The One-in-Ten-Novillion Post

Today, I'm trying something a bit different: I've randomized every sentence in this post.  Each idea was expressed in three different ways; your browser's scripting function does the rest. I hope you don't see any places where it sound a bit weird; I did the best I could to make each set of sentences flow well together. Try refreshing your browser and you can see that it changes. 

Until then, you'll learn a bit more about Brett, hear about an important reporting technique, and will personally witness something of such a fleeting unlikelihood that it will never happen again. No joke. 

Brett's Humble Reporting Beginning
Like most of you, my career has evolved over time. I actually started off doing data warehousing.  At first, I built reports around very matter-of-fact historical data.

This experience naturally evolved into developing executive dashboards. 

Unlike canned historical reports,

Dashboards use something called KPI's (key performance indicators), which let executives quickly assess how their business or department is performing.  This was a big jump: I was now meeting face-to-face with key business users. 

One could argue that I had grown in my ability to add business value: fostering good business decisions, instead of just rote reporting.  It would be another decade before I finally made the next leap: into forecasting. 

Foray into Forecasting
This was quite a jolt: Historical reporting rarely requires more than SUM, MIN, MAX, AVG and COUNT. The math in forecasting is a lot more heady.  For a good half-decade, I was drinking water from the firehose, as I re-tooled my skills.  You might assume I'd play second fiddle to pure statisticians, but it didn't work out that way: A successful forecast involves not only crafting proper statistics, but communicating it to a diverse audience.  And that is the skill I had spent the past fifteen years refining. 

I now consider myself to be a capable forecaster, but I still think that communication skills are equally important as statistical skills.  Here is a tale about a good reporting trick helping make a forecast better. 

The Email Alert Conundrum
Now, some of the forecasts I've built are updated daily.  It is critical that people are kept abreast of how the forecast is changing.  You can probably guess the solution: Just send out an automated email alert. 

But there's just one snag: In my years writing reports, I had a lot of experience with email alerts and I was painfully aware that most people quickly learn to detest email alerts. 

How come?

People inherently need variety. Most people can't bear to read a similarly-communicated message more than 2-3 times.  Granted, there are exceptions to this rule, but for any sufficiently-dry topic, daily email alerts go unread.  How did I get around this problem?

I gave people what they wanted: novelty.  Each day, an automated message went out to a broad audience, but it was first given a splash of novelty! For every potential part of the email alert, I crafted a variety of ways to say the same thing. 

Like so: when the forecast went down I might say, "fell", "was reduced", "dipped", etc.  This email alert had over twenty phrases or expressions (from the salutation, through the results, to the farewell) that were randomized. 

The result: Despite knowing that it was an automated message (I was tempted to pretend it was not, but decided that was insincere), people continue to faithfully read it each day.  Granted, I pulled out all the stops -- this email alert cracks jokes, has subtly-changing subject lines, and other ways to stay fresh.  But I've been told by several people that the varied wording keeps the email fresh each day. 

Oh, and it was embarassingly easy to code.  I wrote a function called GET_QUIP() -- I'd pass it a single-word parameter (e.g., "up") and it would return a value from an array of ways to say that concept (e.g., "got a boost of").  So, if you're ever sending out an automated alert to a broad audience, I highly recommend this trick!

What is your impression of this randomized post?

Now that you've read it, did it read like a normal article? Imagine now having to re-read it -- would you like it better if it stayed the same, or do you appreciate the variety? It was certainly weird writing each idea three times, let me tell you.  A technique like this isn't really proper for a blog post, no matter how well it might work for a very quantitative (if somewhat dull) daily biggest-revenue-movers email. But I thought people might get a kick out of it!

Oh, if anybody here is attending CDO-Vision, let me know! I will be speaking there and would be delighted to meet anyone else who is facing these sort of problems. 

Before I sign off, I have one last neat thing to write. If my math is correct, the number of variants of this blog entry (of which you're reading one) is 10^30 -- otherwise known as ten novillion.  Fun fact: That's about a thousand variants for every gram the earth weighs.  Every person could refresh their browser every millisecond for their entire lives, and never see the page you're looking at right now.