I had one of these “hm?” moments today when I came across a commentary made by Eric Auchard, titled “A brutal logic to Dell’s reinvention” and you can read the whole article here http://tr.im/tR82  Particularly this paragraph:

“Dell’s current reliance on PCs also has an upside as it leaves it best-positioned among major computer makers for a long overdue upgrade of ageing corporate PCs set to start later this year with the introduction of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7. “

Don’t get me wrong. As a Dell employee, I certainly wish that we are “best” positioned and I work very hard to help make that happen. However I just can’t really understand Eric’s logic here. Some questions I have:

1. Why Dell is more reliance than other PC manufacturers? Dell is not the king of PC any more. Why HP and Acer is less reliance than Dell? You can kind of argue that HP has a much broader portfolio than Dell, but what about Acer? PC is the only thing they make!
2. Why overly reliance on PCs is a good thing? Notice I am not saying it is a bad thing. I am saying it is not a relevant question here. For enterprise customers or consumers alike, nobody is going to analyze how much reliance Dell or HP has on PCs and then make their purchase decision. They are going to look at the product, price, services everything and then make their decision. To assume there is a direct correlation between reliance and the quality of products and services and pricing competitiveness is a serious mistake. We all know HP sometimes is more aggressive in PC space because they have a huge profit pool with their printer business.
3. Finally, I think it is too early to say that the introduction of windows 7 is going to shake up the whole PC purchase cycle. And if that cycle does come to reality like everybody is wishing, it is a “rising tide” effect and everybody will get a free ride. The question is who will grab a bigger pie? The answer to that question again, is on the overall competitiveness of products, prices and services, which Dell is making tons of progress, but not its reliance on PCs.

Ok, maybe I am just too dumb to understand what Eric exactly has in mind when he made that statement. What about you? What do you think? Agree? Disagree?

Essentially we are talking about the same thing. Maybe I am not as bold as Seth but a little more polite by asking “why” question than straightly saying “no”. The end goal is the same: by asking “why” question or saying “no”, we allow ourselves focus on critical few things, rather than millions of ad hoc requests.

That’s the choice we all have to make. Like Seth put it so simply, “you can dissipate your gift by making the people with the loudest requests temporarily happy, or you can change the world by saying ‘no’ often. ”

Well, to be more accurate, I learned that long time ago when I watched how Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, Eric Peterson or Bryan Eisenberg presenting in eMetrics Summit or anywhere they go. They are passionate, energetic, and they are personal.

Today I experienced that too.

Today we hit a really great milestone in web analytics within Dell. Several months after implementing SiteCatalyst globally, we presented a global executive dashboard which enables our executives to get a weekly snapshot of the site performance across our global regions.  It gives them a great benchmark, drive standardization of the site, promote best pracitice sharing. More importantly, it drives them to prioritize their web analysts’ time to work on big opportunities, instead of tons of ad hoc requests or routine reporting.

When a senior manager told me, “Oh my this is a thing of beauty! Tear in eye….” and when my director said, “we need turn web analytics from a tool to THE weapon”, I know that we are on something here. Tomorrow is going to be a little different. We might start to see a transformation and a new culture might emerge.

So that’s my thought of today. Web analytics can be personal, can be exciting, can be something you really love. It doesn’t have to be dull at all. Let’s get out of our cubes, start to be like a champion or evangelist within our organization.

It’s your time to shine now, seriously.

Listen to what the genius said and you will be more comfortable dealing with ambiguity.  Einstein said here can be applied everywhere in our life but probably most appropriate in our field: web analytics. Essentially we are people who are supposed to count everything related to the website: page views, sessions, visitors, on and on. The web 2.0 only adds more of such objects to our list: RSS, video, user generated contents, on and on. This list will never end and as the technology innovates, people’s curiosity will only get bigger and bigger.

So next time when your manager asks you to count for the # of trillions of metrics, be sure you quote what Einstein said. And you and I should really focus on critical few things that can be counted (measurability) and that really count (relevance).

And I am having the job to do to define what those things (read it as KPIs) are for my company.

I’m afraid web metrics too create the illusion of certainty and control. As web analyst, we are obsessed by all kinds of metrics and dashboards. But to some extends, we have to admit even we could have all possible data under heaven, there are still things that we can’t figure it out. And 90% of time we think we are right, we are actually wrong. The reason is we are dealing with people, not data. Let’s keep the people element in our mind when creating metrics and dashboards.

P.S. note on Tim Ambler. Never heard of him before, but he is the professor in London Business School and according to this page, he is an expert in the following area:

“If you’re not blogging, you’re an idiot… No single thing in the last 15 years has been more important to me professionally than blogging… It’s changed my thinking, it’s changed my outlook… it’s the best damn marketing tool and it’s free.” – Management uber-guru Tom Peters speaking to attendees at the 27th annual Inc. 5000 conference.

Web analyst as a group enjoy blogging more than any other analytics groups I have seen. Does this mean we are smarter than other type of analyst? At least we are not a bunch of idiots?

And here is his blog: www.tompeters.com/blogs/main/blogging/ Enjoy reading! and blogging!