Career
Good Article on Why AI Projects Fail
Today I ran across this very good article as it focused on lessons learned, which potentially helps everyone interested in these topics. It contained a good mix of problems at a non-technical level.
Below is the link to the article and commentary on the Top 3 items listed from my perspective.
https://www.cio.com/article/3429177/6-reasons-why-ai-projects-fail.html
Item #1:
The article discusses how the “problem” being evaluated was misstated using technical terms. At least some of these efforts are conducted “in a vacuum.” Given the cost and strategic importance of getting these early-adopter AI projects right, that was a surprise.
In Sales and Marketing, you start the question, “What problem are we trying to solve?” and evolve that to, “How would customers or prospects describe this problem in their own words?” Without that understanding, you can neither initially vet the solution nor quickly qualify the need for your solution when speaking with those customers or prospects. That leaves room for error when transitioning from strategy to execution.
Increased collaboration with Business would likely have helped. This was touched on at the end of the article under “Cultural challenges,” but the importance seemed to be downplayed. Lessons learned are valuable – especially when you are able to learn from the mistakes of others. This should have been called out early as a major lesson learned.
Item #2:
This second area had to do with the perspective of the data, whether that was the angle of the subject in photographs (overhead from a drone vs horizontal from the shoreline) or the type of customer data evaluated (such as from a single source) used to train the ML algorithm.
That was interesting because assumptions may have played a part in overlooking other aspects of the problem, or the teams may have been overly confident about obtaining the correct results using the data available. In the examples cited, those teams figured out those problems and took corrective action. A follow-up article describing the process used to determine the root cause in each case would be very interesting.
As an aside, from my perspective, this is why Explainable AI is so important. Sometimes, you just don’t know what you don’t know (the unknown unknowns). Understanding why and on what the AI is basing its decisions should help with providing better quality curated data up-front, as well as identifying potential drifts in the wrong direction while it is still early enough to make corrections without impacting deadlines or deliverables.
Item #3:
This didn’t surprise me but should be a cause for concern as advances are made at faster rates, and potentially less validation is made as organizations race to be first to market with some AI-based competitive advantage. The last paragraph under ‘Training data bias’ stated that based on a PWC survey, “only 25 percent of respondents said they would prioritize the ethical implications of an AI solution before implementing it.”
Bonus Item:
The discussion about the value of unstructured data was very interesting, especially when you consider:
- The potential for NLU (natural language understanding) products in conjunction with ML and AI.
- This is a great NLU-pipeline diagram from North Side Inc. in Canada, one of the pioneers in this space.
- The importance of semantic data analysis relative to any ML effort.
- The incredible value that products like MarkLogic’s database or Franz’s AllegroGraph provide over standard Analytics Database products.
- I personally believe that the biggest exception to this assertion will be from GPU databases (like OmniSci) that easily handle streaming data, can accomplish extreme computational feats well beyond those of traditional CPU-based products, and have geospatial capabilities that provide an additional dimension of insight to the problem being solved.
Update: This is a link to a related article that discusses trends in areas of implementation, important considerations, and the potential ROI of AI projects: https://www.fastcompany.com/90387050/reduce-the-hype-and-find-a-plan-how-to-adopt-an-ai-strategy
This is definitely an exciting space that will experience significant growth over the next 3-5 years. The more information, experiences, and lessons learned are shared, the better it will be for everyone.
Commentary on an HBR article about Start-ups & Entrepreneurship
A friend posted this article on LinkedIn.com. Due to character limitations for comments, I decided to post my response here. Below is a link to the article referenced: https://hbr.org/2019/07/building-a-startup-that-will-last
The article is interesting, but emphasizing “second and third acts” assumes that the start-up will successfully navigate the first act. Even with addressing what the author views as key points this is still a very big assumption. The reasons for Longevity and Success are far more complex and multi-dimensional, but it highlights some of the more important areas of focus.
Long-term success requires several things: The right combination of having a unique goal that has the potential to make a big impact (think “No software” from Salesforce.com); Innovative ideas to achieve that goal; A diverse team to build the product (a mix of visionaries, insightful “translators,” technical experts, designers, planners, adept doers, etc.); Very good sales / business development / marketing to describe a better way of doing things and converting that to new business; and ultimately a management team focused on sustainable and scalable growth.
The point about the need to “Articulate a value framework oriented toward societal impact, not just financial achievement” seems superficial and too tactical.
First, there are unintended consequences to most new technologies. Social Media is a recent example, but Genetic Editing and AI are two areas that are likely to provide more examples over the next decade. Not every societal impact will be positive, and having a negative impact could very well lead to the untimely demise of that company.
Second, the two ideas (societal impact and financial achievement) are not mutually exclusive. When I owned my consulting company, we aimed to fund $1M of medical research to find a cure for Arthritis. We allocated half of our net profits to this goal. Every employee was on board with this because there was a tangible example of why it mattered (my daughter). We invested $500K and helped launch a few careers for some brilliant MD/Ph. Ds and at least one national protocol came out of their research.
Mission and Vision are important to a company, yet many fail to view this as anything more than a marketing effort. Those companies fail to realize that this is as much to motivate and inspire their employees as it is to grab a prospective customer’s attention. These should be inspirational and aspirational, such as the “BHAG” (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) Collins and Porras wrote about 25 years ago.
Regarding Endurance and the assertion that “…the best businesses are intrinsically aligned with the long-term interests of society,” my take is slightly different. The best businesses are always looking for trends and opportunities in an ever-changing global competitive landscape instead of looking to their competitors and trying to ride on their coattails. Companies with a culture of fostering innovation as a way to learn and grow (Amazon and Google are two great examples) are able to find that intersection of “good business” and “positive societal impact.” It is much more complex than a simple one-dimensional outlook.
But it was a good article to help reframe ideas and assumptions around growth.
Creating Customers for Life (4 minute read)
The goal for any business, regardless of the products you sell or the services you provide, should be maintaining a satisfied customer base that is loyal to your business. The idea is to create a mutually beneficial relationship that motivates people to want to continue working with you despite the availability of competitive products or motivations (e.g., those pushing for a “Corporate Standard” involving another product.)
The best part is that this concept applies to all companies and all Product Life Cycle stages. Whether your company is on a rapid growth trajectory towards ‘Unicorn status,’ your offerings are mature and viewed as ‘less exciting.’ The approach will also help if your products decline and you seek the ‘longest tail’ possible. At each phase, there are credible threats from competitors that seek to grow through the erosion of your business.
Several years ago, I was responsible for two product lines in two major geographic regions (Americas and APAC/Japan). Our attrition rate (“churn”) was traditionally slightly below the industry average. We began seeing an increase in churn and a corresponding decrease in organic growth. Both were indicators that something needed to change.
After discussing tactical approaches to address this, our small leadership team agreed that this was a strategic issue we needed to address. The result was an understanding that we needed to create ‘Customers for Life.’ Everyone agreed with the concept, but due to various differences (culture, who our customer was – end customer vs. channel partner, buying patterns, etc.), we agreed to try what was best for each of our regional businesses and share the results and lessons learned.
My approach focused on developing strong relationships that fostered collaboration and ultimately led to growth and success for both parties. The basic premise was simple:
- People tend to buy from people they like, respect, and trust. Become one of those people for your customers.
- Helping companies achieve better business outcomes leads to greater success for our customers and us.
How did we do it? It was a systematic process that my team used that included the following:
- Develop simple profiles for each customer (e.g., products used, date of first purchase, size of footprint, usage and payment trends, industry).
- An optimal size – based on the size of the product footprint, annual amount spent with us, or size of the company- was used to prioritize companies and organizations with the most significant potential impact.
- Make contact multiple times yearly, not just when you want money.
- These “out of cycle” contacts became very important.
- Ask questions about key initiatives, milestones, and concerns.
- We documented the responses, which helped seed following conversations and demonstrate a genuine interest in what they were doing.
- Follow-up!
- Request meetings to understand how they use our products and get a brief update on what our company has been doing.
- Meeting people face-to-face is always good.
- Learning more about their business, systems, goals, and challenges created opportunities to add value and become more of a partner in success with that customer.
- Look at what they were doing with our products and offer suggestions to do more, do something better or more efficiently, call out potential problems and offer suggestions, and discuss best practices. Often, we would have a technical expert follow up and provide an hour or two of free assistance relating to those findings.
- Look for opportunities to congratulate them.
- It demonstrates that they are important enough that you are paying attention. Google Alerts made this easy.
- Regularly ask our customers if there is anything that we could do to help them.
- They would often reciprocate, leading to increased references and referrals.
- Continuous Improvement – Analyze the results and refine the process as needed on an ongoing basis.
Before the meeting, we would spend an hour or two researching the company, its history, and significant events for it and within its industry, and identify its top 2-3 competitors. My consulting background came in handy as I “looked between the lines” to better understand the situation as we planned the meeting, focusing on what we wanted to walk away with and what we wanted the customer to walk away with from that meeting.
As we met with our Customers and Channel Partners, we would explain what ‘Customer for Life’ meant to us and the potential benefits to them. Before the meeting, we would check to see if we had (or they wanted) an NDA so they could speak freely and with confidence. Trust was important. The information disclosed would help us understand their situation, and we would map this against other customers in search of actionable trends. Showing interest and understanding created credibility. Asking relevant questions allowed conversations to progress to substantive issues in less time. From there, we focused on specific points that would positively impact that customer.
Over the course of two years, my team and I helped our customers innovate by providing different perspectives and ideas, modernizing (e.g., moving to spatial analytics to get a more granular understanding of their own business, cloud-enable their systems to increase responsiveness to their business and often control costs), improve their systems and grow their businesses, and more. We also received feedback that helped us improve our products and a variety of processes – something that benefitted all customers. Occasionally, we learned about problems they were having. We took ownership of the issue, brought in the right people, and helped the customer find a resolution. Collaboration and success created strong relationships with many customers – especially in the segment with the largest customers and companies.
From a business perspective, our customer churn decreased by 50% over the same period, and organic growth increased slightly more than 20%. We had achieved our objectives and improved our bottom line. The concepts behind Strategic Account Management, Voice of the Customer, Customer Experience, Customer Loyalty, and Customer Success had blended into a manageable practical approach and provided a great ROI.
One of my biggest lessons learned was that adopting this mindset and creating a repeatable process should be started sooner rather than later.
Every day you are not creating your own ‘Customers for Life,’ there is a good chance that your competition is. Don’t let that happen to your business.
Edit: Added category and tags
Good Article on Being an Entrepreneur
Nearly every morning, I start the day out by reviewing news on business, technology, and finance / markets. Occasionally there is a general interest article that I stumble across. Today it was a short article about Curt Culver, Co-Founder of Culver’s Restaurants.
Several great points seem like common sense in hindsight but are often well out of focus during the “heat of the battle” as you build your business. Mr. Culver touches several of them:
- The Importance of having the proper Work / Life Balance
- For me personally, this was one of the toughest aspects of growing my business. I worked 100+ hours a week, traveled at least 50% of the time, and was often “not there,” even when spending time with my family.
- My habits also set the expectations for others on the team, and I later realized that this also created some strife at home for them.
- The turning point for me was when my youngest daughter, then 4 years old, told her twin brother and older sister, “Daddy really does love us; he just works all the time so that we can live here and have all of this stuff.” It was painful enough to hear that, but it was a wake-up call about what is really important in life – people (especially family and friends), not “stuff.”
- For me personally, this was one of the toughest aspects of growing my business. I worked 100+ hours a week, traveled at least 50% of the time, and was often “not there,” even when spending time with my family.
- The Need to Develop others on your Team
- From past experiences, I understood the need to hire the best people you could afford – people with complementary skills (not just clones of yourself) and who were better than you in at least one aspect. That diversity added value, while the similarities made it easier to “get on the same page” quickly. From there, it was important to understand their goals and work together on career planning early – something that adds value to both parties.
- One of my goals in developing my team was to have everyone understand the big picture and empower them to make good decisions for the business.
- While most of this occurred, my goal was to have each and every person think and act like owners of the business. That level of engagement and accountability only happened with my most senior person, who was also my first hire and owned a small part of the company.
- The moment when I recognized success was during a mission-critical ERP system upgrade for our largest customer – a multi-billion dollar semiconductor reseller. I sat in on project and team meetings, reviewed reports, and asked a few questions, but that was it. It was a very proud and empowering moment for me.
- The weekend of the pre-migration test, I received a call telling me that everything had been successful and that the migration was going forward the next weekend.
- The following weekend I received a nightly summary email, and on Sunday afternoon received a call telling me that the new system was operational and supporting production with ease.
- Culture
- Mr. Culver states, “Culture is all about people.” From my perspective, that is mostly true, but there are other important dimensions of culture based on my experiences.
- To me, the Cultural Identity of your company starts out as something aspirational and later grows into the glue that bonds every member of your team. It helps bring out the best in everyone, including the camaraderie and support from working with people you like and trust.
- There were two unexpected consequences of actively focusing on culture, which were:
- We quickly transformed into a High-Performance Organization. Everyone pushed to continuously “raise the bar.” There was healthy competition between people, but each team member was a “safety net” for others. Having the team win was far more important than winning as an individual.
- New Hires that were not a good fit recognized that very quickly and usually quit within the first 2-3 weeks. I only had to terminate one person who wasn’t a good fit during the probationary period.
- There were two unexpected consequences of actively focusing on culture, which were:
- Having a Support System
- Mr. Culver addresses failure and the importance of family to help support you in times of need.
- One of the biggest lessons I learned was that nothing that I did or accomplished with my company would have been possible without the support of my wife, children, parents, and in-laws (the latter two providing financial support during the early years in times of need).
- With understanding comes humility.
These are lessons learned that can be applied to any size organization and in my opinion, are a great investment in the future growth, value, and longevity of your company.
Occam’s razor, our Maxima, and the Sage Mechanic
My wife has a Nissan Maxima and loves her car. Over the past 9 months, there has been a persistent but seemingly random problem where the radio is used for a few minutes while the car is off and then the battery dies when she goes to start the car. This has happened more than a dozen times over the past 3 1/2 years, and it has been seen by two dealerships for a total of three times recently with no success – the most recent visit being one day before this problem occurred.
Saturday morning, I was running errands when my wife called and let me know that this problem had happened again (the second time this week, and she was very frustrated). I was pretty excited because this time, the problem occurred at home, not at some parking lot like usual, so I had the luxury of time to try to make a root cause determination. I’m somewhat mechanical but no professional, so I followed my consulting advice and contacted a professional.
Dave T. is a mechanical guru with an uncanny ability to offer sage advice with only a modicum of information. He is incredibly busy but always willing to spend a few minutes and give helpful advice. It helps that he is a great guy, but it also helps him generate business (leads and referrals). It is an approach that helps create a constant backlog of work and a very loyal clientele, which is good business.
I called Dave, described the problem, and mentioned what I had read on various forums (i.e., similar electrical problems observed after some arbitrary mileage). Next, I mentioned that this had just been to the dealership, and they did not find anything wrong. Dave laughed, stating, “There is a 99%+ likelihood that the alternator is bad, possibly both the alternator and battery.” He sounded very confident.
There was a pause, and then he asked, “What’s more likely – that there is some completely random problem that only happens when your wife is out and your son stays in the car and listens to music for a few minutes, which by the way only happens to Maximas after X number of miles, or that there are issues with the alternators where they tend to fail after a certain amount of use, which causes them not to charge the battery properly and leads to a condition where there is not enough of a charge to start the car?”
When Dave explained it like that, I felt kind of stupid, consoled only by the fact that other professional mechanics had not resolved the problem before me. He added, “Anything that could drain a battery within a few minutes would be noticeable. It would start a fire or melt wires and smoke or smell. You haven’t seen or smelled anything like that, have you?”
I described my plan to troubleshoot the problem, and Dave suggested that I also test the alternator and the specific gravity of the individual battery cells. So, less than five minutes into that call, I had a plan and was off and running.
Yesterday afternoon I spent several hours using a methodical approach to troubleshooting, documenting everything with pictures and videos to help me recall details and sequence if needed. Sure enough, Dave’s knowledge and intuition led to the correct conclusion.
I called him to thank him, and while talking, I wondered aloud why the dealership could not figure this out? Dave replied, “It’s not that they couldn’t have done what you did, but instead, they focused on the symptoms you described. The mechanic probably sat there for 10-15 minutes with the lights and radio on while the car was off. After that, the car started, so they assumed everything was fine.
I listened to what you said, ignored the randomness and speculation, and honed in on the likeliest problem. The fact that this happened again so soon also made sense because now your battery was run down from the testing performed by the dealership.” He added, “In my business, I get paid for results, so I can’t get away with taking the easy way out.”
I’m big on lessons learned, wanting to make the most of every experience because I have learned that skills and knowledge are often very transferrable. As I thought about this, I realized that Dave’s analysis was the perfect practical application of Occam’s razor. It’s a very helpful skill as a Consultant, but more importantly, it can help when problem-solving in any line of work.
Where Ideas, Experiences, and Lessons Learned Intersect 