The Stroop Effect

Having recently worked with customers on their information dissemination challenges we put together this video to show the Stroop Effect. This is particularly powerful during Business Intelligence reports and where users have pattern associations.




Making reporting intuitive and insightful can be a challenge - you need to maximise the useful information available whilst providing the business actionable insights - in the right context, to the right level of detail and in a timely manner. This a big challenge however there are some simple techniques that can assist your users to understand the information. 




One that we have recently demonstrated to a client is trying to allow users to pattern match or use the associations that they are used to seeing. This could be that red is bad and green is good as a very obvious example, but this can be extended to different types of details such as symbol use. The aim of this is reducing the time for a user to interpret the results, this is known as the Stroop Effect (more details on Wikipedia).  


By portraying the information that maximises the users inherent knowledge or meets their preconceived patterns the data can be interpreted much quicker. We typically try and do this through a myriad of ways such as:




Using known hierarchies: Ensuring that the information they are expecting to see together is presented together and uses the common names or styles of that dimension. This would typically include a business unit or function or product which is displayed alongside the similar items.  ColoursAs mentioned above this can cover basic indications of positive and negative but could also include the common colour associations with a product or brand - coal would be black and soil would be brown etc. This sounds simple but if you are looking at a multi-tier report or dashboard this consistency and knowledge can save considerable time and frustration. Symbols and Controls I expect a + or an up arrow to be positive as per the comment on colour. This needs to be handled with care, I currently fly a lot and the airport I use has the departure sign as a plane taking off but the arrival plane is one facing the opposite way - a good representation but not the ideal image as you arrive to the airport and see a plane directed towards the ground.With the explosion of Web 2.0 there are lots of common user interface techniques or widgets which users come across regularly and these should be maximised and harnessed for users to traverse their data.


The above are a couple of very simple examples for giving your users the information that they need and using some really simple techniques to speed up their interpretation. We would like to know what you do and your thoughts on this in the comments field below.




Thanks,


For more details on our data visualisation and Business Intelligence initiatives you can reach us here: Technical@5point9.com

Technorati Tags: Stroop Effect, Information Presentation, Data Visualisation, Data Visualization, Information Management 5point9

Information Police

Having watched the Eli Pariser talk Beware Online “Filter Bubbles” on TED I was taken by the huge impact that filtering can have on the information that is available to us and especially when we map this back to a business context. The balance between the speed of access to information that you need and the context that the information is being returned from.

The context

The amount of information in the world is vast, by 2020 it is predicted that there will be 35 ZB of data according to an IDC White Paper. This is an incomprehensible amount of data. If that was all mp3 files then it would be the equivalent of 190 billion centuries of uninterrupted music; if it were DVDs, that is 2 billion centuries of uninterrupted movie viewing. That is if we continue at today’s pace, which is unlikely, we could be looking at yottabytes of data which is 10 to the power of 24 - staggering numbers. 

Historically information has always needed to be classified in order to make it accessible and retrievable. Robert Cawdrey wrote the first English dictionary in 1604, the first telephone directory was in 1878 and contained a single page, libraries are thought to have appeared in Greece in around the 5th Century BC and maps date from around 16,500 BC - these are examples of systems that can be used to find information in a timely manner and have been utilised for years. 

Today we have a different challenge, volume - It is estimated that there are 2 trillion webpages on the Internet - that is equivalent to 300 per person on this planet. That is a long book. With tagging, taxonomies and other categorisation we begin to be able to find information more easily then trawling through indexes of websites and information. This is where we got to in the late 1990’s. Fast forward to now: with the social web 2.0 explosion there is a myriad of ways to search information and embedded intelligence that can be automated to give us information based on our behavioural patterns - such as where we are, our browser and historic searches etc.

Filter Bubbles

This takes us to Eli’s presentation and a couple of interesting statements, the first is from Mark Zukkerberg:

“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than  people dying in Africa.”

Whilst on first reading this sounds in poor taste, I interpret the message as being that everyone cares about important things at the global level but they are more interested in the things which directly relate to them or have a more immediate impact or effect. This as a concept is really important and I think of this as spheres of information and different levels of weighting depending on what your objectives are when you are searching. 

Search engines cannot read your mind or even really predict what you are trying to do accurately so they work based on past behaviours and various signals with complex algorithms to work out what is and is not relevant. This is flawed because it does not have the benefit of understanding your emotions or your objectives at that snapshot in time - search engines cannot tell exactly what type of detail you are looking for. 

Eli’s example of Egypt is a powerful one and also raises lots of moral questions, how much should be filtered based on our past trends of behaviour against what is available? Getting information quickly is the biggest benefit as more often than not this approach will give you what you are looking for very quickly and effectively. But this doesn’t always work as per Eli’s point. Dependent on my objective my personal sphere of interests may be more important than a global sphere. On this, I think that we have several spheres of information in our personal and business domains which map roughly to the following:

•Personal 

•People who I know well or are in close proximity to my location. 

•Subjects that I am very interested in or follow avidly. 

•Community

•People or topics that are further removed but are familiar to me and frequently accessed. 

•Regional 

•Things that I am aware of but do not have a major impact on me.

•I may be aware of the people and subjects but not in detail.

•Global

•I have a high level understanding and whilst it might be important it does not directly effect me.

Based on what I am doing I may want to focus more on different spheres or bands of information and here we have the time tradeoff. I recall a few years ago a search engine which allowed you to use slider bars to focus on different areas and essentially add a priority to information. When the search engines or filtering tools are doing this it would make a lot of sense to show this so the user can clearly see what information is in scope and what has been filtered out - a Venn diagram of results would be relatively simple for most advanced users with the context focus being tweaked as the user wants to see more or less of certain spheres. Eli uses the example of dessert and vegetables - at times you want dessert - find information about football, friends birthdays or low brow comedies, other times you want to find out about international affairs or the works of Dostoevsky. I prefer to see these as both valuable sets - whether it is dessert or vegetable information you still want to see it. 

In the business context I come across this all the time - how can you enable an employee to find the information that they are looking for? How can you minimise the steps or hops required to surface the information that they need? The right information, in time and actionable. I do not believe that there is enough done to utilise the types of algorithms used in public Search engines in the business domain and obviously the technology is improving in the business context, I am impressed with what I have seen of Fast, which are limited by the security and other constraints. How often do you have to scour through pages of information to get the information that you need? Wouldn’t it be easier if you could remove the types of pages which always come up and that you have to sift through? So in the business context I think there is a case to be made to have more filter bubbles. 

Regardless of personal or business context, regarding filter bubbles I do agree with Eli that the algorithms and filtering approach should be clearly shown to users so that we know what we don’t know. 

For more info you can reach us here: Technical@5point9.com

Technorati Tags: Filter Bubble, Search, Ted Talks, Eli Pariser, Information Management 5point9

Get On My Cloud

I have recently been working with a large telecommunications customer defining their cloud offerings, go to market strategy and chargeback model here are some of my thoughts on the challenges and recommendations.

Divide and Conquer 

There are many challenges when you are trying to take any new product to market and cloud offerings can be even more complex because of their range, customer knowledge, market understanding and complexity. If we categorise cloud services into 3 types, we have:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

• Platform as a Service (PaaS)

• Software as a Service (SaaS)

Classifying the offerings into these sub categories is essential in my opinion, without this you are trying to find a model (pricing, business, support, product packaging, technical etc.) which fits too wide a subject matter. By subdividing the offerings into these categories you can take a divide and conquer approach which reduces the complexity and enables you to focus on the offerings whilst maintaining consistency across the services. 

Customers

Customers pose a couple of challenges when we are looking to offer cloud services. The background and understanding of these concepts is relatively new and we have found customers are in one of two camps, especially for the more infrastructure (IaaS) based offerings: they either have a comprehensive understanding of the tools or have no knowledge.  This makes positioning and marketing more difficult as you need to provide collateral which informs the prospective customer of the offerings and benefits whilst not alienating them by speaking at too high a level or too low. One way I have found to overcome this is to use language which enables your customers to understand the offerings through problem equivalence. The simplest way to perform this is to use some of the language which is now common through firms like Google, Amazon and Microsoft’s marketing strategy and also by linking this back to the traditional way of achieving the business or operational goals.

On the Software as a Service and also Platform as a Service approach this is slightly easier as the customer base is less disparate in the understanding stakes. SalesForce.com and DropBox as well as Google Apps have helped to bridge this gap and these concepts are more defined. Customers also understand the consequences of using these services and the benefits. 

The concerns of the customers are common across the offerings and these must be comprehensively addressed. The balance that must be struck is the ability to offer the quality, security and availability whilst also maintaining the flexibility and cost benefits of essentially outsourcing your environments - infrastructure all the way up the value chain to your business problems. This can be achieved in a number of ways but the most success that we have found is based on facts, actually showing the operational SLA’s with stats to back them up. Access is obviously the critical factor and the availability of network will need to be clearly shown.  

Service Level Agreements

The SLA’s that are offered should be tiered and should ensure that the support and infrastructure is capable of handling a large percentage of the customers per tier; this should be an obvious observation but is all too often missed and best case scenarios or anecdotal estimates are used - the reputation of the cloud and also future sales will be dependent on this. The usual cycle that we have seen is that a customer will outsource  one business function and see how this goes before committing more services to the cloud, therefore the performance and delivery of the initial services will have a direct impact of the future sales and growing the accounts. The staffing considerations are also a major area of focus for this as the staff will need to be completely trained up and competent - if you are re-skilling existing staff members then adequate training must be delivered. The operational timings must also be considered here, for example it is unlikely that you will want all customers to have 24 hour support due to the impact of this on the team, the out of hours support should be offered to the highest tier and the price should reflect this premium offering.

Packages

On packaging the solutions you will get the best benefits for dividing up the offerings into IaaS, PaaS and SaaS because of the nature of how these offers will be sold. The critical elements here are to make the delivery of the offerings as simple as possible. You may not be able offer a single configuration or offering per service but it should be possible to limit this to a few scenarios - the aim for the packages is to provide an entry level right the way up to the intense use case. This should also take into account the requirements of the SME as well as the Enterprise Account. It will be impossible to create a controllable number of configurations to meet every customers need and ad hoc configurations should be considered at a premium price, taking into consideration the cost of deviating from the out of the box configurations and the opportunity cost from the other services.

Capex vs Opex

One of the big benefits of the Cloud is commercial, being able to spend from operational expenditure rather than capital expenditure and taking on an asset or assets which will devalue over time and require support etc. In terms of the price point this is a critical and often misunderstood element. Just because something is in the cloud does not necessarily mean it should be cheaper than the alternative of buying the solution through Capex. If you take a basic server as an example the life span of this may be 3 years - but you cannot simply take the cost of a server and divide it by 36 months to see how it compares to hosting the same box in the cloud. My view is that this totally misses the benefit of the cloud and is an unfair comparison. To purchase the server outright you will also have to add the costs of support, power, floor space and disposal as well as consider the depreciation of the hardware over the time period. The benefit of the cloud is that all of those headaches are outsourced with the extra benefits of  flexibility - with the cloud you can scale up or down dependent on the business needs.

Business Model

Coming up with a competitive pricing model is a huge challenge and this will be determined by 2 critical factors - the amortisation period (period of time you want to make the investment back) and level of investment into the setup costs for the platform. We want to offer flexible solutions so that the customer can use the services as simply as possible but this does pose a problem in terms of estimating the use over the period. We recommend an approach which looks at a reasonable utilisation target over the amortisation period by year and then works out how this cost should be distributed across the costs of each offering or configuration based on a monthly bill cycle. This has the positive result that the estimates and revenue can be forecast however it does reduce some flexibility in terms of the customer’s purchasing options - as per the Amazon model, customers may want to purchase compute time on a more granular basis and this approach restricts this flexibility. The tradeoff between flexibility and forecast revenue control will be based on the investment in the platform, the higher this investment, then the more flexibility that can be offered. A hybrid model is also an option here, based on the monthly cost, the hourly cost can be worked out to come up with an hourly fee based on working hours (not hours in the day, if you do this you will be too cheap). With this you can then add a premium to this (maybe an additional 70%) and use the spare capacity based on the utilisation for the initial year, once you have this you can tweak your offerings as appropriate - this will need to be iterative. We have not looked into detail in terms of the change management processes and the PMO requirements of this project, if you would like more details on this please drop us a mail, info@5point9.com.

Conclusion

In summary taking cloud offerings to market is a complex, multifaceted challenge and we have only touched upon a couple of key concepts and challenges. As a first step we strongly recommend market research to find out what your potential customers know, what they are looking for and what barriers  they will need to overcome to use the cloud offerings. The services will need to evolve and the offerings will have varying levels of uptake, to this end re-alignment should be possible so that the infrastructure distribution can change based on the market conditions. Bundling up offerings is also a great way to enable your customers to use the services and increase adoption through incentives. An initial period of testing or internal use is also critical for any innovative product offering especially if this is a shift in the organisational operation, by allowing internal users or “friendly” customers to use the service for free will allow you to test all of the internal operational and billing systems as well as the support network and technologies.

For more details you can reach us here: Technical@5point9.com

Technorati Tags: Cloud, Go To Market, Pricing, Business Model, 5point9