Re: Analyze This! (Building an Analytics Culture)

Chad Nelson — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:41:30 -0000

I have battled with the conflict between the "gut" and the data. Being a management consultant for large firms (Fortune 500), I have seen people get caught up in the numbers, the metrics, and the incentives without having a real understanding of why they exist. In large corporations, there is so much information available (too much, really) that often times management doesn't know what to measure or they build the wrong metrics into their dashboards and related metrics displays. The result is that employees "bark up the wrong tree" and, consequently, the business suffers (I've seen millions of dollars wasted due to these mistakes). They make decisions because of the numbers on the dashboards (the data) without understanding the impact to the business.

Of course, we management consultants have learned to capitalize on this area :) One area where we address this issue is in business intelligence, which helps business provide the right information to the right people. I'd like to build upon Tyler’s solutions based upon my own experiences in this realm.

Dashboards are wonderful as long as the right metrics are displayed (very critical). How do you determine the right metrics? Start from the top -- your business's strategy. Focus on what’s most important to the business. Know your audience and then ask "What behavior do I encourage by displaying this metric?” and “Will that behavior help the business meet our strategic goals?” By aligning metrics with your business’s strategy, you’ll minimize the changes to the dashboards. Unless your strategy changes dramatically, your dashboards should maintain consistency.
Tyler – your closing thoughts are great. As small businesses grow into mid-size and, ultimately big businesses, it’s imperative to maintain a culture where employees and managers think for themselves and use the data as input to the decision-making process. If managers/employees rely solely upon the data for their decisions, they’ll become disconnected from the human ability to be creative and find innovative solutions and a constantly-changing marketplace. They may also end up focusing on the wrong data/metric/incentive…and then end up hiring a management consultant to get them back on course :)

Re: CHASE SUCKS WITH NEW PRIVACY POLICY, OPT-OUT PROCESS IS PAINFUL!

Chad Nelson — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:57:01 -0000

Joe,

You bring up some great points here. It sounds like Chase is playing games with their customers by making it difficult to opt out. It's not the first time a large corporation has done this, particularly Chase. What's wonderful about our free market is that we have the option to choose our banks based on our own personal preferences. I have chosen to leave Chase due to related customer service issues.

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Re: Analyze This! (Building an Analytics Culture)

Re: CHASE SUCKS WITH NEW PRIVACY POLICY, OPT-OUT PROCESS IS PAINFUL!