Executives at OneVizion have seen it all during the company’s 19 years and counting. Their Vizion Platform has been used to deploy more than $100 billion in wireless telecom and other assets for customers such as Rogers, Samsung, T-Mobile and UScellular.
Fierce Network’s content team sat down with OneVizion’s president and CEO John Patton, a seasoned entrepreneur and veteran business executive specializing in applying technology to solve business problems. Patton brings a wealth of experience in executive management, software development, and technical sales to OneVizion and exudes passion for simplifying the flow of complex information to help his clients excel at the speed of business.
Patton shared his top seven axioms for running a successful business during a recent interview about the company’s goals and mission. The insights are based on his first-hand experience while working closely with customers and in OneVizion’s internal operations.
These seven axioms apply to communications service providers (CSPs), tower companies, fiber operators and, all types of businesses struggling to pull insights from their data.
1. Overcoming data misery
Data misery is the delusional state of every executive trying to run a company using tabelized data and yes, Patton knows it’s common practice.
Here’s why it doesn’t work. “You cannot economically combine tabelized data. If you could, you wouldn’t have all those separate applications for data. Data warehouses don’t work (see #3 ‘No feedback loop, no control’ below) and data lakes are just as expensive as data warehouses,” he said.
By its very nature, tabelized data is not flexible or scalable. “You cannot index every column in a spreadsheet or table, which turns every import and report into a scrum, because the data warehouse’s gatekeeper is too busy right now,” Patton added.
The result is the company cannot execute its business objectives without lots of meetings (see #4 ‘Dung beetle meetings’ below). “This means you likely pay 30% more people than you really need to do a proper job,” he said.
Maybe the worst aspect of data misery is that those suffering from it don’t recognize it as misery so much as normal and inevitable. It also often leads to simplexity (see #2 below).
2. Simplexity has left the building
Many professionals try to make themselves look important by overcomplicating processes and plans, in the hope that their singular grasp of the complex will make them invaluable, as well as overshadow their gaps in understanding and knowledge. This results in a misguided attempt to impress and dominate.
It is a challenge to pare away all the packaging and deliver a message in simple, clear language, which doesn’t flaunt expertise. Simplexity is the art and science of finding simple solutions for complex situations. But simplexity takes a special talent, time and effort. Mark Twain nailed it perfectly when he wrote: “I did not have time to write a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”
As Patton puts it, at OneVizion we like the phrase “simple shapes, sharp edges and primary colors.” Businesses would do better to watch for and reward those in their organization with the special ability to practice simplexity and strive to embrace the KISS principle
3. No feedback loop — no control
Civilization is based on feedback loops which bring control to a process. A process is defined as input, while the process itself and the resultant are defined as output. Patton noted that OneVizion, a software company focused on helping businesses manage and transform the use of their data, developed its Vizion Platform to provide rich feedback loops where the output can be added to, edited or deleted and the update automatically becomes input.
“Compare this to a data warehouse which is an open system. The time-honored way to get feedback is through table pounders with spreadsheets and endless meetings,” he noted. (Also see #2 ‘Simplexity has left the building’ above.)
4. Dung beetle meetings
An intractable subject is rolled around between participants getting bigger and less pleasant — this is a dung beetle meeting. The intractability is due to having data that is poor, conflicting or even missing, which spawns many bad ideas and ultimately drives poor decisions and investments, the consequences of which can bedevil companies for years.
Some people seem to like to roll around in it, metaphorically speaking, with the same issues going on for years, rather than taking a first principles approach. “In meetings, sound trustworthy data should trump impressions and feelings,” Patton said.
5. Stick to known knowns
The former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld coined the terms “known knowns”, “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” According to The Washington Post, he “helped to produce inexact outcomes.”
This is because nobody can execute on data they do not have and should not execute on data they do not trust.
“If you know something in a personal spreadsheet, no one else knows it. You need to enter data into the Vizion Platform when you know it, otherwise you’re withholding information,” said Patton.
If businesses fail to enter updates as they are generated, management cannot detect and correct issues or make timely mid-course tactical adjustments. Patton noted that the Vizion Platform’s Usage Log records more than 40 characteristics for every user transaction, including who entered the data and what time the data was entered.
“Being able to detect missing data and bad behavior is the first step to correction and avoiding all variations of unknown,” Patton noted.
6. Expect exceptions
If you don’t handle exceptions, they will handle you — by requiring a spreadsheet outside of your process. Eventually, every transaction becomes an exception. This is something Patton has observed over and over again.
All platforms require flexibility and scalability to address business requirements. But if you can only choose one, then flexibility via spreadsheets wins every time. This translates to no depth in rolling up data to drive sound decisions.
The Vizion Platform organizes data in a parent-child hierarchy and incorporates the data into the process without damaging that process with both scalability and flexibility. “This means that exceptions are no longer exceptions but expected,” he noted. This is key because as CSPs, tower companies and fiber providers know, many entry items can quickly become an “exception.”
7. Meet the end user where they are
Perhaps the biggest and most important lesson OneVizion’s team has learned is: “We have to meet the end user where they are, otherwise they will not change,” said Patton.
“Even today, much work is tracked and managed in spreadsheets (that’s why spreadsheets are called “trackers” in the trade). Excel expertise is a large source of the intellectual property of any organization. For a substantially reduced learning curve, and to remove barriers to adoption and drive timely data collection, the system should closely emulate the spreadsheet data entry experience and then immediately return a workbook with the expected formatting and reports,” he said.
This is the best way of reaching the desired state of: “If it is not in OneVizion, it didn’t happen. All data must be in the Vizion Platform for the company to make the best-informed decisions,” Patton concluded.