Reporting and Dashboards Blog
Analytic Snapshots - the overview
If you've been watching the twitterverse or blogosphere, or just "teh internets" then you'll have seen the feature set for the Summer'08 release.
Feature list in salesforce.com Summer'08
Release notes for Salesforce.com Summer'08
The largest reporting feature is Analytic Snapshots.
Ideas I've set to "coming in summer'08"
I've set two ideas to "coming soon":
And I'm looking for more.
The first idea is about keeping copies of dashboards or reports, so that you can look at them later, and try to see what changed between then and now (or then and then, if the 2nd then is different from the first). The second is about an enhanced view on the opportunity trend report, where you'd want to see both opportunities, and products (at least product family).
Those ideas look nothing alike!
Well, those two ideas don't have a a lot in common. However, they are both about grabbing copies of the data in salesforce.com and saving it so that you have a point-in-time copy. The first imagines that working by saving copies of reports. The second wants a better version of a standard report that copies a set of fields from opportunity, and can report what those fields said every 1st of the month.
Saving the data in salesforce.com
So people want to be able to save old data. But wouldn't it be better to be able to report on the old data, rather than having to manually eyeball - compare the two reports visually?
And to keep history - shouldn't you be able to control which fields are copied? When the data is copied? You might want it every 1st of the month, every Monday, maybe every day at 10pm...
What Analytic Snapshots does
Analytic snapshots lets you take a tabular report, and set it to run on a schedule. Every time it runs, it will copy the report data into a custom object. The custom object is almost just like any other custom object - it can have lookups, it can have calculated fields, it can have default values...
We take the set of data in the report, and create a new record in the target object for each row in the report. You choose which fields are mapped where. Lookups can be created that map to other records. For instance, you can copy across the owner of records, so that you get the same visibility and security of records, or copy across a reference to the account so that you can report on the account and the set of snapshotted records.
Right now, the target custom object can't have Apex or workflow, or validation rules in the target object. But since in many cases those are used to manage manually-entered data, that shouldn't be a huge problem.
More detail next time on what you can do, and a walk-through of setting on up... apparently, blog articles are better shorter. I read that in a blog post somewhere.
Book Report - Competing on Analytics
So I've been away traveling for business and pleasure, and we've put the final touches to the Summer'08 release.
When I was traveling I read "Competing On Analytics" by Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris.
This book, (the link alongside is to Amazon - other booksellers are available and may be equally good), covers "The New Science of Winning".
It talks about how it looks when you compete with analytics, what kinds of processes should be covered with analytics, then, how to compete on analytics. It's like the authors went to business school. In fact, they even teach there.
The book isn't a cookbook for KPIs - in fact, they authors don't like that term, since it's inextricably linked in their minds to balanced scorecards and a whole management methodology that involves transformational change for your company.
When it does talk about the how of competing on analytics, it talks about how to build an analytics center of competency. How to hire, build the team, who they should report to, and what deliverables they should have.
How do you know where you are?
There's a handy set of guides to being able to score your company on how it competes. Here's my summary:
| Stage 1 | You really don't know what's going on inside or outside of your company, and if you do know in one area, it's not linked to any other areas |
| Stage 2 | You are collecting transactions, but sometimes not all the data, and you can't get a real picture of what's going on (you should automatically be here with salesforce.com if you are using it at all) |
| Stage 3 | Departments know what's happening in their department, but most people can't access other departmental information, and ther eis no global overview (you should be at least here using salesforce.com) |
| Stage 4 | Overall analytics infrastructure in place, covering the whole company, and some in-process analytics (if you have integration partners or on-demand analytics partners, you can get here) |
| Stage 5 | Your company has achieved a state of Atmabodha, and is completely self-knowing. All decisions are based on in-process analytics hinting you to perfection. Only the person that runs the SAS system need work. When somebody open the doors to your accounting group, money comes spilling out like it used to from Scrooge McDuck's house. |
One point that they do seem to miss is that most of their success stories are where people invent new metrics that more accurately reflect success as they define it. From the sabermetrics in baseball, to Harrah's looking at guests and spending, to Wal*Mart and their metrics on stocking and shelf space/time. All relied on inventing a new metric or metric system.
If you don't want to rely on a new set of metrics you invent (that might be worse than the standard set), there's a fine set at:
Conclusion:
Great for CEO's, or the person the CEO just hired to make the company run on analytics.
Not much help to implement the strategy - choosing services, approaches, metrics.
What to say when you give it to your boss "Hey - you might want to look what happens when we use all the data we're collecting"
Next time, information on summer'08. Ice lollies all round! (or Ice Pops, or Ice Blocks or Ice Poles, depending on where you are from)
