SCRUM and Freedom from Preformatted Reports

A little girl watches her mother prepare a roast for Sunday dinner. Her mother lays out the piece of meat, rubs spices across the surface, and then carefully cuts the two ends off with a sharp knife, and sets them aside.

"How come you cut the ends off?" asks the little girl

The woman smiles knowingly, and explains that her mother taught her the process when she was a little girl, and it makes the tenderest, most flavourful roast.

The woman later asks her own mom why, cutting the ends off the roast makes it taste so much more tender, and her mom responds that she is unsure of the science involved, but that she was taught the technique as a young woman by her own mother.

At which point, the mystery having taken on more significant proportions, the woman makes a call to her grandmother and asks "Gran, why does cutting the ends of the roast make it come out more tender?"

The grandmother, who is approaching ninety, seems disoriented by the question, so the woman explains futher "You taught mom, and she taught me to prepare a roast by rubbing salt and spices into the surface, and then cut off both ends before putting it into the pan."

The grandmother, when she hears this begins to chuckle, "No dear, I cut the ends off so the roast would fit in the useless little roasting pan my mother-in-law gave me for a wedding present."

I am often reminded of this cautionary tale when I examine the institutionalized reporting structures in place in many organizations. With the competitive pressures of business and the volumes of data available, organizations often develop "institutional blindness" around their analytics. Reports become entrenched, and we forget the urgent needs that fostered them in the first place.

I recently stumbled across Marianina Manning´s blog Web Analytics Princess when reading an article about measuring User Generated Content by Judah Phillips of Web Analytics Demistified. On Marianina´s site, there is an article about Virtual Worlds London 2007 in which she relates comments from the CEO of of Habbo Hotels Timo Soininen. He is describing his implementation of SCRUM project management techniques in developing the virtual worlds in response to user metrics and player feedback. For those of you who are not rugby fans, the SCRUM refers to the team huddling together and moving as a unit in a tightly knit formation, allowing the collective to jointly determine speed and direction.

And I started thinking about applying SCRUM Project Management techniques to web analytics. Not just the design of systems, but actual report generation too.

I was struck by a sudden vision of a future of Web Analytics unfettered by pre-formatted (canned) reports. Today Application Developers shape our focus and our perception of our websites by pre-supposing what kinds of reports we will need. Google´s Conversion tracking shystem recognizes only 4 possible types of conversions: sale, lead, signup and pageview. Management measures performance success primarily by focusing on comparisons against historical data. Many web analysts have made the point that historical data is rendered more and more irrelevant the faster things change on the web.

Almost a decade ago, I worked on a project to develop an analytics tool that essentially stored all the data in its raw format, and allowed the analyst to specify all of the input fields to customize the report. The system had ZERO preformatted reports. It was totally flexible...(and also often crashed the database and the site, because that was before we´d caught on to batch processing or staging the data, or protecting against system overload).

The project was shelved. People couldn´t wrap their heads around the idea of total report freedom. It required a certain intimacy with the data and facility with the stats that proved a barrier to adoption. ....at least that's what I think happened :)

...but I think that, in the fast-changing world of web2.0, where user audiences are SO fluid, and their usage patterns are SO dynamic, a free-format reporting system, combined with a SCRUM approach to analytics, that seeks to identify the emerging patterns without presupposing the answers, may be the path to effective optimization.

I know this is a little out in left field. But the neural networks geniuses of the worlds are creating these capabilities....we just need to create the management practices and reporting/visualization tools to follow suit. What do you think? Is this a possible future direction for the next generation of WA? or am I totally out to lunch?