What a Shocking Bad Hat!

Nineteenth century London was famous, or perhaps notorious, for the jokey catchphrases heard in its streets. They sprang from who-knows-where and spread around the city, amongst urchins and gentry alike, in a matter of hours. Charles MacKay, in his classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, gives numerous examples, including, as you may have guessed: What a shocking bad hat! and (a particular favourite of mine) Has your mother sold her mangle? These were the viral memes of the day; a Victorian equivalent of  Rick-Rolling or videos like Hamster on a Piano. Naturally enough, they have all but vanished from use, except for one or two: the phrase to flare up, which quickly became a cliché after the Reform Act riots; and, curiously, the cry Tom and Jerry! which may have originated from a line in a  play.

A couple of things strike me about this phenomenon: the enthusiasm and speed with which a catchy phrase spread; and, the difficulty of predicting, or, on backward reflection, of understanding, which phrases would persist and why.

I am thinking about this just now, because I see a similar, if less amusing, phenomenon at work in many of my customers' businesses. There's a banking customer who discovered - the hard way - that a summer intern's programming project had become widely relied on in their foreign exchange department. It came to their attention, because it was hosted on the desktop machine of an administrative assistant. Whenever she stressed her bandwidth sending a fax or, perhaps more likely, viewing a viral video over the net, the application ground to a halt for its many users who soon complained to IT about the performance of their application. You can imagine that IT were mightily confused  - they did not know the application even existed - until they tracked down problem. It's a good example of how business solutions can spread virally and persist in your operations when found to be useful. It also shows how difficult it may be for IT to understand where such initiatives might spring from, and which of them are likely to become mission-critical.

This is an important issue for us in SQL Server, as we prepare, with our 2008 R2 release, to give business users ever more analytic power, and with that also, tools for readily sharing their analyses. We call this Self-Service Business Intelligence; but I must qualify that further. We call these techniques and technologies Managed Self-Service Business Intelligence, and the difference is significant.

With a self-service application such as the Project Gemini add-in for Excel, we give business users unprecedented computational power within their familiar tools. With such power, most anyone has the potential to build a compelling, and attractive, BI solution: a solution they will be happy to share, and that others may find answers their business needs unequivocally, as it comes directly from another business user. When those others find the solution useful, they will pass that knowledge along too.

How does these practices help the IT department? Are they not an invitation to yet more problems? Not when the full picture is seen.

First of all, self-service business intelligence unburdens IT from responding to numerous ad-hoc requests for reports and analyses. They can manage their resources more effectively, by giving users the means to help themselves with the Gemini add-in for Excel. Secondofly, managed self-service does not cut IT out of the loop: it involves them deeply, for IT provision the required services for collaboration, with Sharepoint and the Gemini Add-in for Sharepoint. IT will also still provide much of the data for analysis, especially the authoritative master data (with SQL Server Master Data Services) or the traditionally warehoused historical data of the enterprise at any scale (with Project Madison.)

By managing the infrastructure for collaboration, IT have unique oversight of, and insight to, the sharing and spreading of successful solutions. Microsoft will provide the tools for administrators to discover which solutions are flaring up. When IT discover a new application growing to unexpected responsibility beyond its original desktop environment, they can ask, and act on, the equivalent of another viral Victorian catch-phrase: Does your mother know you're out?

Donald Farmer
twitter: @donalddotfarmer