Competing On Business Analytics

Another way to hone your competitive advantages.....

What does it entails?

It means that decision makers will rely on fact-based evidence in mapping their competitive strategies as well as in executing them.

Instead of relying on intuition and gut feel, C-level executives must ensure that the decision making is based on sound underpinnings leveraging on hard facts.

So what are these hard facts?

First and foremost, let's us consider some of the value propositions that have been championed by leading-edge organisations i.e. customer-centric ness (CRM), supply chain management, yield management etc

Essentially what you want is data that can provide valuable insights to underscore these value propositions, trends in the market place, underlying business processes and clue in as to the untapped white space whereby one can extract value.

In order to achieve this, you would need to source for quality data, house them in an appropriate structure and be able to query in such a way that provides invaluable insights to your business.


For organisations aspiring to achieve these, you would need the right sponsorship from the very top e.g. someone who is very passionate and committed to such an undertaking. In addition, you need to build up the capabilities and you would want to ensure that there is buy-in with collaborators' interests well aligned.

In other words, we need to foster and engender trust. For trust speeds up things..... sound very familiar.

For organisations with legacy issues, the task can be that much more challenging or daunting.

In order to achieve the buy-in, you would need to compress the tasks hence the timeline so that the deployment can be completed more quickly. You would require an extremely experienced, all-rounded professional who can skillfully navigate through potential minefields. That person must possess the business acumen as well as the IT know-how, and be able to work-round problems in order to complete the last-mile.

As the learning curve is steep, you would want to accomplish it quickly before interests fade away. Typical of such projects, the timeline to go-live can be anything from 12 months to 24 months. There will be instances where champions and or process owners drop out during the period and you would want to ensure that corporate memory is institutionalised.

We would want to avoid a situation where we assemble a panel of so-called experts, devoping a herding mentality, incapble of offering diverse and independent evaluations. There is a danger that this will lead to a negative information cascade. Therefore we need to nuture a decentralised eco-system. where we can efficiently harvest tacit knowledge and aggregating it to provide valuable insights. Other innovative ways include setting up decision markets, where the wisdom of the crowds can be gleaned.

Diversity facilitates in exploring alternatives rather than exploiting the already discovered. It can also serve to provide timely disruption to the circular mill phenomenon.

Along the way the project may be hijacked or derailed by unforeseen circumstances. The morale of the task force may be adversely affected.

The key question is how you recover from these setbacks. The answer to it must be that we gather like-minded professionals who understand and appreciate quality. Without which, the team will have no gumption to rally to the very end and the project will end prematurely.


However it requires a mindset change for most organisations before they can embark on such a course.

Once you are confident that the team will persevere, you can get down to the tasks on identifying metrics that you would want to track, and can explain the causal relationship. Some of the questions asked will be:

1. what metrics are necessary to be measured and managed and what is the data required?

2. where can the data be sourced?

3. how much data is required?

4. how to render the data to be more accurate and relevant?

5. what are the rules and processes required to ensure sustainability?

Next, you need to devise tools that you allow you to analyse the data and surface trends. You would want the present it in such a way that power users can feel comfortable in dealing with the signals.

This will set the stage for decision-makers to have a common platform to debate on the findings and hopefully the decision making will be fact-based.

We have completed a number of such projects, and are still evaluating the outcome. For sure we have many take-aways and like the saying goes .... it is not over until the fat lady sings.

The next interesting question is how many more organisations will take this path, and for those who choose not to go this path, can they afford to do so?

Are you ready to take this path?


Keywords: quality, value systems,
trust, domain knowledge, technology, networking, maven traps, speed of trust, lifestyle

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