Welcome to the Dashboard Effect podcast. I'm Brick Thompson.
Caleb Ochs:I'm Caleb Ochs.
Brick Thompson:Hi Caleb. Did you have something you want to say?
Caleb Ochs:About the resources on our website? Check it out- we have good stuff. White Papers, downloads, you can see our pictures. We're on there. You can find out what our hobbies are. Just check it out.
Brick Thompson:Katie, our marketing manager, appreciates that. Alright, so what are we talking about in this episode?
Caleb Ochs:Different ways that you can show value or like a return on your investment you put into data initiative, or project or whatever it may be, right?
Brick Thompson:So you're gonna spend money, either with outside resources or hiring staff. You got software costs, you got platform costs, you need to make sure Well, actually, you probably don't go into it unless you have an idea about how you're going to derive value from that. But how do you actually show that value?
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, right. It's good. It's a good question. And actually, from our experience, I'm not so sure that people actually do go into it thinking(about ROI) They might have- typically what we see if somebody is like, I have this specific problem that I think this is the solution for so but that's really, as far as it goes. It's not like alright, what if I solve that, then I get this bigger? Yeah, it's like there's some value type. They don't go that far. Right. That's interesting. Yeah. But in some cases, yeah, in some cases. But I think, you know, today, maybe we can talk about some of the ways that we would do it, and some of the common ways, and maybe some interesting ways to think about finding that value or kind of connecting the dots area.
Brick Thompson:I mean, one of the obvious ones is just saving in labor time. So when you automate a data pipeline to pull data out of a transactional system and put it into a data lake, so it's accessible to report writers or analysts, you can pretty easily calculate, what does that saving me in terms of labor costs. I remember a client you and I went two years ago, our first meeting on site, we were interviewing their team was pretty big team, we probably interviewed 1520 people is our call, they had 13, Excel analysts whose jobs it was to run SQL queries, get CSVs load data into Excel munge it so it fit into whatever reports they were using, or producing on a regular basis. It was very much like I mean, it wasn't quite the equivalent of working on an assembly line putting caps on a toothpaste tube, but almost. And that's expensive. And it's error prone. And it's boring. Yeah. And so, but but if you're looking for value, just in dollars and cents, you can just look at the time there if it's once you've built that, and you have that automated system running. I mean, it's not quite free, but almost. Yeah, you don't have labor costs.
Caleb Ochs:That is a that's kind of a low hanging fruit, one that you can, you can kind of calculate pretty quick. It's interesting, though, sometimes people don't like that one. Because then they're like, Well, what are those people do then? Like, yeah, I'd fire somebody and nobody likes to do that. But it's, you know, that's just the truth. Yeah. So that's right. And it's better, it's better for you anyway.
Brick Thompson:Well, and you know, hopefully, you don't have to fire people. But I mean, if you do, yeah, if you're a commercial enterprise, okay. But likely, there's other work, there's probably more demand for analyst work and reporting and so on, then the company is able to do now you can take that, that sort of rote type of repetitive work, offload that to an automated system and have this analyst doing stuff that's a lot higher value.
Caleb Ochs:Actually analyze stuff. Right? I used to be that person. That was kind of a joke that we made a lot. Like our little community of analysts inside this giant company. We're like, that's my title. But all I do is go to SAP download a file, and then I put it into a pivot table, and I send it to a bunch of people. I'm not looking at the data at all. I have no idea what's going on.
Brick Thompson:There's a Dilbert comic in there somewhere.
Caleb Ochs:Oh for sure. So I mean, definitely, you get a chance to upskill right? Yeah, um, I remember when we rolled out click at that job. I use the scripting engine and click and I basically automated a lot of stuff, I still had to go download the data from SAP, but then my script did all the munching of it and, and putting it together and getting it into a good format to send and it took about an hour normally took me like all morning, and then
Brick Thompson:I got to do other things. Yeah. And it's good. So along the same lines is if you can automate through good reporting and access to the data, make decision making easier and faster, so that decision makers, managers or whoever are able to just quit Li Si. Alright, there's the answer that before I would have had to go search for, find the spreadsheet, ask the analysts to update the spreadsheet, do some my own calculations, get to my answer. If you design the reports well, you should be able to get them to a point where that's almost automated, where they're looking at it, trying to figure out. I don't know what the right example is, but who do I need to call today about subpar performance? Boom, it's just right there. That type of thing? And that's even more expensive labor.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, I mean, another one that comes to mind for me is, is doing something that you couldn't do before, right? Like sudden new analysis, or a new way of looking at your data that you just wasn't possible before? Right? Maybe
Brick Thompson:you had a couple of data sources that were in because silos. They didn't have relationships between them. Now you do have that? Now you can get some analysis right. Now, right? That's good.
Caleb Ochs:That's an easy one. Well... not easy.
Brick Thompson:But maybe attaching a number to that it's not as easy. I'll tell him. That's true. I mean, I can think of one example of attaching a number one of my favorites was a company that had a goal of increasing utilization, and some of their employees, how much of the employee's time was billable to clients, and they figured out I can't remember the exact number. So I'm gonna make them have it figured out that for each percentage point increase in utilization, so go from 60% to 61%, that would get you a million dollars to the bottom line, making the numbers up. But it was really significant. And I remember they had this idea that that would be the case, they had done the work. They worked with us to get the data gathered, modelled to report so that managers could then Manage utilization better. And in fact, they did move the needle. And I think the savings were something like $4 million to the bottom line for a project that cost a tiny fraction of that. And that project just needed to be done that once it was going to keep delivering that ROI. So love that one, because you can you can see the value really quickly. And
Caleb Ochs:I think what they did was that was so important there and that I wish more people would do was they spent the time to say, Okay, if we can increase utilization by a percent, this is what it means. So our bottom line like, that is like so valuable of an exercise, because if they found like, Oh, it doesn't actually do anything, then don't do the project that right. But you know, in most, especially in that case, it's like, it's a big deal. So it was a no brainer to go ahead and do this thing. Yeah, just gives you a memory makes makes that decision easier. Yeah, you make a better decision. If you have that.
Brick Thompson:Do you think there's cases just occurred to me that there's cases where giving easy access to lots of data and reporting and whatever reports you want could lead to inefficiency, because you're chasing stuff? That doesn't matter? As you were saying that and maybe think yeah, I guess maybe there is some risk there? Definitely.
Caleb Ochs:Oh, yeah. I mean, I think I think that just having a bunch of reports, is not good. Like that doesn't that doesn't, by default mean that you're doing great at data, BI and analytics, right? Because that can it can actually cause more harm than good. If you've got stuff that doesn't matter. There's not focusing on this little area that maybe doesn't look as good as it did last week may not actually have a return of you actually focusing on it. Right. Yeah, you're scratching an itch, but might be better to focus somewhere else. Right. Yeah, that's, I think that's really important. I don't think that's talked about enough.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, that's interesting. It makes me think of, well, we should do, I think we are going to do an episode on how to keep report simple. For that very same reason. It's tempting to throw everything in the kitchen sink into a report because of the cool visualizations and your access to data that you never had. But you can actually start actually not just getting diminishing returns, but actually working against yourself.
Caleb Ochs:Exactly. Right. Right. It's all it's all power of simplicity type thing. Yeah.
Brick Thompson:What other ways could you show ROI?
Caleb Ochs:Accuracy? You know, I think, still hard, it's still a hard one to kind of go back to$1 value. Because at that point, like, if you're saying I now we have accurate data, and we didn't before, you really have to calculate the cost of making the wrong decision, right? Like, if we did this was wrong. And if we made the wrong decision, then that cost is x. That's kind of difficult to get to at least that's the only way I can think of really tying that one back. So yeah, I guess I guess the simpler ones we've covered, and he gets kind of more and more complex, but I think the dollar amounts get greater and greater than or complicated that the calculation really becomes right.
Brick Thompson:I was thinking of just the dashboard effect of, you know, giving people their numbers given telling them what the score is, and the game that they're playing at work, and how that can impact performance. People want to do a good job, you tell them what the score is what the goal is, they'll often move the needle towards that, in order to show the ROI there, you would have had to measure it before you put the scoreboard up, and then measure it after. But you could certainly do that. We've seen that over and over and over sometimes you don't really even need to measure the dollars exactly, because it's so obviously overwhelmingly valuable. But that's, that's another big one.
Caleb Ochs:A really good point. Where are we at before we did this? And now where are we at after we did this? And you can I think most of the time, you can attribute a decent some portion of it, you know, because there's so many things that are going on in your business. Sure, you may increase your utilization by 5%. But maybe we just hired much better text or you laid off or got rid of all the really bad ones or better training or whatever, right? It's a bunch of thing that's could have affected that. But you know, I think there's always a piece of that that should be attributed to data. I
Brick Thompson:remember a decade ago, and this business, maybe not quite that much, but many years ago, when there were very few of us in a smaller building. And we were focusing on our engineers utilization on projects. And we build a scoreboard and there were a lot of people that had yellows, and even some reds on it one or two greens. And people looked at that some people didn't like that, actually, or at least expressed, they didn't. There's one person in particular, I can think of who stress not liking it, and then very immediately went to like number one or two. But we saw that shift from yellow to green. Quickly. And I think it was I mean, there was other stuff we were doing. Were focusing on it. But I think giving people the score allows them the autonomy to make those corrections.
Caleb Ochs:Exactly.
Brick Thompson:All right. What else?
Caleb Ochs:You got anything else?
Brick Thompson:I don't think so. I mean, I can keep thinking of use cases. But I think those are the general ones. I guess I would end by saying, you know, if you really need to, if you really want to show ROI by numbers, you need to measure before and after. And very often, I think, because it seems so obvious to people that this is going to be valuable. They don't really bother to measure before, or it seems hard to measure it before. So they don't have the data now. I think even making assumptions about it, and just take your best guess rough guess, how was it and then look at it afterwards. That will help you to be able to show that yes, it was a good investment. Good ROI.
Caleb Ochs:It helps you in a lot of ways, right? It helps you kind of stick with it too. Because you've got to really a goal in mind more than just I want a new report.
Brick Thompson:Right. All right. All right. Thanks.