Metrics and Data when Viewed by Admins vs Management vs Users

 I get it, but not sure if I like it, or if users should see it, or if I should let management use it.

We have reached the era of metrics and data that can be measured.

But should it.

No question most systems have had usage reporting, patterns, logs, pretty but usually ugly data to make sense of for your boss.

In Twitter with Rachel Happe(https://twitter.com/rhappe) from The Community Roundtable asked: 

IT friends - if I wanted to calculate the ratio of aggregate hours of meetings to total work time (and potentially segment by mngr/exec) could you get that from your calendar software?

(you might have to pull all events with a room or link since people block their calendars)

— Rachel Happe (@rhappe) January 4, 2021

Prompted some discussion and some replies from various people.

She found an answer for Microsoft Analytics from Alan Lepofsky:

If you use Microsoft look at Workplace Analytics (for admins) or MyAnalytics (for users) https://t.co/h8JhHQ8VyChttps://t.co/LiHY04NZQc

— Alan Lepofsky 🇨🇦 🇺🇸 ✡️ (@alanlepo) January 4, 2021

And then Rachel asked about the admin side. 

Over my 30 years in IT I have been asked to provide metrics, sometimes network items, sometimes user usage. Naturally, as a good employee or consultant, I gave customers what they asked for and automated some of them and others needed some manual efforts.

Should software of course provide this information because it helps IT plan the future, and also be proactive in `their support efforts. 

What I found is many people are ignorant of the data available.

It seems even more people are ignorant of understanding their own data.

Does management really care about the usage internally? Yes, because in some cases they can shut off a service no longer used. Alternatively, they may need to up their licensing or merge some solutions.

But users, do users care what they do or how they do it, or when they do it? I am not s sure.

I know what I do, I think most people if pushed would also know what their habits are but does it imply you are a good employee or not? Does it mean you are goofing off or being more productive?

When I am managing clients or teams I have scheduled one day a week for most of my meetings. I reasoned I'd rather "waste" one day instead of multiple days on meetings. 

This usually has worked for me and my teams because 4 days a week we could work unimpeded.

Meetings don't last 30 or 60 minutes, the time before and after is lost, sometimes as much as 15 minutes or more on both ends before you get back in your groove.

SaaS apps live on the usage data, they want people using their apps and do anything they can to have people using them, but is it a false metric? 

I am in my email all day long, it stays open, so is 8 hours of email, coupled with my network/vpn login time and then my individual application usage(some Saas, some network) to get to some crazy idea I work 20+ hours a day. 

Who wants their company to view them in this way?

No employees.

But management has nothing else to work with usually.

Yes, revenue and sales, ok, that is the only given.

Back-office people, not much to show for their effort. You ran a campaign? You built a server? You rolled out an update? Nice work but quantifying it properly, not so simple, ROI vagueness.

What if all your meetings and online time were tracked to show your actual working time was minimal? 

How would you fight it? 

HR gets involved and guess who is on the chopping board?

People are working from home and the last thing they want is to be picked on for their work effort which they are doing the best they can with what is going on.

Hopefully, this is not going to affect you or your company but it is in the shadows, today. Soon it may be upfront and then it will get interesting with how employees push back or beat the system.

When I worked on Wall Street in the early 90s, we had a database someone wrote to track time. Nothing unusual about that, but the coder was not so advanced and could only set up increments of 15 minutes.

One of the IT guys I knew got yelled at but the boss because it turned out he billed for 30 hours in a day. 

Twice.

It turns out he was delivering things to users, a mouse, a keyboard, software(they used to come in packages and everyone had a license and we had to leave them with the user) and so in theory if you spent 30 seconds dropping off a box or 5 minutes pugging in a mouse, you still billed 15 minutes per person because you could not select less time, because each delivery was billed back to the person and their business line expense code.

Data doesn't lie.

He got paid but was told to never do it again. 

Next time, he took 3 days off instead because he billed his 40 hours in 2 days and just adjusted the dates.

Not the best employee, but this is where interpreting the data is so important to change systems and metrics as the system is running.

Maybe in time the metrics and data will be edited to be more useful but right now it is still hard to get good data and you should be aware of how to handle this discussion when you get into it.

And the discussion is coming to a cubicle or zoom call soon.

To Tableau, or Not to Tableau

This was the question I had as I reserved a space at the event held today here in Tel Aviv. I was supposed to go last year but was out of the country at the time.Nice view we had.

Tableau is about data visualization. yes the same stuff we did 30 years ago with 1-2-3 or Excel but smooth, "simple" and flexible to work with many, many forms of data. They went public in 2013 and since have steadily grown in awareness and revenue. Tableau may not have been on everyone's radar but it is showing up more and more.

Dashboards are the low hanging fruit, embedded systems data, advanced analysis and problem-solving once you get some real data views is when the fun starts.

My impression was the event would be a local Business Partner running the event and maybe 25-50 people would show up for an afternoon event between 2 and 5 pm. Which would be great as I wanted time to talk to them about the ecosystem, project work and length and recurring revenue streams.

Oh boy was my thinking wrong!

My estimate, confirmed by the Tableau people, was over 300 people came and it looks like as many as 400 had replied they were coming. And this is in Israel where I have been at full events that barely had 250 people. Interestingly many startups here use it for client reporting and proof that their marketing or advertising or whatever the solution, is working.

If you wonder if this is something you should be looking into, if you haven't already, the answer is definitely yes. London friends they are coming to you June 5-7, register here.

The time was meant to have networking, for the 5, yes that is correct, 5 Israel Business Partners to get time with everyone. Even if I wanted to be a  BP, I can't, this year. I don't really understand the thinking, but I was encouraged to apply anyway as they review their partners every year, similar to how SalesForce does it. More on this later in this post.

After networking, we had a quick demo from the UK Sales leader Josh and his Product PreSales specialist Rafi. I say quickly because when speaking in a foreign country, native English speakers should slow down their delivery so everyone can process what is said, and also explain as they go along what they are doing to create the demo. The exuberance Rafi and Josh displayed was great, but I would have preferred a little more explanation about the way she built the views for the demo.

There was a brief slide deck from Laurie as he tried to explain that once you build a dashboard the interested parties can start to really expand on their knowledge and play with it further.

I think there are a little way to go for this part as a non-IT person does not think the same way as tech or data people.

As an example, I, like most of you reading this, understand databases and views, SQL calls and other aspects of databases but because of a lack of education, most end users do not. They can learn, and some do, but many just don't want to learn or change. A problem we all face no matter which solution we choose to use for even basic functions in business.

Thus my impression, given the demo was already seen, is someone would become the guy in the corner that is the Tableau expert rather than many users editing it. That is how I first met a few people in the Lotus Notes world in the R2 days. And I can see people with Tableau interests ending up in the same way.

Great, I love it, let's get started! Well, hold on a second there. It is not so simple.

• They have a 14 day(30?) trial period. Not long enough IMHO for your average consultant or corporate person to get their head around it.
• Very pricey options, per user ($999) to get a license to work with it but to save it on a server and not just locally you need Professional ($1,999).
• No developer license or option. Ok, so how do we get it?
• (They have student/teacher Desktop editions)

BUT, there is a "free" public edition here for Windows and Mac and you can read the details.
Ok, so it is limited, but should be enough for us to get our head around how to work with it.

Ready to get going? Try these:

Quick Start in text form for those, like myself, that prefer textual information
Training Videos for those that like visual learning
Long(1 hr) videos on how to via youtube
An amusing example of Data Visualization to help you build your first
There are also various forums and user groups so the community is engaged and even shows how to get Domino to work via REST and ODBC and DB2.

Getting back to the Business Partner discussion, it seems that the expectations are for customers to seek out Tableau partners and work with them on their projects. I can see this as companies move away from training people on new items and prefer to outsource projects. However, I also see it as an internal benefit that should be given proper training to get the most out of it, especially at these prices.

There is a fee to become a partner but once you would be down that path it would be expected.

Coming from the Lotus and IBM Collaboration space my view is tableau is seriously limiting their growth potential by not having options available for consultants or small services teams or even individuals.

Maybe Tableau really does send leads to their BPs around the world from the people that request it from their website. As an end user, this page leaves me wondering what the difference is between the 4 types of partners and why 2 of the options search by country, region, industry, and certifications while the other 2 sort only by region.

Perhaps the same confusion is what leads to the many requests to the Tableauthians (I know, somewhat Star Trek like but not sure what they call themselves) looking for consultants.

I could definitely have used this for past reporting and am looking at using it for some current projects.

How about you?

What are you doing with it?

What would you do if...

Your service provider of a collaborative nature decided to lock you out or disable your account...permanently.

What about your data, your emails, your photos, RFP's, lists or whatever you have stored there?

Someone on Twitter that I follow was told by Facebook they will be shut out of Facebook.

So what does this person potentially lose that is so important to him?

This is just some of what he stands to lose from this account which he has had for over 2 years:

* Thousands of personal correspondence messages in his inbox
* Thousands of his posts throughout Facebook
* Control of approximately 40 groups and pages with hundreds of thousands of combined members
* Membership of over 200 other groups and pages
* 30 photo albums containing hundreds of images
* Nearly 4,000 friends acquired over the years, due to his hard work

Some of this may not be of interest, but how would your customers feel if they were locked out of Gmail or any other service in the Cloud because the company went under or hey opted to lock you out.

Who owns your data?
What choice do you have?
Who do you complain to?
Is there damages to sue for?
Is a social network a data centric network?
If so, how do you protect your data and back it up?

Something to think about before you go storing your data all over the place.