Its not all about the money afterall

The process of developing an IDEA (Integrated Data Engineering Application) sounds like such a consummately technical task doesn’t it? Sounds like you might need some client side boffo cranking out an ungodly detailed MS project file that would then mesh with a WorldAPP Statement Of Work eight tomes thick.

Well, yes and no.

I just looked at a video that a colleague of mine, Matt Haney, jabbered over. It’s fascinating stuff. First, it’s on a larger theme that has always entranced me – the subject of how to correctly motivate a workforce.

But there’s more in this pudding than just these raisins.

It also reveals how incentives can become disincentives when the work task shifts from straightforward or mechanical tasks to those that require expansive lateral thinking. (Hat tip here to one of my all times heroes, Edward de Bono, the “father of thinking”.)

In the video, the presenter, Dan Pink, shows how it has been repeatedly proven that the bigger the pecuniary incentive for cognitively challenging tasks, the higher the fail rate. Hmmm…. I hope our CFO, Oleg Matsko, isn’t reading this. This means we should be cranking out IDEAS for our customers with a bunch of lateral thinking mavens from the client’s team matched with a bunch of rag-tag rightbrained geniuses on our side .…AND…if we want it to really work well…the success of the project should largely be uncoupled from its cost.

You can view this interesting lecture at http://bit.ly/F0gJu

Pure genius in data display

I love the challenges we are faced with when customers ask us to develop an IDEA (Integrated Data Engineering Application) to solve difficult business process problems. It’s fascinating stuff. The IDEAs come in all shapes and sizes and often end up inside a sexy data drill down presentation layer using our valued partner QlikView.

But there is one particular technology we haven’t tapped into yet and I am chomping at the bit to see it deployed. It was developed by Gapminder.org and the technology has subsequently been bought by Google (no surprise there).

It’s so amazing; I call it “spawning intelligence”.

The technology displays data over time as it dynamically unfolds along two axis. The video I recommend from Hans Rosling shows how this technology can reveal fresh insights into the relationship between child mortality rates and world population growth over decades of historical data.

The intellectual stimulation from witnessing these variables as they morph through time is a new paradigm of learning and provocation that must be classed as a game changer.

Data is only beginning to have its day in the sun. Pundits and pulpits beware. Facts alone, presented at this level of mesmerizing acuity, are going to rule this new millennium.

You can see Rosling strut his stuff here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

Social Networking - Integrating People Engineering Applications

As you may know, WorldAPP is the originator of IDEAS - Integrated Data Engineering Applications.

But maybe there is room out there for another company to focus on IPEAS 0r Integrated People Engineering Applications?

Sure, it is not nearly as sexy an acronym, but social networking is certainly now the new red hot space. Yesterday over lunch, one of our business analysts was proclaiming how he had just succumbed and become a "Twitter" the previous night. His friend had finally managed to explain to him the value of looking at himself as a "product" and using Twitter to keep those who might be interested in him as a "product" up-to-date – all this in easy-to-digest 140 character bites of information.

Certainly, here at WorldAPP, we are both aware and excited that companies will soon be asking us to integrate relevant information from Linked In, Facebook and other data repositories into their next IDEA.

Data is data after all and it is the quality and value of data, not the database or structure that houses it, that truly matters from a business efficiencies perspective.

Now that I think of it - the report design dilemma

I am no technology buff. So any esoteric conversation you have with me about the pros and cons of traditional RDBMS vs. newer DBMS architectures will most likely be a very short one. There will be a lot of silent nodding and quiet chin rubbing. Luddite though I be, I do profess to know a winner when I see one and QlikView from QlikTech, one of WorldAPP’s premier integration partners in the BI space, appears to be a monster by any estimation.

Boris Evelson, who writes for Information Management Magazine, has written an erudite blog on this, and, though I paraphrase it here, I urge you to read his brilliant homily in full. I even enjoyed the parts I didn't understand.

In essence, Evelson's treatise lowers the boom on the mile-wide gap between BI tools that require you to know in advance exactly what kind of reports you want in a report (in his parlance this is known as pre-discovery of data, aka data integration and data modeling) and BI tools, like QlikView, that allow you to create virtual data models on-the-fly because everything is already indexed in memory.

The advantages of the latter are easy to grasp by anyone who has just delivered a report to spec only to hear a C level mandariin mumur "I'd like to see this data another way".

To his credit, Evelson is even-handed in his analysis and points out other issues that still need resolution, but it certainly looks like any IDEAS (Integrated Data Engineering Applications) that WorldAPP builds for our customers using QlikView's BI engine is going to serve them very well in the future.

Evelson's article can be found at:
http://www.information-management.com/blogs/business_intelligence_bi-10015454-1.htmlce_bi-10015454-1.html

IDEAS and Gaussian Distribution

One of the intriguing questions around the world of IDEAS (Integrated Data Engineering Applications) is what technologies are going to fold into it's core functionality most rapidly? If one were to map potential integratable technologies within the framework of a typical Gaussian distribution which ones would hover atop the bell curve?

Early interest from WorldAPP's customers does seem to center around forms, workflow, IVR, and other multi-modal data collection schemas involving scanning and even snail mail. Predictable enough you might say.

But who out there is going to be a real game changer? My bet is on a hardware company called Plastic Logic that is solving a critical piece of the "affordability" and "durability" challenge in field data collection. Take a look at this revolutionary concept http://www.plasticlogic.com/news/video.php .

This company gets it.