In this series of blog posts we are going to outline why Meta5 is good for IT. If you have questions or comments? Please leave them below. We will address them as the blog series evolves.

Over the last 30 years there has been a constant tension between Business and IT. It was certainly understandable 30 years ago. Computers were very expensive. IBM Mainframes cost millions of dollars. Disk drive space cost in excess of USD100,000 per GB on a mainframe. You can understand that the business people wanted to make sure that these very expensive pieces of equipment were being put to the best use possible.

Further, in those days, the methodologies and practices of building computer systems were in their early stages of maturity. Project failure rates were high and business people were very concerned they were getting “value for money”. IT history is littered with the stories of grand projects that failed to deliver costing the companies that undertook them billions. Not the least of which are some of the famous projects IBM undertook in the 80s and early 90s.

So when a product like Meta5 unleashed the power of the business users to “do their own thing” it was no surprise that this was not widely appreciated by IT. In the 80s many companies bought the Meta5 product from the then very small vendor, Metaphor Computer Systems, via the business community, despite the protests of the IT department. IT said that it was “not standard” and “Placed too much control with the business! Who knows what mistakes they might make!”

It was not until 1991 when IBM purchased Metaphor Computer Systems and committed to supporting the Meta5 product that the objections of IT were reduced. If IBM put it’s stamp of approval on Meta5 it must be ok? Right?

2014 is very different to 1991. In the days of “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) IT have had to accept that business people need to use the tools they are familiar with. The tools that deliver the greatest value. IT has accepted that forcing people to use the “one standard sized tool that fits all” does not work any longer.

The best example of a widely used tool that IT has tried, and failed, to stop people from using in the Business Intelligence area is Excel. Excel is still the most popular desktop tool for performing data analysis. It is still widely used for data analysis in the Business Intelligence area even though IT and vendors have tried to get people to switch to other tools.

From the days where IT was negative towards Meta5 because:

1. It is not standard
2. It looks different
3. It replicates some functionality where we have other standard tools

 

Meta5 is now a tool that is good for IT. Indeed, it stands to be one of the most IT friendly tools available today.

Here are our summary 5 reasons Meta5 is good for IT today. We will produce a more details blog entry on each of these topic.
1. Excel Integration

The number one reason Meta5 is good for IT today is our new Excel integration. Meta5 can integrate data from data warehouses and external data sources into Excel better than Microsoft can.

With our unique capsule technology to reliably run large numbers of reports and queries that can produce large numbers of Excel workbooks we are uniquely capable of producing such products as excel based Briefing Books.

Our excel integration is based on our iExcel tool that allows us a programmatic interface to Excel while embedding that programmatic interface into a set of parameter panels that are easy to use and understand by any person who is familiar with Excel.

The interface with Excel is as follows. You can see that it is parameter driven.

You can read more about our Excel Integration on this link.

2. Able to deal with the data explosion of “Big Data”

One of the issues that is facing IT today is the explosion of data sources that can collectively be known as “Big Data”. IT is having a hard enough time of it keeping up with all the internal data sources and the high priority external data sources. Getting these all cleaned up and put into the data warehouse is an eternal backlog that “takes too long and costs too much”.

Meta5 is the perfect tool to help IT gain a greater level of control over the explosion of data sources. Because both IT and Business can create, read and understand “Capsules” it is possible for IT to perform application development to their “standards” and to hand the application off to the Business to run and even perform some maintenance on.

IT does not have to get involved with every small change as a “change request” that has to go through the approved processes. If you, the Power Data Analyst, want some changes to a set of capsules that were developed by IT? You can go ahead and do it on your own responsibility.

Because Meta5 is a tool that enables extensions and support to be performed by Business Users it can lighten the load on IT by sharing some of that load with the Business Users. In an age where the number of data sources available to businesses to possibly integrate into their business processes? Meta5 is as IT friendly as it gets in being able to access, analyze, understand and assess the real value of these data sources.

You can read more about our view of Meta5 in the “more data” environment on this link.

3. Perfectly suited to the new “Agile” methodology paradigm being adopted by IT.

A lot of IT shops are now moving to a development methodology called “Agile”. You may hear IT people talking about this. Meta5 has been “more agile than Agile” for decades now. But it was not widely known by IT. IT has preferred to use monolithic development methodologies that take a great deal of time between releases.

Our industry is littered with stories of “mega projects” that ran for years, consumed millions of dollars, and failed to live up to expectations.

Meta5 was designed from the ground up to support rapid application development using iterative cycles and reusing the experience just gained. These are all aspects of “Agile” development that IT people are just now starting to wake up to.

So if your IT staff are suddenly talking about “we are moving to Agile for supporting your Business Intelligence demands”? Please let them know that Meta5 is “more agile than “Agile”.”

You can read more about our view of Meta5 in the “Agile” environment on this link.

4. Enable IT to perform prototyping and development in partnership with the business.

Not so long ago we had an opportunity to design and build an enterprise data warehouse for a multi-billion dollar company that had a very difficult to deal with core operational system. So we put one of our best on to the job.

The company had failed three times previously and so demanded our consultant produce a prototype of the proposed data warehouse and prove to them that we could do the job before allocating the primary budget.

Over the first few weeks we interviewed about 15 senior staff members. In the 3^rd week our consultant was called into the CEOs office to address “complaints” by the senior staff.

CEO: “My staff tell me they are not happy. You are not asking them the questions they expect to be asked.”

Meta5: “And may I ask what questions they expect to be asked?”

CEO: “Sure, they expect you to be asking what reports they need to do their work. They expect you to be asking them what data is on those reports. They expect you to be creating mock reports of how you can do that all better. That sort of thing.”

Meta5: “And may I ask if this sort of approach was taken by the people in the three previous projects that have failed?”

CEO: “Now that you ask that question. Yes. That approach was taken.”

Meta5: “The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result. If we do the same things again we will get the same result.”

CEO: “That stands to reason. So what do you recommend?”

Meta5: “You hired us because we are the best at what we do. We do things differently because we have learned our lessons from hard won experience.

We ask different questions because we need to find out what your business is really about, not what reporting about your business is about. When we know what your business is really about and where you want to get to? We can build you a prototype to show you how to get there.

Building reporting systems is looking backward. Building business intelligence systems is about looking forward. These are two very different things. This is why we do things differently.”

CEO: “Ok. That makes sense to me. You have 5 more weeks to show us this prototype you are planning to build.”

Needless to say that the prototype wowed the senior management team that had just 6 weeks earlier had been so skeptical they asked their CEO to personally grill our consultant!

Meta5 is a unique tool in that it enables IT, or external consultants like Meta5, to rapidly build prototypes with the most complex of data and to show those prototypes to the business so they can gain a better understanding of what is coming.

Today, with our new Excel integration our ability to build prototypes that produce the results into Excel has greatly improved ITs ability to sit down with the business users and show them exactly what we are thinking about when we are developing innovative applications that can take their business forward.

5. THAT NUMBER IS WRONG!!

If you are in IT then you know that when a light on a dashboard turns red or some report indicates that “something is wrong around here” the manager responsible always starts the inquire with “that number is wrong!!” This claim is always followed by “How did you guys in IT calculate that number?”

This is followed by IT needing to review the source data, review the staging area, review the ETL to see what was done between the staging area and the data warehouse. Review the calculations that might have been performed inside the query tools. And finally report back on exactly where the calculated field came from, how the data might have been transformed and how the field was calculated. This all takes time.

One of the key philosophies of Meta5 is to be “self documenting” in such a way that the business people can read the capsules that are built. Whether capsules are built by a Power Data Analyst or by IT, any Power Data Analyst, or even just a regular user of Meta5, can read the capsules and understand how fields were calculated.

Indeed, I am reminded of a story of a prospect that piloted our Meta5 but went ahead with another vendor. They were a bank. During the pilot we loaded up data in to a prototype data warehouse. We did nothing to the data other than to put it in to star schemas so Meta5 could access it more effectively.

One day an Actuary from the bank came to us and said that we must have made a mistake in loading the data because from her use of Meta5 she felt that it seemed to indicate that the bank was not operating inside the provisions of capital adequacy set by the regulating body. Because this was a pilot and this lady was very new and working from the manuals any sort of mistake could have been possible. We checked her work. Together we came to the conclusion that the bank was in violation of it’s capital adequacy requirements.

The punch line is that this bank had a system in place that was reporting to senior management that they were meeting their capital adequacy requirements. This system was immediately decommissioned and those responsible were soon looking for new jobs. The system that had been calculating capital adequacy ratios had some bugs in it that were never found…until the self documenting, fully transparent, visual development environment of Meta5 was used to replicate the calculations and they were found to be faulty.

If that is not great value for IT! I do not know what is.

Summary

In this article we have presented 5 reasons why Meta5 is good for IT. We hope you will pass this along to your IT staff to let them know that Meta5 is not only good for business people. It is good for IT people too!

Meta5: The better way

Thank you for your time and attention.