'You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’

Most national metrological services have the most powerful computing power available in their country. The system installed in the UK Metrological Office takes up the area of two football pitches, is capable of 125 trillion calculations per second and is reported to take two months to boot up. This has enabled it to incorporate more data into its predictive models and to forecast down to 5km by 5km zones – four times more detailed than the current granularity of 10km by 10km zones. Such advances have definitely bought benefits and today the 72 hour forecast is more accurate than the 24 hour forecast was a quarter of a century ago – see inset photograph to be reminded of what a weather forecast looked like at the time!

The amount of information the Met Office can now produce has undoubted use in science and commerce, but the British public remain unconvinced. In fact they are starting to vocalize their frustration at the amount of detail being communicated in radio and television forecasts which is causing them to mentally switch off and not absorb any information at all.

In response to listener’s suggestions, BBC Radio 4 has been testing a new way of reading a weather forecast, clearly flagging the region being discussed before giving a concise summary of how the weather will change in the next 24 hours, much like a shipping forecast. That’s all most of us really want to know to help us make decisions about what to wear and whether we should plan a round of golf or go see a movie. Those involved in activities such as sailing and mountaineering who need more detail can get it from more specialist forecasts available online.

There is an obvious lesson for all of us involved in performance management here. Reporting tends to come as an afterthought and all too often we inundate business users with data that they don’t have the time to digest and most of the time don’t actually need. Worse still, we don’t invest the time in observing how business users consume information for decision support and how they prefer to have it presented, (in my experience that typically means as ratios and trends so that exceptions and changes can be quickly detected).

Self-service business intelligence tools such as SAP BusinessObjects Explorer now means that users can gain immediate insight into vast amounts of data on demand and visualize it in a way that makes sense to them personally improving their ability to make timely and informed decisions. So if you have budgeting data generated in SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation or cost and profitability data generated in SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Costing Management then using tools like SAP BusinessObjects Explorer make a lot of sense especially when you don't quite know exactly what information you want to analyse. For me this is better than having to rely on someone else prepare reports or dashboards for my consumption as all too often they get carried away with the technology rather than focusing on the needs of the business user. Perhaps we should invest in some training in information design and simplification techniques for them – something that would have undoubtedly benefited those responsible for our broadcast weather forecasts.