If you want to improve enterprise performance, ask better questions.
Sometimes that means questioning the very fabric of how we ask questions and what we hold to be true. It can mean blowing up existing orthodoxies so that new connections can be made which reveal opportunities or pathways previously unseen.
For example, Uber, Airbnb and Betfair are nothing more than brokerage services. Yet they have radically changed the transport, accommodation and wagering industries because they dared to look differently at the same information, asked different questions and came up with significantly better results.
The challenge is that if you don’t do it, someone else will – and turn your current reality on its head. Of course, a worldwide pandemic could also do that…
If you want to ask better questions, you need to get better data. And as the authors of the ground-breaking book “Freakonomics” pointed out, often it is data that you never ever thought might be connected. For example, one International Not For Profit that I worked with discovered that their donations increased when it rained…
But to paraphrase Arthur Ashe, start where you are, use the data you are already generating internally from your CRM, ERP, WMS, Field Service, Website, HR systems etc., and with the cutting edge tools available to augment, visualise, govern and disseminate it combined with your own business acumen, derive the insights you can to start asking better questions now.
And then, when you are comfortable that you REALLY understand what is going on across your organisation and customer/user base, let’s take your data-driven business transformation up to the next level…