Blog: Jill Dyche

« Zen at Work | Main | Hey IT! Get Your Mojo! »

In BI, Strategy Is Destiny. (Or Should Be.)

In which Jill, with a nod of the head to operational reporting and BPM, reminds BI users and practitioners not to forget about where their companies are headed.

In his book Corporate Lifecycles, author Ichak Adizes maintains that all too often companies allow their current structures to determine their strategies. Sounds counterintuitive, right? But what can’t your company do because of weak IT investment, anemic management commitment, and flawed incumbent technologies?

My clients usually know what the answer to this question isn’t. It isn’t timely delivery of BI reports, speedy data loading, or changed data capture. But what about real-time individualization of customers, support of customer do-not-solicit requests, or customer and product hierarchy management? Is your Do Not Call list all that it can be? (Check out www.catalogchoice.org for shades of things to come.) Is your customer support tiered, fast, and relevant? Do you know who’s profitable within and outside of a household? What about the ideal product mixes for an existing customer segment?

You see where I’m going. In our rush to proselytize our existing capabilities, we forget what’s in the business’ pipeline. Most of this has to do with the lack of sustained and regular business requirements gathering.

But it also has to do with the business’ failure to think big. After all, you’ve reengineered your supply chain and you now have query access into your ERP system. And your CRM project is finished, right? (The answer should be no, Mr. Rest-on-Your Laurels Marketing Fatcat.) Irrespective of your industry or market segment, your customers are very likely taking you for granted, and their likelihood to attrite is—as 2002’s popular colloquialism put it—only a mouse click away.

In our rush to admonish companies that IT should be collaborating with the business to apply automation to business goals, ultimately enabling strategy, we overestimate the business side, and underestimate IT. We have lots of clients at which IT makes the initial plea for expertise, support, or executive guidance, ultimately educating the business side about what they didn’t know they didn’t know. A company’s strategy—indeed its very differentiation—may well hang in the balance.

Technorati tags: Corporate Lifecycles, CRM, corporate strategy, BI strategy, strategic BI, CRM strategy

Share: