Margin Call

Of the movies based on Wall Street and financial crisis, the one that names this blog entry has surprised me enormously.
Besides the interpretative abilities of the acting squad and the subject of the film, there is a series of curiosities that I think are absolutely simmilar with a lot of companies fighting with data today.


The fact is that a trader (Zachary Quinto) gets an indication from his boss (Stanley Tucci) who has just been fired because of the crisis to take a look to a job he has been working on and becomes the problem that unleashes the plot of the film. The fact that Quinto is the last Spock and that in the film he's an aeronautics doctor is a good joke related with something we have talked of always: the homo informaticus.


Mr. Spock... I mean... Quinto has a boss (Paul Bettany) to whom he cannot explain several difficult subjects because he doesn't understand them. Bettany has another boss (Kevin Spacey) who even doesn't know what to look and how to make sense of what he's seeing. Spacey has a boss (Simon Baker) who doesn't care at all. And over all of them it's the maximum boss (Jeremy Irons) who asks the trader to explain to him as if he was twelve years old.

All this sounds to you, doesn't it?

The different leves in a company find themselves in need of different complexity and availability of the information they use, from the lowest to the highest level. This is easily understood.

There's another curiosity in respect of the agility of the company (it's really surprising) and that defines and explains the behaviour of the consultancy market: from the time in which Mr Spock discovers the problem and the time it all is messed up they spend just a night, with meetings at 1, at 2, at 4 and at 6 AM among all these people. It is called absolute availability and agility.


At 4 AM, Mr Irons asks Quinto what's the matter. And in seconds after knowing it, he decides that in his market they must be the first, even it's for bad. The rest is already known by all of us, but take a look in the agility of the decision. Information hasn't flown very wall between company levels, but when it finally does, the decision is clear and with no hesitation. That information really is used to take decisions (who after all affects a lot of people and other companies).

We well discuss later why some companies work like that and ask what they ask to their employees (afterwork and personal time related), but that's another story.

SPQR

 - Legionaire Caius Bonus, proceed to talk with your centurion in order to know how to get your battle equipment.
- Sir, yes, Sir
- Don't forget to fullfill the form in which it's specified your bank account number
- In order to earn  my pay, sir?
- No, in order for you to pay your equipment.
- ¿Excuse me?
- Excused you are. Get moving.


I don't know if you already know it, but in ancient Rome legionaires had to pay their own battle equipment (I hope at a nice price). In a consular legion of about 5.000 men this made that there was a different equipment level among soldiers, getting grouped by their own social categories. The ones known as Velites were those poorly armoured because of economic questions and used to be, for the same reason, the ones who died first.


Today it's not usual to have a soldier equipment in good condition at home besides of the one in your profile of Call of Duty, but we have laptops and other tech gadgets. As I commented (via IA) time ago, home channel represents the main sales channel today as a difference with some years ago when the corporative channel was the largest one. So, the laptop I can buy today at a not very expensive price could be better or more powerful that the one a IT-Technician uses. Where is this taking us?

This takes us to a Citrix study (some of their comments can be read here ) in which it's stated the trend that IT workers are following in using their laptops (their OWN laptops, I mean) to work more comfortabily. This is, obviously, in some environments and with some usaurs, a potential huge risk for security, but in other more flexible environments it's a situation you can see in many ways:
Worker: Nice, I can use my laptop where I have everything I need
Worker: Mmmm, very clever they are... They'll make me work from home...
Company: Nice, one laptop I don't have to buy.
Company: Ough! He will steal my data! For sure!

I think that everybody has to work in a way that is comfortable and with the appropiate equipment, but I feel it's not fair that a company obligued their employees to bring their own laptops as a usual work equipment.

Then, it happens what it happens:
- Legionaire Caius Bonus, why are you wearing that Metallica t-shirt?
- Sir, because it's the heaviest armour I could afford, sir.
- ¡Go now clean latrines!

Had you ever find yourselves in such a situation?

Just ask with that little mouth of yours...

I said in my last entry that I didn't understand the evolution of requirements of some products. With a broader scope, I don't understand the whole evolution of some products.


Please, be so kind to tell me which BI/EPM product has all the following requirements:
- Export to any format of the following ones: Excel (with charts), powerpoint, PDF, HTML, Word (with charts) and send them by mail
- Create briefing books with N reports
- Conditional formatting, conditional and varied charts, mixing information from several sources if I decide to do so
- Generate on-the-fly a new definition for a measure that is not avalable in the database as a calculation based in other measures
- If I would, plan and budget
- To have a workflow for approvals that you can freely define and that is not limited to the structure of the data model (of course, with the corresponding warnings via e-mail)
- To have absolute flexibility with the frontend in colors, chars, positions, interactivity...
- To have a system that allows to generate easily (important) what the product doesn't offer me as default.
- To be intuitive. Stupidly intuitive.

The list is veeery long and can get longer, but I must complain about the limitations that we find sometimes in the products. How can it be that...
- ordering clicking in a table header is not available as a default feature?
- you cannot export to Excel with charts?
- powerpoint is not a valid format for exports?
- everything I need in a report has to be defined previously and available in the database?
- I cannot put a button that starts a process depending on the contents of a table?
- there's no way of easily mix an Excel sheet with dwh data without becoming an horror movie?
- I have so many complaints and still the ones I don't complain of?

The truth is not that limitations are limitations seen by me. The problem is the following one:
- ... And then the reports are exported to a powerpoint so I have my monthly report for the board of directors.
- It cannot be. It has to be a PDF.
- No. Not PDF, Powerpoint.
- I'm sorry but no.
- But I have to modify it in order to include my notes.
- Well, you can always copy and paste pieces of the PDF and then...
- ... And then I do it all myself. Why should I wish to pay for a product that doesn't makes my life easier with something so simple and necessary for me?
- Ehm... Well, you have this other product that does it...
- Do I have to have both of them?
- Yes, because this product creates eye-candy powerpoints but the truth is that having to format the reports is hard...

Products have grown up, they keep terrible heritage (we'll speak of that) and go on having (most of them) the same limitations as years ago. What are vendors based in to include improvements on their products?
I remember to you that one of the Palm (RIP) slogans was that 'the best application is the one that does what it must do'. Take a note about that, Mr vendor.

We are getting wrong...

NASA has suffered in its budget one of the more severe cutoffs in the last years. If you let me the joke (AGD-ACME-Translated-directly-from-spanish), they are not capables of launching rockets... But when a door closes, a window is opened, it seems very clear to me that software vendors are preparing a market niche that NASA hadn't thought of and that will let its market recycle to hosting and housing of applications, making profitable its famous data centers.


I don't understand the causes of the hardware requirements evolution of some products. Truly, I don't understand. I don't understand why a product that 5 years ago was working perfectly in a simple server with 2GB of RAM now needs 16GB minimum and a double multicore processor to do, at last, the same. Without nothing spectacular. Mister Sofware Vendor (Oracle & SAP, please answer), explain this to me. And not only to me but to a lot of your customers who hesitate about that.

- You'll have to migrate to the new version
- Why?
- Because it's faster than the current one
- Why?
- Because the calc engine has been improved
- And what do I need?
- A server four times more powerful
- Ah... Good... Faster you say, don't you?

I believe that vendors don't need to demostrate that they can develop good products. Then, why to go on developing them in a so complex infrastructure that at last requieres a Nasa-datacenter-type-Hardware? If this is the way, I think in developing custom made applications that require a tenth of the hardware requirements and works perfectly given the current needs (e.g., with .Net or Arcplan and simple Open Source apps).

I know that fashion changes every spring (standard software-custom made-standard-custom-standard...) and that NASA has an urgent need for making its data centers profitable, but I have started thinking if this dinosaur-size requirements are not a straight-runaway to make profitable (and necessary mandatory) the cloud architecture so fashion today.

We'll keep on informing.

IT patience

- What are you doing?
- I'm waiting for this process to finish.
- Ahm... And how long is it?
- It depends but it usually lasts about half an hour.
- And you will waste half an hour looking at the screen?
- (non-believing look) Is there any alternative?
- What's the problem? Doesn't the process know how to process itself if you're not watching it?


The truth is that trying to explain to a non-technician or non-IT-related person that sometimes you have to focus in what you're doing and that watching the screen for half an hour (without doing anything else) is a part of our job is hard. Even to a technician. Even to a IT-technician.


Please, let me say it: What a waste of time.

May it be waste of time or not, we wait patiently for the process to finish. Why? Because when it finishes we have to do other things and usually half an hour is short enough for not starting anything else because of the high cost of mind-chip-change at some times of the afternoon or some days of week.

(AGD-ACME-spanish-translated-expression) If you try to be at church, making the bells toll and brooming the church entrance (specially when you are not a genius) is just what you need for performing poorly in all three subjects. And, of course, you forget things.

- What a ****!
- What's the matter?
- I have to abort the process because I forgot to initialise the database.
- And then you'll start it again?
- Sure... I have to make sure it works...
- Would'nt it be easier to check that all is correct before, start it, go to have a coffee and come back?
- You aren't a IT-Technician, are you?

It is said that spanish IT-technicians are imaginative. As you can see, we are also patient.
And idiots... There's no way to deny it...

What Google Trends says about BI (I)

Gartner has just published its usual magic quadrant and the future is very very veeeery dark.
After assuming adequately that everything could be better (as if the crisis had just arrived...), I've decided to develop my own market report and for doing that I've used Google Trends, a fabulous search trends analyzer.
Why Google Trends? Because at last the searches show the success of a technology. Anyway, for not doing it too long, first we'll take a look to top vendors.

'Business Intelligence' Trend

As we can see, BI searches dive a little in the last 7 years. Wasn't it supposed to be tomorrow's technology and so on? Besides of this, the news volume grows greatly from 2008 until now. Is there less searches because there's a deeper general knowledge about BI?


Microstrategy

Microstrategy has turned the U-Line. It went down on 2007 and 2008 to start recovering veeeery slowly.


Business Objects

BO has fallen greatly. Yes, SAP may have something to do because of it changing its products name constantly, but BO is still BO. Mr. SAP, please take a look at this trend. I should be afraid.


Oracle BI

Oracle BI, after the boom of the sale of Siebel Analytics, has gone down a little. It's the same case of Microstrategy but upside down.


Qlikview

Qlikview case is spectacular. It has grown steadily and greatly (Gartner says that its growth is, in fact, its problem to scale its support). The fact that everybody talks about Qlikview is not casual.


Cognos

In a BO-like way, Cognos shortens its searches. There's no doubt that after IBM bought Cognos it has affected its market badly. Mr. IBM, as Mr. SAP, please take a look at your product trend.

There's a lot more cases and the truth is that almost anyone in Spain (it is clear that we lack a lot of culture in BI to gain representativity). The fact is that more complex products trend to go down. Meanwhile, simpler ones go up. Are we tired of dinosaur-bulky products?

We'll keep on informing.

Introduction to Applied Informatrics

Maybe you don't know (yet) that a blog called 'Informatría Aplicada' hast just turned 3 (wow!).
After 3 years and about 100 absolutely-original-you-know-what-I-am-talking-about articles about IT and BI with my particular sense of humour, I thought that it was the perfect time for Informatria Aplicada to open to international readers... And the best idea I had to do that was to translate it from spanish to english (yes, I'm an absolute genius...).

Translated articles from my spanish blog will appear in AI (some of the most visited ones and the ones that I will write in the future) and special articles specially written for international readers.

So be aware of my next articles. I hope that they could make you smile :-)