BI professionals spend a significant portion of their time trying to instill the discipline of data-driven performance management into their business partners. However, isn’t there something wrong with teaching someone else to fly when you’re still learning to walk?
Why Implement an Organizational Culture of BPM?
I’m holding a focus group with some call center associates from the general customer service queue of a major financial services institution.
I’m thinking that I’m going to have to sell them on why we’re here, work hard to get their support, and tenuously pull information from them. After all, they probably don’t want to be here…this is a part-time job for some, a stepping-stone job for others, and a placeholder job for the rest…and I need their honest, and probably negative, feedback to do my job.
My job is essentially to improve their jobs. I could not have been further from the truth.
Any process development program is a phased program. The first important phase is the launch. You need a plan in which the organization describes how it will roll out the Business Process Management initiative, selects processes for development and trains the people to lead the actual implementation.
Your plan for a successful BPM deployment should include, but is not limited to the following nine steps:
EPM Channel recently interviewed Janne Ohtonen about focusing on the customer when doing process improvement. Janne Ohtonen is a Business Process and Customer Experience Management trainer, consultant, speaker, expert & coach with over ten years of international experience.
Find out his thoughts on customer experience, tolerating failure (!), the importance of goals and metrics.
You’ve likely played an organized sport at some time in your life - How many different ways were there to keep score? How many different ways were there to determine the winner? Just one – right? It was goals, or runs, or points, or something, but never goals and/or assists, or some weird combination of runs, hits, errors, average, ERA, RBI’s and on-base percentage.
Now, ask the same question about your business – how many ways do you have of keeping score, of determining if you’ve “won” (i.e. met your key strategic objective)?
Have you ever noticed how we often get things backward? At a dinner restaurant some order their entrée before their appetizer. During a job interview some employers are biased with their first impressions of the candidate, such as by their clothing attire, before learning the skills and competencies of the individual.
Please allow me provide some background before I make my case as to why some less experienced “data scientists” get things backward. Then I will explain why.
Culture is how an organization internally responds to things going badly. Revenue did not meet targets; the product was late to market; the competition beat us to market, our cost structure is out of line; our quality is suffering; we’re losing customers and market share; our web site is a disaster and our user interface isn’t much better; we’re being out sizzled and out sexied.
So what is the response? Panic? Anger? Fear? Denial? Not invented here? Blame and finger pointing? CYA? Retrenchment into process and bureaucracy? Freeze everything? Fire everyone? Reorganization? An investigative committee? An acquisition? Fraud/cooking the books? Surround everyone with everything we’ve got?
This is the most unique presentation relating to the topic of Big Data I’ve ever seen. One example used by this presenter is “how would you visualize all those twitter posts relating to someone tweeting about where they just landed in order to get an idea of where people are traveling to?” Words can’t do…
What are generally accepted accounting standards for Tweets?
LinkedIn, the professional social-networking site, reported yesterday that its profits jumped 30% and its revenue more than doubled in its last quarter (from $81.7 million last year to $167.7 million), strongly suggesting there’s a financial reality underpinning the buzz and hype surroundingsocial media.
That reality was reflected in last week’s PricewaterhouseCoopers “4th Annual Digital IQ Survey” of nearly 500 U.S. business and technology executives, which reported that 80% of PwC’s “top performers” (defined as companies in their industry’s top quartile for annual revenue, growth, and profitability) expected to increase their use of Twitter to engage with customers, and 62% planned to invest in social media for either internal or external communications. Sixty-six percent of those companies also said they’ll be collecting more customer data this year, presumably via channels that include social-media feeds.
The question of how to account for all that data is, of course, the CFO’s to answer.
If you are new to the world of Business Scorecards – Welcome! If you have been at it for a while, it might be time to have another look at what your scorecard is doing for you.
Jacques Vigeant, Product Strategy Director for Oracle Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management, was interviewed in a podcast by Nigel Youell, Director of Product Marketing for Oracle Performance Management Applications, and had a very interesting discussion about the business value that scorecards add to dashboards. To listen to the podcast click here.