Prepared Minds
MIT Sloan Management Review ($) - Jul 29, 2021
Fast-Track Data Monetization With Strategic Data Assets
To monetize data, companies must first create strategic data assets that can be reused and recombined for new value creation.
Frontiers - Jul 13, 2021
Radical Knowledge Management: Using Lessons Learned From Artists to Create Sustainable Workplaces
George Veth
Having been at the intersection of finance and IT for many years, I appreciate the charge for CFOs to fully leverage data to become the Chief Value Officers of the organization; that is the purveyors of “data-based business strategy and drivers of corporate added value”. This article outlines the opportunity as well as some factors of success.
E&Y - Jul 19, 2021
How finance can use data to create value across the enterprise
With public perception always in mind, CFOs must strike the right balance between managing the rewards and risks of corporate data usage.
Paulo Soeiro de Carvalho ($) - Jul 19, 2021
Insights on Organizational Environment
Part 2: Scanning Systems, Actors and Stakeholders
George Veth
This post is the third in a series on scanning the business environment for strategic maneuvering (understanding and planning for trends, competitive threats, etc…). The bottom line is that the complexity of the environment makes it very hard to scan/sense/internalize things on the frontline or “periphery” of our organizations or, even, beyond the boundaries of our ecosystems. I’ve added this post to Prepared Minds due to the fact that our organizations must work hard to get better and better at sensing and capturing these “weak signals” in order to “understand and manage the uncertainty”. Don’t let the slow start to the post deter you.
Paulo Soeiro de Carvalho ($) - Jul 19, 2021
Insights on Organizational Environment
Part 3: Organizational Environment and Uncertainty
George Veth
This is a good old-fashioned accounting of how to create an analytic dashboard! With the advent of advanced analytics, I don’t see as many of these types of articles as I think are warranted. The author is focused on creating a dashboard to support agile project management, but it is really just a clean run at how to create a great dashboard!
HBR.org ($) - Jul 14, 2021
Build a Better Dashboard for Your Agile Project
Good, reliable data is often the key to making an agile project successful. But project managers often struggle to get the data they need — or to find it in a sea of data they don’t. A project to address this problem at Honeywell Inc. can be a model for companies struggling to build useful dashboards that can help project managers make decisions.
McKinsey & Company - Jul 9, 2021
The power—and pitfalls—of dynamic pricing for omnichannel retailers
Former Overstock.com executive Seth Moore clears up some common misconceptions about how dynamic pricing works in e-commerce and omnichannel retail.
George Veth
I appreciate the need to learn from the edges or boundaries of the organization. These are the places where the organization is sensing and interacting with the marketplace environment. So often, our leadership gets lost in our own construction of reality. This article explores just that. It mixes the idea of the types of data analytics with the sources of knowledge (top management versus front line team). Ultimately, it explores how top companies should leverage the realtime insights of the front line team into organizational decision making. It is worth the read.
MIT Sloan Management Review ($) - Jul 8, 2021
Gain Competitive Advantage by Transcending the Front-Line Paradox
Front-line employees are often the first to sense change yet the last to be heard. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Bain & Company - Jul 1, 2021
How Analytics Can Deepen Banks’ Customer Relationships
Activating high-value customers beats pursuing raw retention goals.
George Veth
There were some good business analytics articles this week from McKinsey and from Bain, but I totally identified with this simple post on “knowledge reuse”. It is such a great reminder of how we must begin to accumulate and provide simple access to collective know-how and institutional memory within our organizations. In this day and age, our businesses (if not ecosystems) should be one giant collective brain; with the ability for anyone to have access to the knowledge of the other(s)! This article shows how several companies are doing just that – leveraging technology to capture and to reuse knowledge. I’ll add that organizational culture is needed to do this well!
Fast Company ($) - Jun 30, 2021
What every business leader should know about “knowledge reuse”
When employees have ready access to a company’s collected trove of expertise, productivity and innovation rise
McKinsey & Company - Jun 28, 2021
Pricing and promotions: The analytics opportunity
Many retailers underestimate the value of coordinating decisions on pricing and promotions. A new analytics approach can help.
Gartner Blog Network - Jun 22, 2021
Build a Business Case for Data Literacy Training
There’s a famous quote by W. Edwards Deming, one of the most influential thought leaders in manufacturing quality and continuous improvement. It says: “In God we trust; all others must bring data.”
George Veth
I always pick up and read posts by Tom Davenport. He’s done a nice job becoming the sage expert behind data and data analytics. This post urges companies to be as intentional with data as they would be with any other raw material that goes into their products. Therefore, the post implies, why not manage the “data supply chain” as fastidiously and comprehensively as one would manage any other supply chain?!
HBR.org ($) - Jun 24, 2021
Your Data Supply Chains Are Probably a Mess. Here’s How to Fix Them.
Data is more important than ever, but most organizations still struggle with a few common issues: They focus more on data infrastructure than data products; data is often created with the needs of a particular department in mind, but little thought for the end use; they lack a common “data language” with each department coding and classifying with their own system; and they’re increasingly focused on outside data, but have few quality control systems in place.
George Veth
This is a simple read on identifying and mapping the strategic skills needed in your business against the scarcity of supply of those same skills in the external market. By gaining this awareness, you can plan accordingly. It’s not brilliance, but it is a key to strategy execution!
IBM Data and AI ($) - Jun 17, 2021
Understanding Skills Scarcity in An External Market — Part 1
What is Skills Scarcity? How to measure it? Where to use it?
George Veth
Appreciate the fact that, Dream, the developer behind a revitalization project (called Zibi) in downton Ottawa, has published a performance scorecard to track this development project. The scorecard freely shares progress against the promises that the company touted that the project would deliver (both financial and non-financial impacts). Exciting to see this level of transparency between a developer and the public. This should be an example to all of us who do project work.
Fast Company ($) - Jun 10, 2021
How the developer of a $1.4 billion real estate project plans to track its lofty goals
Countless developers make lofty claims about their projects. Dream, the developer of a mixed-used community in Ottawa, plans to back them up.
HBR.org ($) - Jun 4, 2021
When an Educated Guess Beats Data Analysis
Research on data provided by 122 companies in the advertising, digital, publishing, and software sectors (industries characterized by uncertainty over outcomes) suggests that data driven decision-making could be counter-productive under conditions of uncertainty. Heuristics and gut feelings often offered a better tradeoff in terms of decision-making speed and accuracy; the inclusion of analysis in the decision-making process did not bring about any meaningful improvement in accuracy while significantly reducing speed.
McKinsey & Company - Jun 3, 2021
Grocers can fuel growth with advanced analytics
Organizational maturity will be a critical element for grocery retailers seeking to unlock the full potential of analytics.
George Veth
The term “Futures Intelligence” is so apropos for the work of sensing the environment and the trends that lay ahead of an organization. The constant scanning of the environment for risks, opportunities, or pending discontinuities is increasingly important in our AVUCA world. In this article, we get a simple reminder with a catchy term!
Cathy Hackl ($) - Jun 1, 2021
The Business Case For Futures Intelligence
The pandemic has created a shift in the way executives think and what their priorities are. Suddenly, the future of their business and their employees isn’t what they thought. Remote work and technologies that enabled working virtually took center stage. Interacting with customers, from support to market outreach changed seemingly overnight. Technology adoption is accelerating across most industries.
Smith Institute ($) - May 28, 2021
Optimisation: is it for your business?
If your business, which may be large-scale and complex, relies upon data and you want to better meet key objectives, then there is a strong chance that mathematical models can help.
George Veth
This article explores how data becomes more valuable as it becomes more liquid – meaning that it is available to be used many times over in varied applications and for varied purposes. In this way, the value of the data “asset’ increases exponentially.
MIT Center for Information Systems Research - May 20, 2021
Build Data Liquidity To Accelerate Data Monetization
Future-ready companies draw on liquid strategic data assets to fuel data monetization.
All Time Favorites
McKinsey & Company - Jun 1, 2002
HBR.org - Feb 7, 2012
HBR.org - Nov 29, 2013
George Veth
I like this article’s approach to knowledge management. The researcher/author is searching for a way to leverage or incorporate key attributes of creativity to instruct the evolution of traditional knowledge management – from what has traditionally focused on organized document management to that of continuous learning. The author cites various attributes that she also equates with artists, and she talks about how these attributes should be infused into the knowledge management function to bring the function to life. The article is a bit dense and meanders a bit, but it is worth skimming for the idea.