Evolution and Challenge in Business Intelligence

Fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with Charles Caldwell, VP of Product, Logi Analytics

There were some great pithy lines and some super sensible insights.

Listen to the full conversation on the Podcast

We talked about:

Product Management

A career in Product Management

Why did product management became his thing? Turns out he had always been interested in trying to find ways to make things better for people from being a young kid but didn’t know what that was a job.

What is Product Management?

• Balance between the perfect solution and the doable.

“Closest fit to the role of scapegoat I’ve ever seen.”

Charles Caldwell – Logi Analytics

Key Challenges in Product Management

• You cannot hire and fire but have to influence – a liberating and intellectual challenge.
• Underestimating the amount of influencing you have to do to be successful.

“Everybody doesn’t like the thing for a different reason. If everyone didn’t like something for the same reason, it would be easy.”

Charles Caldwell – Logi Analytics

What Makes a Good Product Person?

• Engineering background is a good signal for a product person. You need to be curious.
• You need to be intelligent, both in terms of IQ and EQ. Curiosity and empathy

Business Intelligence

What are the biggest challenges in Business Intelligence (BI)?

Data.

Design, cultural, technical and process challenges have always been an issue.

Mostly around data. 

On data

Our ability to store and maintain data in a useful way is very hard. All starts with the quality of the data. Data kept for some purposes is simply not fit for other purposes. Data volume increases faster than software gets better.

On culture, people and management

Numeracy is a huge challenge from a cultural perspective.

Data literacy, confirmation bias and more are huge challenges.

1950s management thinking was that bringing all the data together was the solution. Of course it wasn’t.

Then the internet showed that disparate sets of data could be much more powerful.

On data – again

Today, data is much more available, there is tons more. It’s hard to know what to do with it.

“For data to be useful, it has to have context, a hypothesis associated with it that is valuable to the business.”

Charles Caldwell – Logi Analytics

There are two types of problems

• Simple/solved – we know what do – build a bridge for example.
• Wicked problems – we don’t know what to do and we have to work out how to find a solution.

Data can help solve the wicked problems.

On ISVs

ISVs are way out there in terms of developing new ideas, adopting new ways of working, developing solutions to problems. Best people to work with.

Working with ISVs forces Logi Analytics to solve new and hard problems.

We, Logi Analytics, sell a complex set of features and solutions that help ISVs get analytic solutions to the market quickly. We try to help them building products that generate data your customers want without breaking your product roadmap.

“One of the biggest opportunities in application development is hacking the data literacy of your customers and their cognition. Solve the problem that augments the person.”

Charles Caldwell – Logi Analytics

For ISVs, understanding the data needs and data literacy of customers, is a fundamental part of good product management. Your applications have to deliver your customers the right data, not all the data, to the right people in the organization. Some of the best applications companies not only understand the data their customers need, they also understand that by actively helping them to increase the data literacy of their orgs, their applications become more embedded in those businesses.

How to understand the data literacy of your customers is one of the breakout conversation topics for BoS Conf Online Fall, 27-29 September. More…