Seen and Not Seen has an interesting post about “the tyranny of the average” in the design world.  A good read, worth the time.  If you are in a hurry, this graphic tells the gist of the story very clearly:

This has got me thinking about a lot of things we do in the data world, especially with respect to business intelligence.  One of the more useful buzzwords I have heard lately is “shadow systems“, describing the unofficial spreadsheets and databases that spring up within an organization to allow people to get things done (I have written a lot about them).

Too often, we  create or purchase data solutions that are designed to answer questions that the average user might have, as specified by the program sponsor, project manager, and developer.  The problem with this is that usually this user doesn’t exist at the time the design is finalized, is even less likely to exist when the project is completed, and is virtually guaranteed to be extinct within a year after rollout.

This means that designing for the average user delivers tools that aren’t useful to anyone.  Instead, we need to design data tools that are general enough to fit a large user base, and flexible enough to be updated to keep up with a changing business environment.  We don’t want to move at the speed of business at the time of design, we want to match the changing accelleration of the business over the life of the product.

If you are a BI/Reporting/Spreadsheet type person, you might like this chart.

Frank Dravis has a new post on metadata and its growing importance in the marketplace. Dravis wonders how metadata became a subject of interest for non-technical folk …

In years past, metadata was the domain of data architects. It helped them understand what data they had and how it related to the sources and operations from which it came and to which it went. At the first mention of metadata business users would roll their eyes and head for the conference room door. Surely metadata was the stuff of arcane IT discussions best had out of earshot of people driving and running the business.

Then metadata management progressed and someone had the silly idea of articulating the business value, the value to the business side of the house, for metadata. The value came from the resolution of an age old problem. A corporate manager is sitting in a conference room looking at their regular monthly sales report and it is different from what they expected based on anecdotal evidence from the field: the numbers are too low.

Personally, I think that this recent interest is driven by a few things:

1. Regulation and the threat of real penalties for inaccuracies in reporting. People got interested enough to protect their own hides.
2. The rise of ERP and BPM in the marketplace. If everything is in one place then metadata suddenly becomes a lot easier to manage.

Truthfully, I wonder how all of this is going to turn out. I know there are lots of people who want to sell metadata software, but in my experience it takes a lot of resource (time, effort, and expertise) to maintain a comprehensive metadata environment. The threat of jail time helps to keep people motivated enough to save their necks, but not enough to make something useful. Being locked into an ERP package can mean the same thing, only it is your data that is locked.

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The more important outcome of a decision, the more people will resist using evidence to make it.

– Michale Lovagalia, Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Iowa.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

– J.K. Rowling