Business Intelligence
February 15, 2010From ‘Performance Management in the Midmarket’ by the Aberdeen Group…
During the current economic downturn, Businesses are feeling pressure to access, review, analyze and act upon events and information in order to become more agile as they work to meet day-today operational and financial performance goals.
They interviewed over 300 companies and identified their top pressures in this order:
- Lag times and inaccuracy of operational business decisions
- Need to understand operational performance drivers
- Poor executive visibility to the business
- Executive mandate to find operational efficiencies
- Need to improve customer intelligence
- Need to improve response to customer demand
- Increased cost due to operational inefficiencies
- Declining customer retention
My Thoughts…
Since this is a huge topic, I will stick to one topic at a time over several weeks.
Topic 1: Lag times and inaccuracy of operational business decisions
The old adage ‘time is money’ is still true today. Aberdeen says that companies suffer when the lag time for determining operational performance is greater than the ‘decision window’ [the opportunity to affect performance based on taking or changing an action].
This really makes sense. If you look at a report that is a week old, you may have already suffered a week’s worth of inefficiency. Or, a report that is a week old may hide specific incidents of inefficiency that happened during that week.
All of us see many articles and much data talking about performance management [business agility], but there appears to be more discussions than actions. The companies that act [take steps to improve] are the companies that will end up with greater market share when the economy turns around. Companies that don’t act may not survive.
Your Thoughts…
Is your company ‘talking’ about performance management or ‘acting’ on it?
