Have you been in a corporation where they have business
strategies stuck on the walls, some having the customer at the top, others
their shareholders and others their employees, but all it remains is simply
stuck on the wall, with no analytics to back or track the global strategy.
Have you ever been in a situation where everyone agrees
there must be a solid BI strategy and it somehow either gets drowned in
tactical fire-fighting, the customer feels they have a strategy but when you
ask for it they all look at each other, or it simply never seems to happen?
We have all probably been in some of these situations and
some of us in all within the same company.
Think of this actual business case.
A US mega
corporation/ with a number of different product areas, global geographic
locations, and service offerings / was trying to figure out how to improve
their various reporting applications for 80% of their global analytics. Some critical data-loads were taking 20 hours to run and some queries taking over 500 seconds. After
extensive planning they started with reallocating their IT resources, they reassigned each IT lead to another within the organization as a method of cross-pollination. Then the
senior executives decided to spend eight weeks with a BI Solution Architect and a team of 3 developers to define their BI strategy roadmap, by
interviewing their most prominent executives, and hand them a report on why
business did not have consistent reports and why their BI was always behind business expectations.
The project was called ‘Global BI Health check’. What they failed to
realize was that [1] many of their business executives and key stakeholders
just did not have time to talk to the health-check team – even for an hour in the
eight weeks allocated to define the truth. These business leaders choose to
appoint a ‘big-three’ resident consultancy to represent them in their business
discussions; [2] Daily the company was going
through severity 1 issues in their IT landscape and each time the team
went to the IT leadership they were immediately diverted to solving today’s
critical issue by order. One of the reasons for the health-check was to define how to make Sev-1 issues a once a month type issues. Thus diluting the efficiency of the prime task of the
team; [3] The few business participants allocated either were not the right
people or did not have the experience or the authority to take strategic
decisions. When pushed the business stakeholders simply looked around for who was available and assigned them to the task.; [4] The ‘big-three’ partner convinced the key stakeholders, over
whom they had great influence that their solution was not in revisiting the
current state but in investing in newer technologies.
So while everyone had decided as a group that they needed
a detailed change, very little actually was achieved or changed. The
interesting thing about this business case, and many others like it, is that no
one in the organizational hierarchy too accountability for the impacts due to
the lack of a strategic goal, vision or execution, which clearly defines that
Planning and execution are interconnected- Execution of any plan takes time and
involves key stakeholders to participate actively and that effective execution
requires direct business ownership and accountability. One way of looking at
this is that while all the executives felt that it was necessary to get a clear
sight of ‘A’, i.e. our current state, while defining the future state ‘B’
desired business state in the future- the operational staff was either not
aligned to the executive beliefs or had no perceived benefit in aligning their
day to day assignments towards the executive ordinance. The other reasons could
also be a lack of executive commitment to make this a mandatory requirement in
order to align all tactical developments to a common strategic goal. Whichever
way we look at this example it was a collective failure.
At more than one customer when we ask key stakeholders
two simple questions: How important do you think a global BI strategy is
towards enhancing strategic data-quality and increasing information quality?; and Do you think
your company should invest ten to sixteen weeks in a workshop to define points
‘A’ and ‘B’? In almost every case we get an overwhelming 90% plus agree that a
global BI strategy is critical to information quality and global harmonization
of data. At the same time more than 50% of the respondents doubted that the
other really got it. To my lay persons mind this simply reads “I fully get this
and think this is critical, but I don’t think the others in the room really get
the importance of this requirement”.
When computed collectively this just does not make any
sense. How can 90% of the people agree to a concept and in the same breath
state that 50% of the people will not possibly agree to it.
Here is what I think
could be the reason behind this:
Group agreement- personal disagreement: It is virtually impossible to have everyone in any
organization to agree to anything, especially if is deals with strategic shifts
that impact their day to day jobs and the world they are finally getting
familiar in. On one side if a company culture does not encourage resistance,
challenges or dissent then it will surely go down. However, there are times
when a democratic leader has to stake their vision and take a certain amount of
authoritative decision when they feel further discussions could go on endlessly
and that the proposal needs a fair chance to succeed – thus giving their full support
and commitment for it to succeed. While there are grey areas where one would
not recommend an executive to put their jobs on a limb there are others that
should be evidently clear to any executive to put their commitment to a
program. For example [1] Only actual business stakeholders must participate in
the strategy workshops; [2] All strategies need to clearly define ‘A’ and ‘B’
before it can define a path towards ‘B’, also known as a Fit-Gap process; [3]
There must be global standards and processes in an enterprise to avoid
subjective developments’ [4] Where automation is available it must be leveraged
as a standard process if it is proven to be better than the manual process
being currently used, etc.. These are fundamental qualities that should resonate
with any executive. Disagreements can be based on logic, familiarity with
current state or unfamiliarity with a proposed future state, loss of power,
political alliances, etc. A successful strategy deployment is like a national
presidential election. People should be allowed to voice their dissent in the
workshops and one the new path has been defined they must all stand behind and
work for its success. We need to avoid situations where player either simply
stand in the bylines not willing to help or do everything in their power to
ensure it does not succeed.
The boss is always right: and
if he is wrong look at the heading again. We have for many years been grilled
on this concept and in most organization being nice and a part of the group
seems to become more critical than being right. In some cultures teamwork often
means conforming to the mindset of the team and often the boss. In such
cultures great ideas often sink to the bottom when participants are either
discouraged from fully engaging or their own fear of being ostracized. Again in
our case the key executives did not want to push too hard on the IT director
for fear things would be allowed to become far worse in the Sev-1 situation if
they demanded time from their subordinates, or the fear of damaging internal
protocol relationships.
Lack of persistent to—down ownership: If the success of any global strategy is participation
then if requires a number of actual business stakeholders to contribute towards
it development. To make any program a success the senior leader needs to get
all the players on board. Without this explicit agreement , which often has to
be reinforced consistently and continuously, most people will hesitate to get
out of their daily comfort zones in order to participate in a long term
program, while continuing to give a semblance of support without direct
accountabilities or ownership involved. Most strategy projects fail due to
assumptions and one of them is that all the required pieces will automatically
fall into place.
The singularity approach: Most
strategies must have a singular goal – to align themselves to the business
goals. Whether the strategy is logistics, sales, finance or business
intelligence it must all align to a business goal. If the business goal is to
to be the best information provider in the industry in five years and the
tactical developments continue on a path of subjective developments without any
standards or processes then the two will never converge. A lot of BI strategies are either not worth the paper they may be written on, or once written gather dust in some cupboard, or are totally technocal and have nothing to do with business. The first step of any
strategy is business alignment and then the rest will fall into place.
While all this seems
fairly logical it is not easy to install as true strategic initiatives often
involve change and most humans are rooted to long standing cultural patterns
that fight change. A good start is to start a discussion, point them in the
general direction and provoke challenges and discussions. Let the process take
its own life till it stabilizes into something that aligns with the global
enterprise needs. One way is to demonstrate why strategic alignment will mean
success for the individual, groups and the enterprise because most of us are
wired to not be part of a failure – so holding up a mirror and looking at it
honestly may be the most powerful way of helping managers and executives
clearly see point ‘A’ and analyze whether they are individually and
collectively headed in the wrong direction. The most critical step is clearly
defining ‘A’
