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…
I always find the acceptance speeches at Hollywood’s Academy Awards to be inspirational. The ones I enjoy most are Oscar recipients who thank the teams that contributed to their receiving the award. Success comes much more from teams than from an individual’s performance. My favorite acceptance speeches are from Oscar recipients in science and technology.…
OECD data shows the per capita cost of health care in the U.S. at twice the OECD average, with a lower measure of outcome (average life expectancy). I’ve no qualm with health care costs rising as a percentage of GDP; efficiencies in agriculture, mining and manufacturing are going to show up as higher spending levels elsewhere in the economy, with improved health care a clear priority for additional resources for most citizens. But at twice the cost?
It came as a bit of a shock that some customers just weren’t going to pay you. For no good reason. I would ask if perhaps the delivery had been short, or was late, or something went wrong with the implementation, or they were trying to use it as leverage on another deal, or maybe they were having cash flow problems themselves. If so, we could work something out. No, it wasn’t any of those things, this was simply how they treated all their vendors, they’d pay us when they felt like it, or maybe they wouldn’t pay us at all.
While the first use of the term “business intelligence” was in a 1958 paper by IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn, it was Howard Dresner in 1989 (later with Gartner) who defined the term and the practice as we now recognize it. Even I could have invented the concept in 1999, but it was Dresner’s talent that he recognized a decade earlier that the disparate data warehouse, analytic and reporting projects and initiatives needed to be unified under a single umbrella.
The fundamental problem that BI addresses is: scarce IT resources.
When you begin your career your most important skills are your hard, technical skills; the finance and accounting, the statistics and economics, the physics and chemistry, the engineering and calculus. But as I tell my business school mentees, as your career progresses, the emphasis changes such that much sooner than you might initially think, the most important courses you took in college turn out to be psychology, philosophy, literature, sociology and anthropology.
We all bring important skills to the myriad of different conversations we participate in every day, and while confrontation and intervention might not be your cup of tea, applying the right type of analytics to the problem, consistent with its level in the Conversation Pyramid, can immediately make you and your team valuable in either catalyzing your own organizational transformation, or simply improving your organization’s value creation or mission effectiveness.
Mike Tyson probably said it best: “Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth.”
The future of business is the martial arts CEO, the jujitsu strategist. Far too many organizations approach business with an American football mentality, complete with scripted plays, huddles and time outs, but the real world isn’t quite so convenient and accommodating.
It is no longer sufficient for an organization to be lean, agile and efficient. Its entire supply chain must also perform as the company itself does. If some of its trading-partner suppliers and customers are excessively high-maintenance, those suppliers and customers erode profit margins. Who are these troublesome suppliers and customers, and how much do they drag down profit margins? More importantly, once these questions are answered, what corrective actions should managers and employees take?
It’s the 2012 Olympics. How do you think performance is going to be measured at the games by the teams involved? The number of gold medals? The number of world records?
Now come back a few years to when a team is preparing for the games. How is performance going to be managed? You can be sure it won’t be in terms of the number of medals they hope to win.
Instead the focus will be on the type of training being given, the diets being prepared, the way in which equipment and facilities are being used. To ensure these activities can take place, budgets and other resources are allocated to the appropriate activities. In short, the focus is on the process of preparing the athlete and not on the outcomes they hope to achieve.
Now compare this approach to the way in which organizations typically plan and budget.
The balanced scorecard, the methodology developed by Drs. Robert S. Kaplan and David Norton, recognizes the shortcoming of executive management’s excessive emphasis on after-the-fact, shortterm financial results. It resolves this myopia and improves organizational performance by shifting attention from financial measures and managing nonfinancial operational measures related to customers; internal processes; and employee innovation, learning, and growth. These influencing measures are reported during the period when sooner reactions can occur. This in turn leads to better financial results.