Using purpose to determine need

This is a critique towards Business Users.

Business users, when involved in Business Intelligence projects, know exactly what they would like to have. Admittedly, some of them don’t at first, but with the assistance of any helpful BI-consultant, some good samples and, of course, a huge stack of pre-project existing reports, dashboards and additional databases, they manage to express their needs pretty well.

“I need a marketing dashboard which will show me the evolution of our product portfolio and highlight regional, branch, brand and team differences”

“I need a set of standard reports to figure out how the workshops our doing. Which models are causing most issues, which work orders seem to be taking much more time than planned & of course I would like to be able to benchmark different teams, shifts and people against each other, taking into account their experience in the topic.”

or

“I would like to know where citizens point & click on our website and weather they always find the right page fast enough. Furthermore I would like to keep tabs on the link between our city communication (paper, emailing, events, city hall posters, publications & internal communication) to find out if we are communicating effectively”

Even though these statements seem ample for an experienced Business Intelligence team to start working on, they all share a common flaw, which makes it almost impossible for anyone other than the user, and most of the time even the user himself to get the right stuff delivered.

The three statements all have the same thing in common: every expression is need based. To understand what you need and to be able to communicate this effectively is a rare skill indeed. Yet, if we would simply change the wording of the these requests and use a purpose based statement, it would be much easier to build a dialogue about what is required, and adjust accordingly.

Before I go deeper into why this model would work, let me first work on changing the above statements from need-based to purpose-based.

Say “To be able to understand which campaigns we need to focus on, and to follow up on target market effect, I need an overview of our product portfolio which allows me to highlight regional, branch, brand and team differences”
instead of saying “I need a marketing dashboard which will show me the evolution of our product portfolio and highlight regional, branch, brand and team differences”

Say “In order to manage work, and to be able to quickly identify potential issues and effectively communicate these issues towards line-managers, I’d need a set of reports which can easily list issues and compare jobs, based on teams, shifts and people against each other, taking into account their experience in the topic.”
instead of “I need a set of standard reports to figure out how the workshops our doing. Which models are causing most issues, which work orders seem to be taking much more time than planned & of course I would like to be able to benchmark different teams, shifts and people against each other, taking into account their experience in the topic.”

Say “To allow our teams to adapt communication when needed, I would like to have a better insight in how our citizens search for inormation on the main website, and which things they download and click, in what order.”

instead of “I would like to know where citizens point & click on our website and weather they always find the right page fast enough. Furthermore I would like to keep tabs on the link between our city communication (paper, emailing, events, city hall posters, publications & internal communication) to find out if we are communicating effectively”

Being knowledgable about your purpose is a major part of being Business Aware. Using Purpose to define need will in turn help you focus efforts when aiming for Business Awareness Bliss