Bad Incentives

Effective performance management requires lining up incentives with desired outcomes. In practice, this is impossible — the best you can do is pick your problems. Today’s example, from the New York Times, “Paying Doctors to Ignore Patients“: “…the best way for a doctor to make money in his practice is not to spend time with patients but to use equipment as much as possible. That means moving the maximum number... [Read More...]

Risky Performance?

Just like your mutual fund portfolio, there’s no disassociating performance and risk — time and time again, organizations merrily optimizing their business bite the dust because of “unforeseen circumstances” — i.e. badly-managed risk and compliance. Today’s example: IT administrator Terry Childs has managed to lock everybody else out of San Francisco’s wide-area network, containing the city’s “emails,... [Read More...]

Public Sector BI Incompatible with “Leaps of Faith”?

A couple of recent Boston globe articles talk about IBM/Cognos returning $13m because of bidding irregularities and questions over conflict of interest. I’ve been competing with Cognos for over 15 years, and I consider them a very ethical organization. The big problem seems to be simply that state was very keen to implement performance management, and so missed a few steps in the process. State senator Salvatore F. DiMasi is apparently a fan... [Read More...]

Time for Voice of the Customer?

Fern Halper of Hurwitz recently published a blog entry on some BI survey results, showing that: Perhaps surprisingly, over 30% were already using text analytics The highest usages were for “voice of customer” and “competitive intelligence”   Also of interest was the ranking of BI technologies in order of importance — Query and Reporting 1st, OLAP Data Cubes last. I believe there’s an opportunity there,... [Read More...]