In Torture, Plain and Simple, Suzanne points out that while it is true that torture doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter: it’s illegal.  But let’s dwell for a minute on the first point: torture doesn’t work.

Elaine Scarry gave this subject a scholar’s attention in The Body in Pain, where she explained that pain nullifies the world around us — with extreme pain nothing exists but the pain.  This deconstructs the ego to a point where conversation is meaningless and information extracted in this state has one goal: to make the pain stop.  Say anything to make the pain stop.  In fact, there is a long history of torture being used to extract misinformation to support campaigns of misinformation.

While this simple fact is well established in research, it seems appallingly under communicated.  If it was well communicated, I imagine it would lead to this:

Interrogator 1: Should we do it?

Interrogator 2: Well, it doesn’t work.

Interrogator 1: OK then, let’s not bother.

The complex ethics simply disappear.

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So I have blogged before about Polestar - an intuitive UI for browsing and exploring information that as one deployment option can be directly accessed on the Internet at http://polestar.ondemand.com

Internally, the labs team continue to innovate this offering in interesting ways. One way has been to add an API that allows applications, pages and tools to push prepared data to Polestar and embed the cloud based solution into their products. Which is interesting, but not as interesting at the amazing things that start to happen once that API happens.

For example, one internal team created this video of an internal test showing that Polestar could be embedded into a classic SAP applications.

This is just someone playing with an idea at this point (so don’t look for this built into your SAP applications just yet), but it really demonstrates the power of an API to generate the unexpected. Hopefully we will see lots more innovative uses of these API.

Timo Elliott recently posted on a new capability available from our Labs team - Polestar. It seems that his use of a hockey example has become a theme. Another colleague of mine noted that the co-founder of SAP Hasso Plattner owns a stake in the San Jose Sharks. So he produce a brief analysis using Polestar about the performance of the Sharks under various leadership:

What is really interesting is that the data set is only 16 rows pulled from a website, yet you can quickly glean really interesting facts and trends. Thank you Fredrick - great video. As a Brit living in Canada, it seems I am doomed to hear about Hockey all the time. Clearly, I need to go and get some Rugby data and produce the next example myself.

Also, here is the spreadsheet so you can try this your self at http://polestar.ondemand.com

My good friend Donald MacCormick sent me this little video outlining how he used Polestar to review the partners that attended our recent conference. I thought it worth sharing:

The report’s authors state that good decision-making needs:

1. High-quality data
2. Access to advanced systems and training
3. Sound judgment
4. Trust
5. Flexibility

My colleague Timo also blogged on this some time ago - here.

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How often have you heard someone say “We need to be making fact-based decisions” as apposed to “Gut-feel based decisions”

Timo Elliott a colleague of mine has this to say:

It’s one of our core beliefs that decisions made on data are better, of course Scott Adams has a slightly alternate take on that…

Before we can really start to assess whether facts assist us in making decisions, we need to be able to achieve a few other things. The very first thing is we need to find the facts. And given that Butler Group state:

“a number of surveys have concluded that an information-based worker is spending between one and 20 hours each week searching for information”

It appears were spending a lot of time collecting information. Anything we can do to reduce the time spent looking for information and increase the time spent looking at information would seem to be important to getting better decisions faster.

And that is the project I have been working on for a while - BUSINESSSOBJECTS POLESTAR. How to get from “I have a question” to “Here is some useful data” as fast as possible - and to make that accessible and usable by anyone.

“Polestar combines the simplicity of search with the power of BI to offer an iTunes-like interface that will appeal to a currently under-served segment of BI users.” - Cindi Howson, Founder BI Scorecard