Prepared Minds

Most of the time, we focus on removing as much uncertainty as possible in the attempt to provide the single “best” answer to the question we’ve been asked. However, when uncertainty is unusually high, we can serve ourselves and our sponsors better if we embrace the uncertainty instead of trying to fully contain it.

Companies that transition to a new risk playbook will be in a stronger position to win the future consumer. There are three key areas to get right.

To compete today, companies need to be data-driven. But for mainstream, legacy companies, that’s easier said than done. Despite a decade of investment and the adoption of Chief Data Officers, this survey of Fortune 1000 senior executives finds that many companies are still struggling against not just legacy tech, but embedded cultures that are resistant to new ways of doing things — over 90 percent of companies surveyed reported culture was their biggest barrier.

Most financial institutions capture a fraction of potential value from profitability insights. The time is right to retire that paradigm.

Many organizations start a Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) process with little implementation experience, and armed with a few books and articles on the subject.  When times get hard or the process stalls, S&OP leaders can utilize an S&OP maturity matrix and a SWOT analysis to determine the next step that is best for their situation.

Few organizations take full advantage of data generated outside their walls. A well-structured plan for using external data can provide a competitive edge.

Broadly speaking, we refer to location intelligence as the use of mapping and geospatial data, in combination with a company’s internal customer data, to improve the customer experience and underlying business processes. 

As organizations launch more and more digital initiatives, CEOs must monitor whether they are delivering business results. These metrics are ones to watch.

Why (and why not) be more end-to-end, how to, and Stitch Fix and Netflix’s experience.

Thank you for joining our inaugural Live Demo Day on January 26, 2021. The Foundry and Gotham demos included examples of how our commercial and government customers — including manufacturers, defense agencies, and others — use our software.

Smart Simplicity involves the consolidation of all GBS activities into a more modular, interoperable, and far more comprehensively coordinated form. It is designed to achieve excellence and transform customer and employee experience, as well as user experience in general.

In an era when the pace of technological disruption is rapidly transforming industries — think of streaming services challenging cable, ride-sharing apps versus taxicabs, or electric versus hybrid cars — both incumbents and new entrants must predict how consumers will respond to innovative offerings. A new mathematical model helps incumbent firms forecast consumer response to novel tech offerings.

In a new report, Forrester outlines the 12 steps chief data officers can take to build, scale, and sustain data-driven discovery, analysis, and decision-making in their organizations.

Transforming a company into a truly data-driven business involves fundamental organizational changes… Ally MacDonald, senior editor at MIT Sloan Management Review, spoke with [Jonathan] Tudor [of GE Aviation] about his work with self-service data and organizational transformation.

Some companies will shape the future after COVID-19. They’ll use machine learning to turn massive amounts of raw information into “golden” decision[s]… The practice of data alchemy is grounded in a new appreciation for what analytics can do, how to use it effectively, and—most importantly—how to embed it in day-to-day decision making.

Predicting consumer demand for goods and services during the Covid-19 pandemic is more complicated than ever. To improve prediction, managers must abandon their biases and seek out new data sets for forecast models, tap local-market knowledge, combine the outputs of many different models, and continually test and refine them.

Many companies get little value from their annual strategic-planning process. It should be redesigned to support real-time strategy making and to encourage ’creative accidents.’

My guess is that there may be a diversity policy on the books, and that there are people of different genders and races. But we need more diversity than that. We need much more intellectual diversity, and we need to find ways to put unlike ideas together in new ways.