Central nervous system
YOUR brain is the central organ of what is called the nervous system. Together with the spinal cord it makes up the central nervous system. It controls the activities of the body. Processing, integrating, and co-ordinating the information it receives from the sensory organs, and makes decisions about what instructions sent to the rest of the body. What if private and public sector organisations were like that.
Like the central nervous system, sensing what is happening in all parts of the business or parts of government, reacting to things, anticipating situations, assessing scenarios and circumstances to make things happen in the time frames and in ways that you want as the chief executive, chief marketing officer, chief financial officer, minister of government? Is it even possible?
For your organisation to sense microtrends, and quickly anticipate and adapt to market conditions, I am tempted to say yes, it is.
But knowing through experience, the limitations of collective corporate culture, inertia of change, and lack of patience which sometimes translates to a cost-centric versus investment mindset, I'd have to say no it’s not possible.
Bring a business-driven approach to people, process, and technology into the conversation, and well, you are tempted to consider saying yes, we can.
Add detailed integrated corporate-wide data to that equation and I would strongly suggest that we can get pretty close to our organisations working like the human brain and its central nervous system.
There will be many naysayers among top executives if you asked them.
Here is why: Executives are reluctant to invest, lack the patience due to fiscal reporting requirements, usually no more than a year. And that, for perspective, is around three months longer than it takes to give birth to a human brain.
And then as good parents do, to the best of your ability, you invest and continue to invest over the years in that infantile nervous system through adolescence and beyond.
Yet, the expectations of your organisations are disproportionately higher than that of the human brain and central nervous systems in the child.
IT systems continue to underperform even today and in particular relative to cost. A cost centric view of IT is in this day and age if not unforgivable, pretty short-term thinking in the context of corporate expectations of return on investment.
Therein lies much of the answer. If you treat something like an expense, then the expectation should not be a return on investment.
What investment?
These IT expenditures are all around, everywhere in the organisation, all generating the greatest asset an organisation has – data.
But no one really focuses on driving returns out of that asset, mostly because you cannot touch it.
It’s far simpler to explain, if you can get the boss to walk around and kick the tyres on a twin cab. Data is a most powerful asset.
It can bring the organisation to new levels of agility by getting rid of many of the
Source: SUPPLIED pain areas of spending in IT rather than investing in the right technology and harnessing the potential of the data you already own.
Here are some symptoms, you are spending too much time getting to the data, filtering through it, manipulating, smoothing, and then compiling reports instead of making decisions.
Other signs include constant firefighting where you are pretty much in reaction mode, when you could be intelligently shaping the future.
And often we just cannot make decisions fast enough. There is so much data coming from so many different directions; our brains don't scale the way data can.
So, in frustration, we goosestep past data governance to create our own data marts – spreadsheets and data bases - all over the organisation, a kind of data chaos that only adds to the data drift, error rates, and duplication.
What often results is hurriedly put together, data mining, business intelligence, data warehousing, and analytical processing technologies, ironically usually takes an exceptionally long time and never really gets finished. Such difficulties erode workforce morale and efficiency.
The next step unfortunately is to buy time, and go for another expense item, a shinier, newer version of the systems currently in place, typically with similar results.
Leading edge executives and technology leaders understand and utilise an analytics capability maturity model, very recent in its conception, known as The Sentient Enterprise.
Rather than a single prescription or methodology this approach charts an overall journey—a transformation of people, processes, technologies, and the meaningful leverage of data.
Organisations can follow to mature their analytics capabilities to survive, disrupt, grow and gain competitive advantage in today's hyper-agile, data-driven world.
A business-first, agile data platform is the backbone for analytics capabilities and processes, that provide a balanced and decentralised framework, with centralised control (the central nervous system) and a foundation for ongoing agility.
Add to that a behavioral data capability that captures insights not just from dayto-day transactions, but from complex interactions around the behaviours of people, networks, and devices.
As these capabilities develop customer sentiment and behaviours get prioritised and elevated to mission-critical importance for the organisation.
Then there's the much “lip-serviced” collaborative and ideation abilities that lets the enterprise socialise insights across their business and social connections within the organisation to see which ideas, projects and people get followed, liked, shared, and tagged.
Analytical applications leverage the simplicity and logic of the consumer app economy to deploy analytical capabilities as internally packaged workflows, selfservice apps that can be used by the entire business community.
And finally, autonomous decisioning is where the Sentient Enterprise is realised - advanced algorithms helping the enterprise make more and more tactical decisions on its own without human intervention so people can put more focus on strategic planning and major decisions. Where do you start is next week’s discussion.
■ Naleen Nageshwar is a practitioner of executive decision support, data analytics and digital business transformation specialising in business imperatives that can be supported through analytic insights and big data. He runs his own consultancy Data4Digital. He can be reached at naleen@data4digital.com or via his website www.data4digital.com