Creativity@Home: Collaborative Performance Analytics

This proposal stems from discussions that took place through the creativity@home scheme piloted by the EPSRC. These discussions centered on three major societal trends that are destined to influence each other - the explosion of information, the emergence of mobile computing and the growth in social networking and open innovation. Clearly these three major trends open up new opportunities, but they also pose significant challenges. The first of which is how to make sense of the copious quantity of data available to organizations today.The world is becoming more instrumented - organizations are collecting data at ever more disaggregated levels. Services, such as credit and loyalty cards, allow banks and retailers to capture individualized data. Every mobile phone transmits location data, while every security camera records activity data. Products are increasingly instrumented. Sensors in cars and planes continuously transmit data on product performance and reliability. Every visit to a website leaves a footprint. Data is contained in every photo posted to Facebook and every tweet made to Twitter!A challenge for organizations is how to harness these data and extract insight from them. Today's context means that this challenge is complicated by three factors - (i) the simple volume of data, (ii) the fact that 80% of this data is unstructured and (iii) the fact that much of the data lies in disconnected source files - databases, excel spreadsheets and individual websites.The thesis that underlies this proposal is that parallel developments in mobile computing and social networking technologies, including open innovation, may offer a solution to the challenge of extracting insight from data. For while the simple challenge of making sense of data is not new, the novelty in this proposal lies in bringing together mobile technologies, with socially distributed ways of working, to explore the potential of what we are calling collaborative performance analytics. Collaborative performance analytics builds on the ideas of open innovation and socially distributed ways of working. It asks the question - how might organizations open up their performance data to a wider community and engage them in the analytics process. Clearly a pre-requisite would be for the wider community to have to have access to technologies that enable socially distributed working. Hence the thrust of this proposal - that we should bring together mobile technologies, with social networking applications to enable collaborative performance analytics. To explore this concept this proposal explains how we intend to create a demonstrator scenario to illustrate the potential of collaborative performance analytics.

In terms of specific communication and engagement activities it is worth thinking about the three beneficiary communities separately. For managers in both the public and private sector the research findings will be disseminated through conferences, workshops and teaching programmes. Professor Neely is frequently invited to give keynote speeches at major conferences on business performance measurement and management and so he will use outputs from this project in his speeches as appropriate. Professor Neely also teaches many programmes on business performance measurement and management and the materials developed through this research will be disseminated through these programmes. For the analyst community, there are active groups on LinkedIn and in various discussion fora. Throughout the research we will seek to engage members of these communities in shaping the research and guiding the programme of work. Active discussions on LinkedIn are proving to be an extremely valuable way of promulgating ideas to groups of people who have pre-selected themselves as being interested in the topic at hand. Hence throughout the research we will regularly feed materials to LinkedIn discussions involving the analyst community. The third group of beneficiaries - the academic community - will benefit from this research through traditional means: journal and conference publications. Additionally the PMA (Performance Measurement Association) will support dissemination of the research findings through its website and newsletter. The next PMA conference will feature a major session on Business Intelligence and analytics at which this research will be presented.