Prior posts focused on implementing technology. I’d like to take a step back to consider how people actually use the systems we’ve implemented, or more specifically to address how people exploit the information we pour into them.
The answer, of course, is it depends.
If you ask,”How well do we use information to operate our business, to do things like tally revenues, pay the bills, account for people and the like, the answer has to be ‘pretty well’.”
If you instead ask, “How well do we use information to better our business?” the answer is far less encouraging.
Consider the following charts. You can quibble with the data points (endlessly) but the main messages resonate with me.
Both charts show the results of a survey of over 1,300 managers polled by the Harvard Business Review. In the first chart (below) the left axis lists four important information uses. The top (blue) bars show the percent of respondents who say their organizations use information to effectively improve service, sales, loyalty, and collaboration. The second (red) bars show the percent of respondents who say the ability to achieve each objective is important to their business.
The gaps within each set of bars is dismaying: collectively, these gaps indicate a persistent inability to use information to serve customers, grow sales, and increase collaboration—in other words, to better our business.
I don’t think these gaps are terribly surprising. Most organizations have volumes of information about what has happened. Most own scads of information that could be used to make good things happen, but somehow fail to prospectively use information to make something new, important, valuable happen.
My second chart suggests why organizations don’t use information prospectively: information is as fragmented, isolated, and silo’ed as our organizations (all together now, D’OOHH!).
I don’t know if information utilization would really improve if there was “unified view” available to all—what I need to see as a customer service manager varies from what you might want to know as a salesperson.
But I do subscribe strongly to the idea that organizations fail to effectively use information because information is bound too tightly by existing organizational structures.
Perhaps we need a new “information structure”—a commitment to making information access and use largely independent of existing organization lines. Data collection could continue to conform to organization structures; accounting will collect the bills, sales will still book the sale; but profound changes in how information is compiled, accessed, and USED are in order.
But what would that look like? And more to the point how would we get there?
More thoughts on these practical considerations in future posts.
