Prepared Minds

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.

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!

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.

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!

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?!

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!

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.

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!

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.

Love this sketch of operational excellence in financial institutions (not sure it doesn’t apply to all industries), and the idea of having an integrated process map for the entire company, so “operations [are] traceable and transparent”. The idea of having a business model mapped out on the wall, with digital alerts and areas of focus, is my dream. We are almost there when combine this deep analysis work with the technology counterpart of digital twins!