BI and BPM can learn from each other

By: Frank Buytendijk

 

Organizing data governance and many ways to mess it up again

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

A world without government is a pretty horrible prospect. In such a world, everyone would be at war in a struggle to survive. To avoid such an environment, we prefer to hand over some of our natural rights to a government. We give up some of our freedom to receive protection. This is the purpose of government.

John Locke (1632-1704) has argued that creating a state is not a top-down exercise: a society is the result of a social contract between citizens. We pay taxes and therefore receive protection, infrastructure and social benefits.

In our modern days, there is a new aspect to this: we expect data governance. But is this well thought through yet? I published a series of articles on this question.

Whose Data Is It, Anyway? was the first article on data governance in the public sector and commercial enterprise. It presented a bit of a "big brother" doom and gloom scenario, I am afraid. But is it unlikely? I don't know.

In The TomTom Case – Were Police Using or Abusing Data Analytics?, I included a real-life case study, describing how a police force used collected TomTom satnav data in order to plan speed traps. Ethical or not?

The third article Who Owns Your Data? focused on the private sector. Digital data governance isn’t clearly organized. Who owns the location-based data on your smartphone? The phone company? The phone manufacturer? Or do you feel you own the text messages, voicemail, emails and pictures you stored on your phone? And who owns the status updates you put on Facebook, you or Facebook?

In the final article of the series Organizing Data Governance - And Many Ways to Mess it Up Again, I concluded with two topics. First I described how to organize data governance in a less traditional way. Then, I did the opposite and described some ways to mess it up again, to protect our interests until the public and private sectors get it right.

You will only see if you get it

By: Dick van Mersbergen

All meeting rooms at the Be Informed headquarters are named after famous philosophers. Large posters explain how they relate to our product and company. The second philosopher I came across is Ludwig Wittgenstein. His quote:“Logic takes case of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.”

The poster reads: “At Be Informed, our approach is more logical. We look at the goal of the process and then simply and logically work our way back to what is needed to successfully complete transactions towards that goal.”

Like every sports-minded Dutchman, the combination of the wordslogic andgoal made me think of the most famous Dutch footballer: Johan Cruijff. He is not just dazzled defenders with his football skills; his pseudo philosophical comments and weird twists of old saying had the same effect on people. Completely unaware of this, Cruijff ends every cryptic sentence with: “…it’s logical.”

In 1983, Cruijff joined long-term rival Feyenoord. During the first training session they played a 4-2 rondo on a small square pitch (see figure 1). Black has possession of the ball and the two in the middle (orange) have to conquer it. An easy game, played in during training sessions everywhere.

The Master immediately said: “Stop! You do it all wrong.” The other players replied: “But we play this game for years and it works fine. What’s the problem?” Cruijff explained that when the 4 players are in the corners, they limit their space. There are just two good passes possible (the orange arrows), as the pass through the middle is likely to be intercepted. There is hardly room for improvement, for example when X1 and X3 move will not change a thing.

So the others asked: “Well, this might be, but how to play it right?” Cruijff said: you need to stand halfway along the sides (see figure 2). Then, when moving, X1, X2 and X3 will create space and give the player with the ball more options. Even the pass through the middle will be OK because the defenders will be forced to leave this space more open.

At first, the others of the Feyenoord squad were sceptical. But they tried it and it worked really well. They understood and adapted the new playing style. So by simply turning the players’ square 45 degrees and introducing a new vision, a whole new game was created. Cruijff did not change the rules, he gave the players a new perspective. To use an other famous Cruyff quote “You will only see if you get it” (Je gaat het pas zien als je het doorhebt). This is actually the title of a management book on Cruijff and leadership.

And there is a link with our company as well. At Be Informed, we looked at the way business processes were automated and we said: “Wait, is this really the best way to do things?”. Instead of playing the same game over and over again, we introduced a new goal-oriented approach and created a completely new -and winning- game in the world of Business Process Management.

By the way, in the 1983-1984 season Feyenoord went on to win the Dutch leaguefor the first time in 10 years. It’s logical.

Sun Tzu: Check and mate.

By: Dick van Mersbergen

In one of the meeting rooms at Be Informed I came across a famous quote by Sun Tzu:

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

As a vivid (but not very strong) chess player, I study strategy and tactics. So I grinned and nodded - every chess player knows that Sun Tzu was right.

Besides, working at Be Informed, I am interested in computers and artificial intelligence. So Sun Tzu’s quote also made me think of the link between Be Informed and chess computers. The two proved to be very similar.

A short history of chess computers
The first chess machine was constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1770 to impress Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa. It was called The Turk, after the mechanical Turk that executed the moves on the chess table. The machine travelled Europe and beat strong players and even Napoleon in 1809. Soon after that, the machine was unveiled as a hoax. In the small chamber underneath a master player was hidden, he made moves via a ingenious array of mechanics.

The David Levy bet
As soon as computers appeared, programmers tried to make it play chess. In the 1970s and 1980s many thought no chess program would ever be able to defeat a top human player. In 1968, International Master David Levy bet that no chess computer would be beat him within ten years. He won this by beating Chess 4.7 (the strongest computer at the time) in 1978, but admitted that it would not be long before he would be surpassed. He was right: in 1989, Levy was defeated by Deep Thought.

Deep blue
Turning point was the 1996 match between IBM's Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov (one of the strongest chess players of all time), where the latter lost his first game to a computer. But Kasparov regrouped to win three and draw two of the remaining five games of the match, for a convincing victory. In May 1997, an updated version of Deep Blue defeated Kasparov 3½-2½ in the rematch. Note that athough the Cold War was long over, this was still a match of Russia vs the USA. A new era began: chess programs had overtaken human players.

How did computers become unbeatable at chess?
The first study on the subject was published in 1950 by Claude Shannon, long before anyone had programmed a computer to play chess. He predicted two possible search methods that would be used and labeled them Type A and Type B. Type A programs would use a brutal force: exame every possible position for a fixed number of moves. Shannon thought this would not suffice, because:

• the computer would be to slow. With about thirty moves possible in a typical position, looking just 3 moves ahead for both sides would take about 16 minutes(!), even in the very optimistic case that the chess computer evaluated a million positions per second.
• it ignored the problem of quiescence. When only calculating a number of moves deep, you never know if there is a move later on that refutes the combination.

So it was clear Type A needed improvements. Shannon already suggested that Type B programs would be improved by:

• only looking at good moves for each position
• using quiescence searches.

What is a good move?
Programmers worked on these improvements for years, but the problem is that it is very hard for a program being to decide which moves are good enough to be worthy of consideration. Chess players rely on their ability to recognize patterns and on their intuition. Because computers don’t have an intuition and don’t have a strategy, this proved to be counterproductive.

Quiscence: look for stability as a goal
Instead of imitating human thought processes and knowledge it turned out that computers need to do what they are best at: calculate. But they needed to understand what to calculate. Not having to check all possibilities, modern chess programs look for steady positions and the ways to get there; just these are evaluated. This was the key to world domination.

The Be Informed approach
Similar to chess computers, traditional business applications are very good at Processing, but very weak at Management. This is where Business Process Management goes wrong. The BPM suppliers at first used brutal force to deal with the zillion possibilities, then tried to improve that by making the software to think like humans.

As with chess programs it is better to define goals instead of define and manage all possible paths. This is exactly what Be Informed did: the knowledge models within Be Informed let the application work towards goals and look for the paths itself. Be Informed gave BMP its quiescence search.

So where chess programmers found that it was useless imitating a chess player, we at Be Informed don’t want our business process platform to imitate the knowledge worker. We want it to free the knowledge worker. Let’s make them both do what they do best: calculate and and decide what is good respectively.

Being a chess player I can truely sum up Sun Tzu’s view with the pleasing words: Check and mate.