We've moved from a world of data scarcity to nearly unlimited accessibility and availability of information. Systems and technology have rapidly advanced as well, but firms are still seeing mixed results. This presentation discusses why we need to focus on better questioning and actionability as the core of an information strategy.

1. Using Powerful Questions to Drive Your
Information Strategy
May 29, 2015
Rob Saker
Chief Data Officer

2. Drought
2
A lack of information will lead to
the death of your organization.

3. Flood
3
Too much unfocused data can
have a similar result.

4. 4
How do you provide
focus to your
information needs?
When focused, water has the power to
cut through steel
Pictured at right is a 5-axis water jet cutting head that
pressurizes water to up to 100,000 PSI.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_jet_cutter

5. Why the focus on questioning?
5
The signs that led to a focus on enquiry
23,000. Number of syndicated
reports and variations that were
proliferated at large CPG
manufacturer.
Lack of clarity. “Capture everything”
leading to debates about source instead of
relevance.
Systems, maintenance and acquisition.
Increase in data leading to growth in costs.
Rapid expansion in tools to
exploit information. HANA,
R, Hadoop, NoSQL, Logical
data warehouses, in-
memory appliances.
70. Number of distinct data
sources incorporated into
recent analytic model.
Desire to transform
business models.
Companies needing to
transform, but being
constrained by data and
technical debt.
We have made the shift from scarcity to abundance of information,
without corresponding progression in our design approach.

6. 6
Your great subtitle in this line
“What unique resource strengths does St.
Petersburg have over every other city in the
world?”
Russian Offshore Technology Firm

7. Brewer Metric Standardization
7
EBIDTA
Net
Producer
Revenue
Cost of
Sales
COS
Variable
Freight
& Fuel
COS
Fixed1,200Team identified, rationalized, and standardized
metrics down to a list of 1,200 from brewery
operations to consumer insights.
Metrics
7 Identified 7 key performance indicators that we
believe we need to control to drive the strategic
objectives.
Topline KPIs
1.5 Amount of time it spent beginning to end to drive
adoption of the idea, not including metric
standardization.
Years
Marketing
Spend
SG&A
National
Spend
Local
Spend

8. CROSSMARK IS THE SMARTER WAY
TO FASTER GROWTH.
Crossmark sits in a unique
position in the market with direct
engagement across
manufacturers, retailers and
consumers.
Consumers
Retailers Manufacturers
• Digital, social, experiential, affinity, panel,
consumer incentives
• Hundreds of thousands of direct engagements
• Millions of loyalty/affinity card members
Helping manufacturers activate their
products with retailers and
consumers.
• Planning, forecasts, sales to
retailer, promotion, digital
Helping retailers manage their
store activities.
• POS, assortment, planograms,
beacons, loyalty, digital.
• Billions of direct observation
data points at retail per year
Manufacturer Data
Consumer Data
Retailer Data

9. 9
“The people who don’t ask
questions remain clueless
their whole lives.”
- Neil deGrasse Tyson

10. Questioning and Our Brain
10
Divergent Thinking
Taps into the right hemisphere of the
brain that drives random pattern
association.
Political Bias
When faced with a difficult
mathematical question, people revert
to their political bias.
Fight Against Intuition
Cognitive scientists have published
studies showing that people are
unwilling to accept controversial ideas
that contradict their previous intuition.
4 year olds
They ask 390 questions a day, but that
will be the high point in their lives.

11. Questioning is an Unlearned Behavior
11
Our education processes discourage inquiry.
• Questioning isn’t taught in school
• We reward students on developing “expertise,” which we define as memorization of
facts.
• We hire people with advanced degrees who are “experts” in their field to drive our
critical projects.
Companies invest in candidates with advanced degrees and expertise. An expert is
someone who has mastered a subject and therefore doesn’t need to ask questions.

12. Consulting & Development Methodologies
Discourage Questioning
12
Business Process
How will we integrate?
How will we do our
work?
Vision
Where do we want to
compete?
Measurement
Lorem ipsum dolor sit
amet, consectetuer
adipiscing elit
Implementation
Strategy
How will we
differentiate ourselves?
Development

13. Organizational Inertia
13
99%
Where your business
lives day-to-day
Organization behaviour is a real world example of regression to the mean.
Existential
threat
Ground
breaking
innovation

14. 14
What is the cost of poor
questioning?

15. Increased Time to Value
15
Complexity increases the duration of every task
Month 1 Month 2 Month 3
Month 1 Month 2 Month 3 Month 4 Month 5 Month 7 Month 8
~7 month project
Complex approach 6 Weeks
Define
4 weeks
Develop
2 days data
3 weeks
Test
3-4 weeks
Rework
2 weeks
Tune
2 weeks
Backload
4 weeks
Volume Test
2-3 weeks
Report
2 weeks
Implement
Focused approach ~3 month project
4 weeks
Define
Design
Data modelling
Data acquisition
4 weeks
Develop/Test/Rework
ETL development
Data replication
Database development
Unit testing, integrated testing
Statistical analysis modeling
Tune
Index build and
rebuild
Aggregation and
embedded
calculation
optimization
Testing and tuning
2 weeks
Report development
Volume Test
Data refresh
End user acceptance
1-2 weeks
Implement
Physical model
replication
Testing
Backload
No backload, as
all dev and
testing against
full data
volumes

16. Increased Ongoing Total Cost of Ownership
16
Maintaining data complexity reduces operational efficiency
Data systems
Additional server &
storage costs
Additional Support
Resources
Maintenance of
additional indexes &
aggregates
Maintenance of
additional ETLs
Software costs as
you upgrade to
faster CPU’s
Additional costs associated
with growth of data, its
complexity and the
compounding nature of
such issues
Loss of business
productivity
Inefficiency
costs
+
+
+
+
+
+
Over-buying data
+

17. Complexity Decreases
Productivity
17
In absence of precision firms capture everything
Requiring users to enter extra data greatly
decreases productivity and requires greater
change management to enable.

18. 18
Nest
Why can’t the
“unloved objects” in
homes be smarter?
Box.com
Why can’t I access my
files anywhere?
Amazon
How do we remove
friction in the path to
purchase?
Waze
How can we
optimize travel
through real-time
traffic information?
Mint.com
How can we simplify
and enrich personal
finance?
Uber
More tightly manage
supply and demand
between drivers and
riders.
Missed Opportunity Costs Dwarf Productivity Losses

19. In an interview with Fortune, Jeff Bezos indicated that
meetings with his senior executive team at Amazon begin with
reading 6 page memos for up to 30 minutes. Participants
spend this time absorbing every word.
“They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences.
There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured
memo and not have clear thinking.”

20. On the Kindle
“Books, in my view, are too expensive. Thirty dollars for a book is too expensive. If I'm only
competing against other $30 books, then you don’t get there. If you realize that you’re really
competing against Candy Crush and everything else, then you start to say, “Gosh, maybe we
should really work on reducing friction on long-form reading." That’s what Kindle has been
about from the very beginning.”
• Amazon Prime
• 1-click ordering
• Pro-active shipping before items are
ordered
• Dash buttons
• Same day delivery
• Two hour delivery
• Drone delivery
“How do we remove friction in the path to purchase?”
15,000% TSR
Total shareholder returns
since 1997 IPO.
$90 Billion
Total sales in 2014.
426
Number of items sold per
second on 2013 Cyber
Monday

21. 21
“Effective leaders ask questions
instead of giving orders.”
- Dale Carnegie, “How to Win Friends and Influence
People”

22. THIS GENERATES
ANSWERS AND
DRIVE BUSINESS
DECISIONS.
THIS GENERATES
ANSWERS AND
DRIVE BUSINESS
DECISIONS.
22

23. What is a powerful question?
23
They clearly define the issue
Powerful questions clearly articulate the problem. They do not attempt to solve multiple unknowns simultaneously.
They drive outcomes
Powerful questions drive decisions and outcomes. A question without an outcome is trivia.
Tips for developing effective and objective questions.
They are simple
Complex language and terminology is used to mask a lack of understanding. Good questions are simple and spoken in a
language everyone can understand.
They are objective
They do not impose a bias on the inquiry process.

24. Inquiry Process
24
Diverge
Used to explore possibilities outside of
the initial frame.
Strategic Framing
Identifying the key problem or
opportunity facing the business.
Factual/Evaluative
Questions whose results can be
directly measured.
Converge
Used to constrain questions after
divergence to those which best align
with the business objective.
Create Choices Make Choices

25. “What business am I in? Or, what business should I be in tomorrow?”
Framing Questions
25
These questions should be tied to your overall corporate strategy.
• You must know who your customer is and their value to you.
• A detailed assessment of the value you provide to them.
• What business problem are we trying to solve?
Useful Types of Data
• CRM data, with enrichment to enable classification
• Financial data
• Sales data, with enrichment to enable classification

26. Divergent Questions
26
Divergent questions explore additional possibilities to ensure we have appropriate
framed the question and explored adjacent possibilities.
• Sales of soda vs. “share of stomach” ensures that beverage firms don’t become
narrowly focused.
Additional Types of Data
• Industry sales
• PESTLE trends (Competitive, Economic, Political, Legal/Regulatory, Technological,
Sociocultural)
“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.”
- Henry Ford

27. Convergent Questions
27
Convergent questions focus and prioritize those which are most likely to have a
significant impact.
• Quantify by the size of impact and probability and prioritize
Additional Types of Data
• Evaluative analysis for sizing and probability

28. Factual Questions
28
Factual questions are those that have a direct answer.
• Processes must be designed at the beginning to measure the answer to these
questions.
Additional Types of Data
• Observation data

29. Question Inventory Matrix
29
Problem/
Hypothesis/
Question
Possible Driver
or Cause
Analysis/Tool/
Model
Data (What data
set(s) best explains
it?)
Timing/Avai
lability
Responsible
(Synthesizes
Analysis)
Accountable
(Decides)
Decision to
Drive
Deadli
ne
What is the
incrementality of
a new product
launch?
(EXAMPLE)
Media
awareness
Marketing Mix Sales, Distribution,
Media Actuals
2 months
after event
Marketing
Analysts
Brand Director Do we need
to change
our
investments
in the new
product?
Should we
launch?
1/31/2
015
Distribution Distribution
incrementality
analysis
Nielsen, POS, Manu
Sales to Retailer (STR)
Week after
event
Sales Analyst Sales
Director
Should we
launch the
product?
Distribution
execution &
effectiveness
Store audits, Nielsen,
POS
Week after
event
Sales Analyst Distribution
Manager
Where
should we
focus our
distribution
efforts?

30. Conceptual Enterprise Business Matrix
30
Point of
Sale
Wholesale
Data
Distribution
Data
Media
Planning Data
Promotional
Spend
Store Audit
Data
Marketing Mix
Analysis Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Distribution
Incrementality Yes Yes Yes No No No
Distribution
execution Yes Yes Yes No No Yes
Analysis 4 Yes No Yes No No No
Analysis 5 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Analysis 6 No Yes No No No Yes
Capture, generate or
acquire data once in a way
that satisfies across all
questions.

31. Conceptual Enterprise Business Matrix
31
Point of
Sale
Wholesale
Data
Distribution
Data
Media
Planning Data
Promotional
Spend
Store Audit
Data
Marketing Mix
Analysis Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Distribution
Incrementality Yes Yes Yes No No No
Distribution
execution Yes Yes Yes No No Yes
Analysis 4 Yes No Yes No No No
Analysis 5 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Analysis 6 No Yes No No No Yes
Model in a way that integrates data
once for use across multiple questions.

32. Validation Process
32
Measuring and analyzing the results are fundamental to improving an
organization over time.
Repeat Measurement
Continue measuring results.
Measure
Did the result match expectations?
Repeat
Continue executing against
your hypothesis to capture a
representative sample of data.
Execute
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetur adipiscing elit sed
do eiusmod aliqua.
Analyze
START
Measure results
Execute against hypothesis
Execute against hypothesis
Measure results

33. 33
Key Takeaways
Focus on Questions that Drive Objectives
Remember that actionability is the key test of a powerful question.
Frame/Diverge/Converge
Use the frame/diverge/converge process to ensure you aren’t becoming predictable
or stale.
Tie Business Questions to Data Design
Use questions to tie to your enterprise data design.
Measure
Questions should be designed in a way that allows for measurement, and
measurement should be built into the design of processes.
Refine Questions Over Time
Businesses are not static, nor should the questions we use to drive them. Analyze
your ability to answer questions at regular intervals and refine them.

34. 34
THANK YOU
Rob Saker
Twitter: @robsaker
rob.saker@crossmark.com
Sources and additional reading:
“How to Win Friends & Influence People,” Dale Carnegie
http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/1508569754
“A More Beautiful Question,” Warren Berger
http://www.amazon.com/More-Beautiful-Question-Inquiry-Breakthrough/dp/1620401452
“Before You Innovate, Ask the Right Questions,” HBR. https://hbr.org/2013/02/before-you-innovate-ask-the-ri
“The Second Machine Age,” Andrew McAfee, Eric Brynjolfsson, http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/0393239357
“Inmon vs. Kimball – An Analysis,” Nagesh. http://www.nagesh.com/publications/technology/173-inmon-vs-kimball-an-analysis.html
“Relentless Practical Tools for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence,” Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross. http://www.amazon.com/Kimball-Group-Reader-
Relentlessly-Intelligence/dp/0470563109/ref=sr_tc_2_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1432841651&sr=8-2-ent
“Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the Ultimate Disrupter,” Adam Lashinsky, http://fortune.com/2012/11/16/amazons-jeff-bezos-the-ultimate-disrupter/