The recent deluge of rains in Northern California have flooded streets, brought down trees and plugged storm sewers. As I was trying to make my way around the neighborhood, I thought of a classroom exercise to help my MBA students to identify the use cases upon which they could focus data and analytics. In this exercise, I’m going to ask my students to pretend that they have been hired by the city to “Optimize Street Maintenance” after these rainstorms. In particular, the students need to address the following questions:
Where and how do you start to address this initiative?
What data might you need to support this initiative?
These are classic questions that I hear all the time when I meet with clients about their big data journeys. Let’s walk through how I’ll teach my students to address this challenge.
Step 1: Identify and Brainstorm the Decisions
“Where and how to start?” is such an open ended question. How does one even begin to think about that question? We recommend that organizations start by identifying the decisions that need to be made to support the targeted business initiative, which is “Optimize Street Maintenance” in this exercise.
I will break up the students into small groups (3 to 5 students) and ask them to brainstorm the decisions that need to be made with respect to the “Optimize Street Maintenance” initiative. Those decisions could include:
What streets and intersections need maintenance?
What storm sewers are blocked?
What is blocking those storm sewers?
What sort of maintenance is needed?
What is the impact of street cleaning and debris removal on flooding?
What streets and intersections should we fix first?
How busy are the streets and intersections?
What worker skills are needed to fix the street?
What equipment and materials are needed to fix the street?
What time of the day / day of the week is ideal for doing that maintenance work?
How many workers are available?
Do I have access to temporary workers?
How much overtime can I afford?
How do I warn residents that a road is flooded?
What options do I give residents when the major arteries are flooded?
This brainstorming is much more effective when you have brought together the different business stakeholders who either impact or are impacted by the “Accelerate Street Maintenance” initiative (see Figure 1).
Some key process points about Step 1:
Allow individuals to brainstorm on their own at first. When it is entirely a group exercise, some folks go quiet and we potentially lose some good ideas.
Be sure to capture each decision on a separate Post-It note for later usage.
Place the decisions/Post-it Notes on a flip chart (or two).
You don’t need to group decisions by business function. I just did it here to demonstrate the process.
Finally, “all ideas are worthy of consideration.” This is the key to any brainstorming session; to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable to contribute without someone passing judgment about his or her thoughts or ideas.
Step 2: Group Decisions Into Use Cases
Next, we want to group the decisions into common subject areas or use cases (which is much easier to do if each decision is captured on a separate Post-It note). I will bring all the students together around the decisions on Post-it Notes, and have them look for logical groupings.
