Why do we try to automate as much as we can – in the business world and in our own lives? The hope is that our routine and defined activities should take as little of our time as possible – and we have more time to spend on the fun things like doing nothing or inventing sliced bread 2.0.

So, when Allan Wille from CRM Daily wrote recently that the End-Game for Business Intelligence is to create sophisticated Dashboards, I was pleased to find James Taylor of ebizQ taking exception and inviting everyone to, “[please] kill me now….”

I agree wholeheartedly with James when he says

Surely the endgame for BI must involve some kind of predicting of the future, some looking forward?…….. why show them a dashboard when we could program the systems to ACT? Enterprise decision management would use this same data not to display a pretty graph on some marketing directors desktop, but to make the CRM system, the website, the call center and everyone involved in the organization act more intelligently.

Dashboards are good and relevant in some situations, but the goal is to have business rules drive and automate as much decision-making as possible. The rules themselves need to evolve and become sophisticated enough to ’sense’ the environment and the context based on raw data feeds – on our way to the Intelligent Enterprise.

With sophisticated systems doing this intelligent work what do the people do? They can now take the next unstructured problem and put structure to it – in a constantly escalating endeavor to tame the next market and the next competitor, or to discover the next breakthrough product.

Let’s not spend time doing things that machines are better at!

I have been on my faithful Blackberry for almost two years now. Email, Calendar and Internet were the basic building blocks for being productive while mobile. My project planning and task management was on my laptop strung together among Microsoft Project, MindManager and Microsoft OneNote – with the occassional sync to Blackberry Tasks.

Early last year I installed ToDoMatrix from RexWireless on my Blackberry as a better way to manage Projects and Tasks – with reasonable success. I was still juggling with multiple tools on the laptop and trying to get to a single picture of my commitments and plans.

Then, ToDoMatrix was upgraded a few months ago to ‘7-Dimensions’ that supports Getting Things Done (GTD) Methodology, along with support for a lot of other customizations. After experimenting with a new workflow using ToDoMatrix, I am finally discarding the chain to my laptop. I can now do all my planning and execution on my Blackberry. MindManager will still be a standalone brainstorming tool; Microsoft Project will still schedule and manage Enterprise Projects, and OneNote will still be the prime sketching tool. But they will not hold the one version of truth. The truth is now Mobile and free!

GTD

I have been a fan of Getting Things Done philosophy for personal (and organizational?) productivity for a long time. Perfecting the system for my own use took almost a year…but I was able to stay on track despite falling off the wagon a few times for short periods. Now, I am glad to be on the GTD bus for more than two years.

As I shifted from my HPCompaq PPC handheld to a new Blackberry, I was disappointed with the tool sets available on the BB. Then I ran into a nice article on implementing GTD using Blackberry…experimented a little bit…and came up with my own implementation, using BB exclusively for GTD. No other tools needed! Will write about that sometime soon…