. So that's always been the bottleneck, is somebody in
the organization saying, "I've got a reporting tool, but where am I
going to point it at?" Right? So it's great Power BI can come in.
It's great you can assign a custodian to be in charge of this and
all that, but you're still going to have somebody sitting there
going, "I need some data."
Joe Phelan (00:33:25):
Yeah. I mean, you're so right. We're working with a client right
now-
Thomas LaRock (00:33:29):
Twice.
Joe Phelan (00:33:30):
Twice you've been right now. That's good, Tom. We're working with a
client now that is expressing that exact issue, is saying, "I'm
ready to get going, but we're working on our data warehouse and I
want to make sure that I have all the data from all the different
systems loaded into that warehouse before we start to execute." And
that's the beauty of Power BI. Again, is you don't need to wait to
have all the data in the warehouse and have a perfect data
warehouse. We can go to each of the systems and extract the data
and produce what I would call then information in a very timely
manner. But that is an education in itself because it's old IT
thinking, and you don't know what you don't know. And it's just
people not familiar with Power BI and its capabilities.
Rob Collie (00:34:30):
The software industry absolutely is to blame. People like me in my
former job, we're the ones that are to blame for that because we
produce an entire generation of tools that made the default
assumption. First and foremost, for instance, that all of your data
that's interesting is in a database and it's in a single database.
So it produced this infrastructure first mindset because the world
didn't have a choice. If given a choice, the world probably
would've chosen something different, but the software industry
said, "No, no, no, no, we're going to do it this way." It's really
simple. Power BI just decided, "Hey, we're not going to work that
way. We're not going to require that." And the sky didn't fall. In
fact things really have taken off, but it's actually two things you
were hinting at there though, Tom.
Rob Collie (00:35:23):
I'm going to call them both though. So it's not just access to
data. It's not just this former... It used to be you'd build
plumbing and then you'd think about faucets years later. Now we say
that you can think about it as faucets first and then figure out
what the plumbing needs to look like. And that ends up being a lot
more efficient. But the other thing is, is that when IT was
responsible for building everything, there was also this tremendous
subject and domain expertise from the business side that had to be
mind meld telepathically transmitted from the business to IT, and
then implemented according to that spec. And that turns out to chew
almost as much time as the endless infrastructure investment,
because boy, that is... It's really hard. There's a lot.
Rob Collie (00:36:12):
The tribal knowledge on the business side, if you could dump it out
and print out, it would be like an old encyclopedia Britannica,
like lining a whole bookshelf and there's just so much nuance
there. And so bringing it within the business to execute, to build
shortcuts, all of that, all of that requirements transmission and
misunderstanding and mistransmission. And then of course my other
favorite point is that even when you write a perfect spec for
something, and then you implement that spec perfectly, which by the
way, has never happened in human history.
Rob Collie (00:36:49):
We've never had those two things happen in sequence, but even when
they do happen, the first thing that happens when the business gets
back the report that they just asked for, they go, "Oh, you know
what? This doesn't even really answer our question now that we
think about it. We need to filter it like this or drill down like
that or correct for something, blah, blah, blah." Human beings
don't know what they need until they've seen what they've asked
for. And so the whole requirements gathering process, which again
was inflicted on the industry by the software people, it's just a
fools' errand from the start. So it's really, really, really a very
different world when you don't have to wait so much on
infrastructure and you're unconsciously communicating with yourself
armed with all of your own business knowledge as you're executing
on something.
Rob Collie (00:37:39):
So Joe, you said that this was a business led initiative. I've got
to ask you and I've never asked you this, so what was IT's reaction
to having something so valuable be built on the business side? I'll
preface this. I'll even make it multiple choice, because everyone's
going to be on the same page about this. On one hand, the reality
that you describe, it's never been realistic to expect IT to keep
up with BI. They're outnumbered tremendously. By definition they
don't know everything about that business, the business knowledge.
They can't. They have to do their other job. And on top of that
they're being saddled with all kinds of things that only they can
do.
Rob Collie (00:38:23):
I would want them to be grateful and appreciative and collaborative
with this sort of development, but they also could be a little bit
threatened. They could be a little bit resentful and I'm sure that
the real world spectrum of this, it goes from guardrail to
guardrail. There's plenty of examples of either endpoint and all
points in between. How did that play out?
Joe Phelan (00:38:45):
Well, I think initially they were suspicious of the solution, but
once they found out more about it and how it worked, I think it was
quite refreshing for them because they were inundated with
projects. Didn't really want to pull away from what they had on
their plate. The business had a huge demand and an urgent demand
for the information. So for the business to be able to come up with
a solution, I think in the end was refreshing for the IT
organization and it required very little support. So given the fact
that it required very little support, it was welcomed, believe it
or not with open arms.
Rob Collie (00:39:35):
Well, that is the way that it's supposed to go. And that's the way
that it goes with our clients. We work very hard on that. It is
truly a situation where everyone can win. I can understand it
though, in the places where IT still feels a little defensive about
it. It's not just something's being taken away from them. It's also
this weird psychological trick that as long as it's Excel that the
business is using, when Excel goes bad, it's generally not IT
that's blamed. That's Excel. It doesn't mean that it should be that
way, it just is that that's the perception. And then as soon as you
use something like Power BI, "Oh, it's got the letters BI in it."
So now when that goes sour, people will turn. And IT has one of
those unenviable situations where they only get noticed when things
go bad.
Rob Collie (00:40:27):
I understand their reluctance to increase their surface area in
terms of the things that they might be held responsible for even
though they didn't do it. Our governance and adoption program,
we've got a really good recipe for this and you just can't play
defense against something like this. You have to play offense. And
if you do play offense and you set things up the right way from the
beginning, you don't really need nearly as much defense. You don't
need to be afraid of it. But if you sit back and try to control it
and just squeeze it, white-knuckle tight prevent the business from
unlocking this Pandora's box, they're going to open it anyway.
You're never going to fence in that earthworm. So it's good to hear
that.
Joe Phelan (00:41:09):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (00:41:10):
I do want to talk about supply chain of your specialities, but I'm
going to throw one more curve at you before we go there. You and I
have also talked about FP&A. We've talked about financial
planning and analysis. I shared with you my theory that in a lot of
ways FP&A is an organic... The existence of FP&A, that's a
discipline, is a natural emergent response by the business side of
the house to the underserving nature of IT centric BI. Because when
I first got to know what FP&A meant and I started meeting
people and talking about it, I'm like, "Oh, you do the BI mission.
You do what BI was always supposed to be. That's what your charter
is." And so I approached you with that theory saying... This rose
color glasses theory, this is the new thing. I really found your
response to that very intriguing and compelling. Are you willing to
share that with us?
Joe Phelan (00:42:17):
Sure, if I can remember what it was. But let me give it a shot.
I'll just talk from experience with FP&A and the organizations
I've been with in the past, typically FP&A is there to support
the CFO and provides the CFO with relevant information about the
business for each of the departments. And so will typically sit in
meetings, ask questions, gather information. And because they have
a limited knowledge about each of the departments, the questions
can be sometimes a little insulting to some of the departments and
overly elementary. And so that I think causes frustration. It
causes a waste of time and energy in the meetings.
Joe Phelan (00:43:18):
And one of the things that intrigued me about Power BI is when it
was embraced by FP&A in the organizations I've been in, they
would come to the meetings equipped to ask a lot more intelligent
questions. And so the time spent in those meetings was a lot more
fruitful and they became more team members in the problem solving
process and support process for the organization and were respected
a great deal more because they were more equipped for those
meetings. So I think the overall respect for the FP&A folks was
elevated quite a bit. Their overall knowledge of the business and
their ability to ask more prudent questions, more meaningful
questions in the meetings was much improved. And so overall it was
time better spent and allowed us to get to agreed upon actions
going forward and delivered a, I think more consistent and more
accurate message to the CFO.
Joe Phelan (00:44:34):
And the CFO was really charged with keeping as well as the CEO, the
shareholders informed, the investors informed. And so having good,
accurate information about how the business was doing was extremely
important to the CFO. So overall I think our efficiency as an
organization improved quite significantly. The time used to be
spent by FP&A, a lot more time used to be spent gathering
information and gathering data and very little time on analysis. So
Power BI allowed them to spend a lot more time on analysis and
coming up with solutions and helping the organization than they
were able to do before, because they just simply only had so much
bandwidth. And when you're spending all the time gathering data and
information, it doesn't leave you much for anything else.
Rob Collie (00:45:32):
Well, I think you remembered your answer from before perfectly.
Joe Phelan (00:45:35):
Is that the way I answered it before?
Rob Collie (00:45:36):
Yeah. And I remember when you first told me that, that first part
especially when you said something... Was it along the lines of
FP&A is this separate discipline, this separate team, and
they're almost like a federal government type of entity? They're
going around and they're trying to understand various departments
and not doing a great job of it and therefore losing credibility. I
started laughing and thinking to myself, "Well, oh, perfect. Yeah,
they absolutely inherited the BI mission. That's just like
traditional BI. It's the same failures just recast." And of course
their tool set was different, right? The FP&A leans very
heavily on Excel.
Rob Collie (00:46:18):
In some ways that gives them an agility, but it also gives them a
tremendous labor intensive and static view, all the things we've
been talking about. Whereas the traditional BI, their failures were
more like not even being farther away from the business than
FP&A was. And having tools that move at a glacial pace, even
though they're great, once you get them built, you just actually
never get them built. That's the only problem with traditional
BI.
Joe Phelan (00:46:46):
Well, they say the power of being truthful is it's easy to remember
what you said last.
Rob Collie (00:46:51):
That's right. That's right. mark Twain said that, something along
that. The thing about always telling the truth is you never have to
remember anything.
Joe Phelan (00:46:59):
Exactly.
Rob Collie (00:47:03):
All right, supply chain. I am not a supply chain expert. We have
some at our company and not just you, but what does even supply
chain mean? Does every business have a supply chain?
Joe Phelan (00:47:18):
I think every business in some form or fashion has a supply chain.
Whether it's people, resources, or equipment or technology, just
about everything that we do in the world today has some sort of
supply chain attached to it.
Rob Collie (00:47:35):
We talk also a lot about logistics. Are these two terms basically
interchangeable to you or do they mean different things? They seem
to have a lot of Venn diagram overlap.
Joe Phelan (00:47:47):
Well, I think supply chain is part of logistics. And so logistics
comprised of many different things in which supply chain is a piece
of it. And I won't profess to be an expert. I've spent a fair
amount of time in the logistics and supply chain business, but I'm
not sure I'm a complete expert.
Rob Collie (00:48:14):
Oh, yeah. All you did was make it to CEO. You're right. We're still
waiting for your career to blossom.
Joe Phelan (00:48:22):
There's always a chance.
Rob Collie (00:48:24):
Yeah. We're really hoping you pull it together one of these days,
Joe. All right. So let's talk about data and the supply chain. And
if you want, we can blend COVID in here or we can keep that
separate. We can talk about that separately, but data, supply
chain, logistics, COVID, go.
Joe Phelan (00:48:47):
Yeah. So let me talk a little bit about the general trends that I
see in the short term in response to COVID and how that relates to
the supply chain. I think consumers and businesses have become very
resilient and are jointly learning to operate in a way that could
add significant utility in the future. So what we've been through
has resulted in a great deal of learnings and opportunities, I
think, although it's been painful. Providing time savings for
consumers is a commodity that I think carries more value today than
it ever has. And we've all grown to learn more about the value of
time savings as well. We've grown accustom to spending I think more
time at home. That time's been with our families and we've had to
adjust in many different ways. We've adjusted our purchasing
habits. Many of us have learned to appreciate the time savings
associated with online purchasing and delivering goods and
services.
Joe Phelan (00:50:01):
Many of us have done that for some time, perhaps not to extreme
that we do it today. And some of us haven't done it at all and have
been exposed to it, and they've said, "Wow, this is really cool."
And so I think the most successful businesses in the future will
have to better manage all of the data that they have around
consumers purchasing habits and turn that data into information
that will increase their share of wallet. And so there's a lot of
examples where information will help you increase your share of
wallet and will help you understand what's driving consumer habits
going forward. I think this data will also bring new discoveries
for products and services delivered to your home when you need them
at the right time.
Joe Phelan (00:50:58):
And so you will get the product without having to ask for it
because the information leads to the conclusion that now is the
time. And so that in itself I think will be pretty powerful. And
some may argue, Rob, that this is all temporary adjustment. Dining
restaurants will open full again and movie theaters and malls will
all open back up and grocery stores will get back to normal.
However, I think there's a high probability that many consumers
like the change that has occurred. They like the change to their
purchasing habits and will opt for these different options in the
future, drive up for pickup of your groceries, delivery of your
groceries to your door, classrooms will also look very different in
the future with online delivery of education at all levels,
distance learning, things like medical appointments. I don't know
about you, but I'm afraid to go to the doctor's office.
Rob Collie (00:52:13):
Yeah.
Joe Phelan (00:52:13):
I probably shouldn't be, but I am. I'm afraid to go see the
dentist, but with telehealth now and I've used it, you can dial up
a doctor and get some really good consultation and advice and you
can see the doctor and she or he can see you and prescribe a
remedy. And so the way of doing business I don't think it's
temporary. I think we've had some setbacks. We've made some
adjustments, but a lot of what has happened as a result I think
will stick for some time to come. And so with all the previous
spending habits changing, a significant shift has already occurred.
And as a result of our getting more comfortable with doing things
online these past several months, I think we'll see the new... I
hate to say the new normal because it's cliche, but there will be a
new normal going forward.
Joe Phelan (00:53:18):
And some people still like going to the grocery store and some
people still like going to the movie theater and that will
continue, but I think some habits will change. All of these have
changed rapidly the businesses and the new data that's needed to
crunch and understand consumers demands, desires, and purchasing
habits will become even more prevalent in the future. So the demand
I think for information will continue to excel. Supply channel
changes, the consumer purchasing changes, consumer demand changes,
all of this will thrive off of the need for new and more real time
information. I think businesses will need to be more agile with the
data and the information.
Joe Phelan (00:54:15):
Waiting until the end of the quarter or the end of the month or the
end of the week will no longer allow you to be as resilient as you
need to be as the consumer demands you to keep up daily. And
crunching data the old way is too time consuming and too cost
prohibitive to be as agile as you need to be to compete in today's
world. Today's world is happening today, it's not happening
tomorrow and it's not happening yesterday. It's happening today.
Businesses will need to access realtime information captured from
mounds of data collected throughout the organization across
multiple functions to ensure that timely decisions are being made
for consumers and automation, I think will play a big part of that
going forward.
Joe Phelan (00:55:14):
So all of these IoT devices that we've grown accustomed to use in
the past, we'll continue to use in the future, but they'll be aided
with more real time and relevant information as we go forward. So
they'll become an even more important part of our lives I think
going forward. It's a long answer, but there's a lot going on there
I think.
Rob Collie (00:55:43):
Well, true or false, in my household we have IoT cat feeders.
Joe Phelan (00:55:50):
[crosstalk 00:55:50]. True.
Rob Collie (00:55:54):
True. We have IoT cat feeders. And speaking to the logistics and
all that kind of stuff, we ordered new dishes for these boutique
IoT cat feeders, and the dishes arrived the next day. It's just
unbelievable.
Joe Phelan (00:56:12):
That's called Amazon Prime.
Rob Collie (00:56:14):
It is. It is. Yeah. When you said, Joe, that you think a lot of
these changes are going to stick more than people expect, I think
one of the things we almost always implicitly underestimate is the
impact of shifts in investment on these sorts of things. So for
example, I remember... I guess it was two years ago, maybe it was
more, I don't remember really, but OPEC decided to just dump a
bunch of oil on the market to drive the price way down. And their
goal was to crush the domestic United States shale oil industry.
Drive the price of oil down to a point where it wasn't profitable
to extract from shale.
Rob Collie (00:56:58):
And my first blush thought was, "Well, that's just silly," right?
Because as soon as they put the price back up to where OPEC wants
it to be, it'll be profitable to do shale again, but it'll
temporarily wipe out all the investors and the infrastructure and
equipment. And maybe it's a very expensive business and it's going
to drive the price of investment higher in the future because it's
been proven to be risky. And I was like, "Oh." Once I connected
those dots I was like, "Oh, this is three dimensional chess." And
so there's no OPEC that released COVID on us. It's not a 5G bill
gates conspiracy, but it still has some of that same sort of
effect.
Rob Collie (00:57:44):
Even if you're just a small regional bank, you're going to be less
inclined to provide a small business loan for a new in-person
restaurant going forward than you used to be. You're going to be
more likely to fund the carryout joint. And so even if the pandemic
passes and we don't get another one immediately on its heels and
people's short memories start to... There's still this smart
allocation of investment and those people have longer memories
because they have to. That's their whole job. And so I think
there's a durability to this trend that's going to be enforced by
the financial community. And even if the rest of us decide, "No,
let's go back to normal," it's still going to be just more
expensive to launch a brick and mortar sit down restaurant than it
used to be, for example.
Joe Phelan (00:58:42):
It'll change. I think you won't see a traditional perhaps brick and
mortar restaurant like we've seen in the past. There's many
restaurants that I've seen that have done fairly well through this
crisis because they were able to very rapidly change their model.
And so knowing that they were going to be shut down for a while or
they would be back open with a lot less capacity, they turned a lot
of their business to dine out and very quickly adjusted with their
staff and with their consumer base and reaching out to the consumer
base and advising them of the new business, "This is how we operate
now. We still have the same products, the same good food, but we'll
bring it to you or you can come curbside and pick it up." Making
those adjustments real time and quickly is extremely important for
any business.
Rob Collie (00:59:52):
Yeah, totally. So let's get back to supply chain because I actually
know just enough to be dangerous here. I mean, we have a number of
clients that we work with who in response, not to the pandemic, the
disease itself, but more in response to the financial fallout, the
financial crisis related to it, the collapse in demand in a lot of
sectors, we see a lot of inventory reduction projects. Inventory
reduction really it's just like a one time savings for a company.
If we temporarily stop making new stuff and allow our warehouse to
halfway empty, then we're making revenue on that stuff, but we're
not spending as much as we normally would. We don't have to replace
it. So we allow ourselves to get a little thinner in reserve. And
so that's a pretty time honored tradition during downturns.
Rob Collie (01:00:45):
And it's been really, really gratifying to see how much help we can
be in that space. We can really help drive it because sometimes
it's hard to change old habits. And so having good dashboards to
track all of that, it really makes a huge difference. We even have
a case study that I can't talk about yet because it hasn't been
finally approved, but a really, really cool case study on exactly
this. We also have experience with the other side of this equation,
which is the demand shock in the other direction and the supply
shock. So we have another client who before COVID put a monstrous
order in as they do every year from China for a crucial component
of what they manufacture. They always do that because of the
Chinese new year.
Rob Collie (01:01:30):
And they know there's going to be an outage in supply and it turned
out there was a huge outage in supply this year when COVID ravaged
China. And it just happened to be timed just right so that they
were sitting on a good supply. They were stocked up and able to
produce a bunch of product when COVID caused their sales to go up
tremendously. Actually COVID influenced their sales in the positive
direction. And if they hadn't had this lucky chance that they had
just stocked up on a bunch of supply, they would've been unable to
take advantage of the demand. And if their competitors had been
able to step into that void, they might have actually experienced a
permanent loss of stature in their market.
Rob Collie (01:02:15):
So there's these two opposite tensions in a way. There's this
insulation against the black swan outage, where you actually need
more inventory. And then there's the traditional desire to reduce
inventory in response to a financial crisis. And I don't really
have a question here to be perfectly honest. I just find this to be
a fascinating tension and want to know if you had any thoughts on
it.
Joe Phelan (01:02:39):
A lot of businesses, big businesses have traditionally gravitated
to one supplier for a product or a component because it allowed
them to get the unit cost down for that product. So ordering larger
quantities gets you to a lower unit price. But the cost of
logistics when things don't go well can be quite significant. So I
think a lot of companies now are moving more towards having
geographically more suppliers. And so there may be a supplier in
China, there may be one in Latin America and there may be one in
Europe that you use and your costs for producing those components
might be a little bit higher, but you're able to then leverage the
supply chain either during downturns or times when things are
extremely good in a more productive way. So I think many businesses
are reevaluating their stance on that and their procurement habits
and are making different decisions based on what they've witnessed
particularly over the last several months.
Rob Collie (01:04:10):
Yeah. One of the things that I've seen many times over the years
now is that whenever the world changes, whether for good or bad,
positive or negative, it immediately invalidates all of the tribal
roadmaps that have been developed over time in terms of trial and
error. And maybe those roadmaps really weren't all that good to
begin with. A lot of times when you poke at them you discover that
they really weren't as good as everybody thought. So sometimes it's
a blessing that everyone comes to this realization that we can't
trust that roadmap anymore. And so the need for good analysis, the
need for good information, the ability to see through all of the
noise, to see the forest for the trees, there's only a higher
premium on that. And this is one of the reasons why our business is
actually blessed to be doing quite well during otherwise completely
historic, awful situation.
Rob Collie (01:05:08):
But BI has always done this. Even bad BI used to absorb more
spending during downturns than it did during "normal good times".
And a lot of the things that you've been saying today, in fact
without any sort of prompting or pre-planning, I have a blog post
and a talk that we're turning into a white paper that's basically
10 things that should be table stakes for your modern data culture.
And, Joe, you've just been again, without any leading the witness
you've been hitting on so many of the things that we talk about,
that like the increased frequency, the ability to drill down. You
use the word across a lot. Seeing across different silos of the
business. You also talked about mergers and acquisitions and how
many modern companies that's how they've been built.
Rob Collie (01:06:04):
And so even if they're operating in parallel spaces, you're still
inherently siloed from the get go and being able to see across is a
big strength here. And so another thing we wanted to talk about for
sure is your recent interview in the Supply & Demand Chain
Executive magazine. You're part of the cover story. And if we were
playing Power BI bingo or a Power BI drinking game for every time
you managed to get the words Power BI into that interview and into
the pages of this publication, I mean, we'd be living pretty happy
at the moment. What did you think about that process? Was that
enjoyable?
Joe Phelan (01:06:39):
Yeah, that was fun. I enjoyed the opportunity. It was with a
publication called Supply & Demand Chain Executive. It was the
September issue. And I think they did a very nice job of discussing
how a smarter supply chain is developing as we result of our better
using information assisted and various technological solutions. The
article is called industrial revolution 4.0, which I thought was a
cool title as well. And in that article I emphasized the need to
have the right information available at the right place and at the
right time. I think the same can apply.
Joe Phelan (01:07:25):
This is the beauty I think of Power BI is whether you're using
various IoT devices, geofencing, AI, robotics, drones, RFID sensors
or GPS, real time information will always be the key success factor
I think for these types of solutions. And smart devices aided with
smart information and smart people I think will provide a smarter
supply chain and smarter solutions for the consumer. And that's
what I tried to emphasize in the article, but there was a number of
industry experts quoted in the article and I thought they did a
very nice job. It's a good read.
Rob Collie (01:08:11):
And one of the things you mentioned in there that I really liked
was as you incorporate more and more automation, more and more
devices in your operations, somewhat paradoxically your need for
monitoring increases because there's fewer and fewer humans
involved. And even though humans are of course their own source of
error and imperfection, an automated system can run for a very long
time in the dark doing something you don't want it to be doing when
there's literally no human being watching it. I find that
fascinating as well. So it's basically constant reinforcement that
I have chosen the right industry, the data industry, we can all
just pat ourselves on the back.
Joe Phelan (01:08:53):
That's called confirmation bias [inaudible 01:08:55].
Rob Collie (01:08:55):
Is it? Is it? Well, I'll tell you what? If I started getting
different signals I would've changed jobs.
Joe Phelan (01:09:03):
Well, that makes it legit [crosstalk 01:09:04].
Rob Collie (01:09:05):
At least when I talk my own book I am putting my money where my
mouth is. So I think in closing here, we talked about this a little
bit earlier on, let's make it a real crisp direct question opposed
to a sidelight. What advice do you have for this new breed of
modern data professional in terms of becoming more relevant, more
noticeable even, more valuable to the C-suite or to leadership and
executives in general? What are the advice that you would give
someone who's at that point in their career right now?
Joe Phelan (01:09:38):
Wow. When you ask that it brings back memories of my walking by the
C-suite early in my career and thinking to myself, "How do I get
one of those offices in the future?" The answer I came up with is,
"I guess I need to start thinking more like a C-suite person. And
if I start thinking and acting more like a C-suite person, maybe I
will become one." And so I think the question's relevant from the
standpoint that data people should start thinking and acting more
like C-suite people. Don't consider yourself just a "data person".
Put yourself in their shoes and try to first understand their needs
and the needs of the organization, and then use the lingual that
they use. What type of lingo does the C-suite use? ROI, return on
capital deployed, shareholder value and understand how the
solutions you provide will help them accomplish their
objectives.
Joe Phelan (01:10:56):
And I think that's how you get at the C-suites attention, is
understand what their objectives are and how you can solve those
problems by providing solutions. Because I don't necessarily view
us as data people. I view us as problem solvers and process
improvement engineers and many other things, but we can aid the
business in making significant improvement in performance. It's not
about creating just a pretty dashboard or gathering data. It's
about providing meaningful real time solutions for the
organization. So I think that's an old term, data people and I
think we need to all start thinking about ourselves as something a
little bit different in the future. Whether it's a process
improvement engineer or it's strategic enabler engineer or
whatever, we need to look at it a little bit differently going
forward.
Rob Collie (01:12:10):
Do you hear that, Tom? You are no longer ever allowed to use the
term data janitor ever again?
Thomas LaRock (01:12:17):
That was not the takeaway I had from what our guest just said.
Rob Collie (01:12:22):
He said you shouldn't call yourself data people. You're like,
"Yeah, so I'll just call myself data fluky." That'll really set the
right mindset.
Thomas LaRock (01:12:32):
Data professional. I usually say data professionals and that covers
a lot.
Rob Collie (01:12:37):
It does.
Thomas LaRock (01:12:37):
It's your data, [crosstalk 01:12:38], it's your DBAs, your data
engineers, your Power BI, but-
Rob Collie (01:12:41):
We stopped talking.
Joe Phelan (01:12:42):
You behaved.
Rob Collie (01:12:45):
Mostly. Mostly behaved. Yeah. We were talking about data janitor
and all of that. And I think we probably got a little bit chopped
up there. We're okay. I mean, Tom, was just wrong, so it doesn't
really matter. We'll just move on.
Joe Phelan (01:13:01):
Yeah. Hopefully-
Thomas LaRock (01:13:02):
Wait a second. Wait a second. Nobody said I was wrong. I'm two for
two on the day.
Rob Collie (01:13:09):
I said you were wrong. You're right, my vote doesn't carry the same
weight. You're right. I understand.
Thomas LaRock (01:13:16):
How did we go from some great advice to all of a sudden Tom being
wrong?
Rob Collie (01:13:21):
I don't know how that happens.
Thomas LaRock (01:13:23):
Oh, as the DBA though, I accept this result.
Rob Collie (01:13:26):
I did want to magnify what Joe was saying, which is... I actually
yesterday just started a document. All it's got right now is a
title. The working title is the I is for improvement. Sort of like
an attempt to rebrand BI, intelligence was the wrong goal.
Thomas LaRock (01:13:44):
I like that.
Rob Collie (01:13:45):
Being informed. Well, those spreadsheets that you're talking about,
Joe, that people send to you, that's checking the check box of
informed as far as they're concerned. And when you talk about
thinking like the C-suite, you've got to work backwards from
improvement. And it's really, really, really interesting. You'd
think on the surface that if you work forwards from the data and
think about what you can do with the data and what you can present
from the data and then put that out there versus if you work
backwards from...
Rob Collie (01:14:18):
Don't even think about the data first. Work backwards from asking
what can the organization do to improve and then go looking for
data and building a solution that's completely the inverse of what
"data people"... Their first instinct is to go the other way. To go
data forward rather than improvement backwards. And the Microsoft
stack has really planned in advance for this. They call it the
Power Platform now because it's not just Power BI, it's also Power
Automate and Power Apps. And the idea is that you should create
positive action loops in your business that drive improvement.
Rob Collie (01:14:58):
I got to give them credit. Microsoft has already positioned
themselves for the next fight. I think that within the next few
years people like Gartner will be evaluating BI vendors not just on
their ability to build the right kinds of reports and things like
that, which has been most of the criteria. They will start adding
the integration of action like why do I have to leave my dashboard?
If I've got a conclusion about a change that I need to make, why do
I need to leave the dashboard to do that? Why is it so
disconnected? Why can't there be a button right there next to that
store? We need to increase their share of product X or something
like that. Why can't I at least contextually have a jumping off
point there to go and take that action?
Rob Collie (01:15:45):
And having that mindset of embedding those kinds of action, taking
verbs in the reports also helps really keep you honest when you're
building reports, when you're building dashboards with this
improvement in mind that they're like, "Oh, if that's part of the
dashboard, I can't cognitively let it out of my head. It has to be
there. It's just as important as the charts." And I think we're
going to see this is the new thing, this is the new mindset and
Microsoft has already quietly built the platform that can do this.
Even though it's not the thing yet, they're ahead of the market.
And I was just, "Oh, yeah, I'm really excited about it."
Joe Phelan (01:16:22):
I think our consultants are really performance improvement
consultants.
Rob Collie (01:16:27):
I agree.
Joe Phelan (01:16:27):
So they can provide the tools and information for your business to
allow you to improve.
Rob Collie (01:16:35):
Yeah. It's a different breed. Just like we're talking about the
future is the hybrid. Our team, it very much reflects that. It's
not an accident. This not your father's old mobile. This is not
your father's BI consulting team.
Joe Phelan (01:16:52):
Yeah. Agreed.
Rob Collie (01:16:53):
I'm glad that you see that. That's incredibly validating for me and
so I appreciate it.
Joe Phelan (01:16:58):
But somehow we need to get, I think that messaging across. That
might help with business engagement in the future, is to
position... We're getting off topic now, but position the business
more as performance improvement consultants than-
Rob Collie (01:17:14):
We also just need to get people to start searching for performance
improvement consultants.
Joe Phelan (01:17:18):
Yes. True.
Thomas LaRock (01:17:19):
I got news for you. If people search for performance improvement
you guys will never be front page of Google. I'm just telling
you.
Joe Phelan (01:17:26):
Oh, I see. I see. Yeah. It's going to be some sort of herbal
supplement.
Thomas LaRock (01:17:32):
You will not win that SEO race.
Rob Collie (01:17:36):
You're talking about sports, am I right?
Thomas LaRock (01:17:40):
I'm talking about things that do require endurance from time to
time. Yeah.
Joe Phelan (01:17:46):
Great place to stop, right?
Rob Collie (01:17:48):
Oh, it's a fantastic place to stop. Joe, this here has been a real
pleasure. Thanks again very much.
Joe Phelan (01:17:53):
You're very welcome and thank you. I really enjoyed it and love the
opportunity and hope that we can do it again sometime in the
future. But thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Announcer (01:18:03):
Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 podcast. Find out what
the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to
powerpivotpro.com. Interested in becoming a guest on the show?
Email lukep, L-U-K-E-P@powerpivotpro.com. Have a data day!