Working harder in narrow picture

By Bozidar Kralj, on September 1st, 2010

Working harder in narrow business intelligence picture

If company has fall of income due to reduced sales volume, because old management and sales staff do not understand well how the market works today. To stop sales decrease their new head of sales or some of them to forgive and hire youth and new people from whom you expect to increase sales. Intensify its sales activities, you telephone sales, an active web sales, people are more and more are on the ground, nearly knocking from door to door. Product development will produce more new products, more complex and more bundled. Marketing will intensify campaigns and so on. On the financial side (beside headcount reduction) there will be several actions taken to save EBITDA and some of them might be introducing new tools or upgrade for reporting and planning with special care of strategic reporting.

Many actions, but the results might not be spectacular. At the end of the company never become what the owners and management initially wanted.

In addition, some of companies can be very “stubborn” and held the position that “need more work, time and investment and will solve the problems and challenges”. No matter what companies challenges are related to the area where does not have enough skill and knowledge. Specially in knowledge gathering and interpretation.

http://www.sxc.hu/profile/criswatk

Let us focus on information gathering and interpretation.

Just buying fancy and most expensive business intelligence tool together with data warehouse on market will not solve problem and improve decision support systems. Buying most expensive solutions, will provide best data interpretation… sounds easy.

Sorry, but companies do not see much out of what specifically they do, in fact, companies can understand things around them, but have a different look. They have different angle at problems, narrow look and not seeing all problems…

…because companies are not watching “the big picture,” and you would not believe how such a model of behavior is often in a common practice.

This is not because company leaders do not know or are stupid, but quite the contrary – are extremely clever and intelligent but look out of the different “glasses” and “not seeing the big picture.”

I just do this, view the “wider picture” and understanding that our “vision” is still limited, there is a difference between successful and less successful companies. For solving the real problem company needs THE RIGHT TOOLS and before that proper concept and solid basis = knowing BIG BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE picture.

The first step is understanding what is really a problem, the second step is choosing the right tools, and then quality solution will follow.