So take what you learn from your corporate management program and think about how you can apply it to your life.

• Leading With SPI
• Getting to Cloud

Leading with SPI – Driving Productivity and Profit using Strategic Performance Improvement

Leading with SPI provides a detailed, step-by-step guide to driving better strategic definition and more effective and efficient strategic execution. Using the powers of business intelligence, the key decisions of the business are focused around those points where real improvement can be made. SPI transforms the outlook of business leaders from a backward facing measurement system using traditional lagging indicators, to a more future focused KPI based performance improvement capability that delivers more opportunities to improve and move ahead of competition.

SPI starts with deconstruction of measurable strategic objectives to help focus the business on what’s most important, and by following a simple process, identifies the questions that must be answered at each key decision point.

The KPI used to measure performance are grouped around these key decision points, ensuring that what must be done, gets measured. And, gets focused upon!

Find out more about Leading with SPI by clicking here

Getting to Cloud – Discovering New Business Opportunities with Cloud Computing

Cloud is the missing power base that underpins data warehouses and advanced analytics. So many businesses are either prevented from implementing BI solutions or stall early into the project through the lack of processing power or clean data quality management. Cloud provides the opportunity to leverage the significant benefits of BI, without reliance on outdated, overloaded IT infrastructures.

Cloud computing is so much more than a power base for BI – with its foundation in virtualization technology, it is the platform that will transform the competitive base of business. No longer will small businesses be constrained in competing against their larger competitors through lack of IT resources. Cloud remedies that.

Cloud also impacts the IT reseller market – rather than disintermediation of resellers, Cloud offers an expanse of new service and product opportunities that were previously beyond the technical or financial scope.

Getting to Cloud looks at the questions both buyers and sellers need to be asking themselves right NOW. It provides detailed ROI case analysis and savings data for use in business cases…and so much more.

Find out more about Getting to Cloud by clicking here

The machine we use for thinking, our brain, networks with other brains in a kind of collective consciousness – where often what we say is not always perceived by others in terms of what we meant. So how does one judge the minds of others. Men have beeen struggling with this for years, as they seek to understand just an inkling of how to interpret the brains of women! In business, where decisions are often made in collaborative enviornments, understanding these various in thinking communication is serious stuff.

This interesting video provides insight into how a special brain region for thinking, right temporal parietal junction [RTPJ], controls how we judge other peoples thoughts. So just what can one do to enhance collaboration – should everyone be wired to a TMS machine during decision making to make sure we get the decision we want?. I will leave that judgement to you – just remember check the sugar!

It is often thought that the left side of the brain lacks the ability to provide for innovation, yet it is the very logic of the insights gained from BI tools that is driving organizations that use BI to becoming market leaders.

With the economy seemingly collapsing by the minute, the availability of reliable, relevant information is even more important than ever. The market forces and interrelationships are more complex than ever before, and Sales and Marketing teams that lack this capability will struggle to identify where their efforts will provide the best returns.

Listen to this brief audio on how BI can benefit the effectiveness and profitability of sales teams.

With a positive attitude to make a difference to the world, they don’t expect to wait until they scale the corporate ladder. They want it now – and they want the tools to do it. These are the change leaders that BI program managers should seek out.

Dubbed by Fortune Magazine as “potentially most high-performing generation in history”, this generation is used to having on-demand information to support their need for instant gratification and greater technological skill. With higher expectations of themselves, personal performance dashboards give them the instant feedback they thirst and with little previous commercial experience to resource, they are not blinded by false assumptions and filtered recall of ‘what happened last time we tried that’.

Gen-Yers are not afraid of failure – they are more afraid of not having the opportunity to try. As open communicators, Gen-Yer’s expect the same from their leaders. They are comms savvy and have a higher internal sense of when they are being are not being told the truth or information is being held back. Many more traditional managers are somewhat intimidated by this generation, but smart managers will not hold Gen-Yer’s back – rather they will provide them the the tools and opportunities they need, and support their stretch into innovation, without fear of failure.

Gen-Yer’s remind us that there are many forms of leadership – and not all of them belong or reside in the executive boardroom.

When fear enters the picture, in the absence of the truth, the individual makes up something that is so much worse. We seem to be genetically programmed to look at the negative side of things, a natural protection mechanism.

So what message should you give. That depends entirely on the customer group – and knowing about your customer to that level of detail requires business intelligence capability. For customers in lower economic levels – they will be looking at ways to spread payments or lower cost options. For those in the mid-level, with perhaps more job security and lower debt levels, they will be looking to cash in on the good deals and are more willing to get a good discount for cash payments now, rather than extended payment terms. For those at the top, they are more concerned with ensuring that support will be there when they want it – they don’t have time to read manuals and prefer to get on the phone and have someone walk them through installations or have a service agent do the installation for them.

You need to affirm to your current customers that your business is solid. Be honest. Tell them you are taking prudent actions to cut costs to ensure your debt levels remain within good business practice, and that to ensure your current products remain supported that you are working closely with suppliers to ensure that both product delivery and after sales service remain at the levels you know they value.

Customers just want to feel that you are on the ball – that you care that they may be feeling restless and want some form of assertion that all will be well. Contacting your customers and keeping them close to you will do more for maintaining sales volumes than almost any other strategy.

So you see, The Logical Organization and business intelligence is not all about raw data. It’s about having the right information you can rely on to create a transparent relationship with your suppliers and customers. Right brain emotion is still a valued partner of left-brain logic.

As a $50b market place growing 15% per annum, customers are finding that BI has become vital to their ability to stay competitive.

There are a lot of trends in BI, but the three core trends that are impacting businesses are:

1. Explosion of data – estimated to double each year
2. Need for BI for the masses – not just C level execs and business analysts; it’s for every person in the organization that has to make a decision
3. More complex questions – driving increasingly more sophisticated analysis of data

In turn, this means that more and more businesses need to know a whole lot more about business intelligence, and how it will transform their business processes, decision making, profitability and competitiveness.

BI is no longer a ‘nice to have’ – it’s a critical business capability.

BI is not a technology – it is an evidence based decision support system usable by 95% of the organization.

By using a Business Intelligence driven design approach, enterprise transformation programs can dramatically increase their chances for attaining pre-defined business value.

This occurs at several levels:

1. BI ensures that all processes are directly linked to strategic objectives
2. Information embedded into processes ensures that intelligent, evidence based decisions are made
3. Alerts and automated decision making can significantly speed up a deliverable cycle
4. Processes monitoring and feedback via dashboards ensures a continuous improvement cycle is effective

This extends the value of BI far beyond the capability to extract, aggregate and analyze data.

Using BI to enable enterprise processes and other supporting technology can fundamentally change the way an enterprise responds to its organizational design challenges.

Read More about Using BI in OD Transformation

I congratulate all on a great debate. All contributors made valid points, albeit from different perspectives. As a corporate performance consultant for 20 years I have developed an in-depth understand of technology and am often charged with vendor selection.

I acknowledge Nigel’s statement that we all agree that “when it is implemented well, business intelligence technology can and does stimulate better management and innovation”. I also agree that more focus needs to be on “how technology solves business issues” rather than how well the IO can manage queries. Nigel caps the major challenge that most BI vendors and business managers don’t recognise – “not enough businesspeople understand what the technology can do”. It’s very much a matter of they don’t know what they don’t know!

BI impacts processes and decision making in often revolutionary ways for many businesses. This aspect is rarely highlighted in BI vendor marketing presentations. They talk about better decision making – but do not state why or how. Having better data is not the answer. Using better data and embedding that use in every day processes is how decisions will become data driven.

I agree with Nigel that BI has been IT-led. This has largely been by necessity. Executives today that sign off on technology investments don’t have the time or desire to understand how technology works. But in failing to do so, they fail to recognise the significant value BI can have in the organization.

BI and performance management matter in ANY size company and decision making must be supported by facts, not individual recollections of what happened last time we tried that.

I don’t read that Nigel suggests that BI is not suited to SME, rather he rightly emphases the real truth that all business owners and managers [not just SME] “must make the effort to learn how they can adapt the available BI tools to their business needs”

Tony adds to this dilemma by pointing out one possible reason for this – that many BI vendors fall short in communicating the value of BI tools to the business – they tend to concentrate on regaling the many benefits of the BI features in terms of how they easily fit into the IT infrastructure and the performance power of the engines – Business people don’t give a hoot about any of this. They want to know only three things – how it makes me more money, how it saves me money, and how it will keep me out of jail!

As Paul says “Managers across all organisations of ALL sizes have the identical issues” But in saying this, business managers need to take more responsibility about IT as a critical business capability and get more savvy and knowledgeable about business technology in general. If they don’t understand how BI technology works – how can one expect them to trust and rely upon it to support their most pressing business decisions. They won’t do this if BI is seen as part of BI. I advocate BI as a separate function that provides capability across the business – just as IT or finance support aspects of all functions. In this way it provides a strategic and operational bridge between IT and the business. The more BI gets ‘operationized’ the more its value is released.

As Bob states one of the prime reasons that so many businesses “go to the wall each year is due to the lack of financial information”. But I would add that its not just financial information that is needed – but market information and operational performance information. Too much emphasis is given to financial reporting – when it is purely an outcome of good decisions around product development, marketing, supply chain, manufacturing etc etc. The closer to the source of the driver of performance the information can be monitored – the more likely any damaging flow on effect can be contained.

I got so frustrated by all these issues that I decided to do something to help resolve these problems so have recently published a comprehensive guide [“The Logical Organization”] covering all these important points – what BI does and what business managers need to know about the technology, but written in a way they understand. BI is about executing business strategy, business ownership of data as a valued asset, data quality governance, business process automation, evidence based decision making, personal performance management, effective planning and governance – and a whole raft of business competencies. Collectively, we all need to include more about these items in our communications about BI and move away from the tech speak that scares most managers away, and sends the rest to sleep.

It’s not about technology – it’s about accepting that the operational framework businesses need today is vastly different from 10-15 years ago and that BI needs to be integrated [using BI technology] at every critical point of performance. And that applies to any function, in any business [small – medium and large], and in any industry.

The Logic Evangelist

I mentioned to him that I had completed my book and proudly handed him one of my promotional postcards. He looked at it and a grin crossed his face as he realised that he had, at first glance, read the title as ‘Theological Organization’ instead of the books real title ‘The Logical Organization’.

In laser quick speed the question as to why I would possibly consider that I would have anything of merit to contribute in his area of expertise also crossed his mind. This is of course a totally valid conclusion, so we shared in the amusement of this however, I also recognized that my view of ‘logic’ would no doubt come under scrutiny. On this ground I feel secure, so I quickly clarified that my reference to ‘logic’ per se was purely in the context of making business decisions.

He accepted my response graciously but explained that there have been many ‘authorities’ on logic in the past that have been somewhat deluded in their interpretation of the subject.

We promised to explore this debate at a later date. It was only on my way home that I realised that he had just provided me a perfect example of one one of the elements I cover in my book. That each of us interpret reality in the context of our previous experiences and biases.

This is what no doubt led his first reading the title as ‘theological’ rather than ‘the logical’.  I rest my case!