Why a best-run enterprise needs to be a clear enterprise

Never before have organisations generated so much data. It’s calculated that 40 exabytes of unique information in all shapes and sizes will be created this year – that’s about as much as in the last five thousand years put together (apparently). But never before has there been such a pressing need to make sense of this morass of data. In fact, according to a recent study by the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, a staggering 90% of C-level executives feel they don’t have the necessary information to make critical business decisions — and a surprisingly candid 50% are concerned that they may be making poor decisions as a result.

That's a real problem when every interaction, inside and outside an organisation, along with historical information and external market information, is captured and stored in systems that frequently can't talk to one another. Inevitably, as well as the technical, economic, regulatory and even social implications of creating this volume of data, there's a strategic impact resulting from the way it is accumulated, categorised, stored, retrieved and interpreted. Do you always have confidence in the numbers you're given?  And how can you manage what you can't measure? 

People are changing the business model

A legacy of conventional working practices may mean years of accumulated know-how resides in the heads, filing cabinets and local hard drives of older personnel who may have struggled to embrace the full potential of digitised information-sharing.  This means that as these experienced workers approach retirement age - a phenomenon referred to as "Grey2K" - a significant body of process and domain expertise leaves with them. 

The obvious answer is that knowledge transfer mechanisms must be put in place to ensure valuable expertise isn't lost.  But this type of individual may have been used to making decisions based on gut feel or rule of thumb rather than hard facts.  As these workers need to be replaced, the solution may not be to hire additional staff but to give existing staff the means to make better informed, more rigorous decisions - a more cost-effective option and one that is more likely to contribute to an agile enterprise. 

At the other end of the spectrum, a new breed of employee is entering the workplace with very different expectations of their professional life. This generation tends to envisage staying in one job for only 2-3 years, moving regularly to broaden their skills, increase their earnings potential or to alleviate boredom or dissatisfaction. As voracious consumers of content outside of work, these workers are accustomed to near-instant access to people and information.  With the advent of Web 2.0 and social media, they're used to intuitive searching that puts masses of information at their fingertips very rapidly. 

They demand similar facility from their enterprise software and expect new systems to be up and running in hours, not days, weeks or months.  They're impatient and intolerant of any physical or political obstacles that prevent them from getting a clear snapshot of what's going on at any point in time. They also want access to information on an as-needed basis without having to put a request in to an IT analyst to run reports on their behalf.  They expect the flexibility to be able to work from home or remotely rather than being predominantly office-based and therefore demand a sophisticated level of support in terms of productivity tools, mobile devices and connectivity - and the commensurate cultural leap in recognising this decentralised yet interconnected model can lead to more effective ways of working. 

Business network transformation

All of this changes the very nature of work. A rise in the role of shared services across various lines of business is driving a greater need for common platforms and information.  As teams are increasingly cross-functional and globally distributed, the importance of collaboration and sharing information across time zones and continents grows ever more pressing.  Workers are starting to transition from individual contributor roles that operate within functional silos to team roles that require multi-disciplinary and often international collaboration. But that means people need support for how things really get done - working as teams, communicating across boundaries.

The days of managing a business using only structured (quantitative) data generated within an organisation's four walls are also well and truly behind us.  All information, whether structured or unstructured, internal or external, needs to be brought together in a way that's relevant for business decisions.

Companies can no longer have an arms-length, point-to-point relationship with their customers, suppliers and business partners.  They need to optimise performance across a dynamic network of organisations with whom they may have a broad spectrum of relationships, including outsourcing, offshoring or in-housing. 

Formerly centralised and process-driven organisations are morphing into business networks that can adapt to global competition, constant change and shifting demand.  As a result of these "environmental" changes, we're seeing the need to converge data and business processes into single, integrated systems that deliver visibility across the enterprise.  But in most organisations, that need is still far from being met. 

The problem is that executives are all too often disconnected from the realities faced by operational units, forced to make decisions without a clear view of what is happening on the front line.  Organisations find it difficult to communicate goals to their employees and to align their day-to-day activities with overall strategy. 

These are the kinds of situations we see across hundreds of organisations, from growing companies to large, established enterprises, who share a universal need to tame information chaos and integrate their business processes before they can execute on their strategy and monitor the success (or otherwise) of their actions. 

The need for a clear new world

The challenges organisations are facing - and more importantly their solutions - fall broadly into four discrete areas of the science or art known as Business Intelligence:

Information Management

In order to create a trusted foundation for decision making in a fragmented universe of multiple systems and competing standards, you need to clean up and integrate your existing data across a common platform.  This often means drawing together a rag-tag miscellany of databases and data marts from diverse business environments with different semantic and taxonomic conventions, and then harmonising new, "bought-into" protocols across your entire organisation.  To this end, there are a number of tools available that perform the functions of data integration, federation, data quality, text analysis, metadata management, master data management and data mart solutions. 

This "nuts and bolts" activity is perhaps regarded as one of the least glamorous aspects of business intelligence - yet without it, you're effectively basing decisions on a partial or erroneous view of your operational and financial performance.  The old adage of "garbage in, garbage out" from a bygone era of mainframe computing has never been truer or more relevant. 

Information Discovery & Delivery

Today, a paltry 15% of employees typically have access to business intelligence, so putting information into the hands of all your knowledge workers rather than a restricted few is a glaringly obvious yet often overlooked opportunity to create significant competitive advantage and improve the responsiveness of your organisation.

The functions which broadly fall under this category include the triumvirate of query, reporting and analysis, plus search and advanced analytics.  The "delivery" aspect is an area of acute interest because it addresses the fundamentals of making information available to those who need it, when they need it, in the way they want it, and it therefore reflects many of the social and cultural phenomena that are changing the way we work today. 

Echoing the methods we use to carry out internet research for personal and professional purposes, new tools are available which mimic the speed and simplicity of familiar web-based search engines to crawl through an organisation's data repositories and deliver keyword-matched results.  A simple, yet effective way of boosting personal and organisational productivity.

A further benefit that cannot be underestimated is the evolution towards a self-service model for management information.  Some of today's reporting and visualisation tools provide the kind of intuitive interface that enables even the least tech-savvy business user to confidently create formatted reports and insightful dashboards.  These allow the outcomes of hypothetical business decisions to be modelled with point-and-click ease, enabling those all-important "what if..." questions to be answered with greater certainty. 

It's not just about novel ways of accessing and interpreting your existing data.  Under the aegis of "discovery" are new tools that automate the process of scouring internal and external sources for both quantitative and qualitative data.  Unstructured information such as emails, documents, notes fields and web content is estimated to comprise more than 80% of all organisational data. This is certainly a tool that is gaining credence as wikis, blogs, tweets and various other social applications are establishing a firmer foothold within the global business community. 

Governance, Risk & Compliance

One resounding lesson that has emerged from our recent economic history is that regulation is perceived by increasing numbers to be a necessary evil.  In the financial services sector and beyond, the collective disciplines of Governance, Risk and Compliance are rapidly growing in importance as a means of maximising strategic and operational effectiveness while minimising cost by proactively aligning, automating and monitoring key risks and controls. 

At its heart is the tenet that risk needs to be tracked and managed just as proactively as, say, financial performance, yet auditing is a retrospective process by nature.  If you're relying on a backdated snapshot of your business, it's akin to driving a car by looking in the rear view mirror. 

By automating exception reporting, risk in all its many guises can be flagged up - from detecting fraudulent activity that could result in financial penalties to something as prosaic yet transformational as being alerted to negative user reviews on the web by your customers. 

Enterprise Performance Management

Enterprise Performance Management is defined by a combination of people, processes and technology.  At its heart are a set of analytical applications, historically focused on the finance office, which supports strategy management; planning, budgeting and forecasting; financial consolidation and reporting; and profitability and cost management.  Today, these applications increasingly extend beyond finance into operations such as supply chain management and procurement. 

The role of EPM is to ensure that workers have a complete view of business performance, from the top floor to the shop floor.  This supports collaboration between senior executives and operational managers who can provide feedback and act in alignment with corporate strategy as they go about their day-to-day activities. 

Bringing clarity to your business

Organisations need information to manage two contradictory pressures - increased complexity from doing business globally at ever-increasing speed, and increased accountability as stakeholders demand rigorous and sustainable business practices across economic, social and environmental dimensions. 

The hallmark of a sound, pragmatic approach to Business Intelligence is to embed the insight gained from consistent, reliable data into the very fabric of business processes so that people have the information they need to make the right decisions and take action - be that determining whether to divest an entire business unit or simply identifying what to cross-sell a customer on the phone.

A key advantage of implementing a self-service information model is that it reduces reliance on IT for the vast majority of routine and ad hoc requirements.  Business users can significantly reduce the amount of time they spend gathering and analysing information, and rather than creating IT bottlenecks by queuing requests for information, this frees up valuable time and resource that permits the IT function to act as more of a strategic business partner to the wider organisation. 

As companies become more interconnected than ever before, business models are evolving from linear value chains to collaborative "networks" with all of the partners the network focused on how they can jointly deliver value to the end customer. That's why you need to evangelise the process of converting low-value raw data into high quality, actionable information not only within your own organisation but to the wider ecosystem of customers, partners, suppliers and regulatory authorities that you do business with and exchange information with every day.