Features
Feature
True Teamwork
Tear down barriers to improve decision making.
by Joe McKendrick
Faced with rapidly shifting markets, demanding customers and a tsunami of data streaming in from a digitized world, organizations are under pressure, from top to bottom, to improve the quality and speed of their decision making. To succeed in this environment, organizations must integrate diverse data and perspectives to enable collaborative decision making at all levels across the enterprise and beyond their walls.
Enter Business Intelligence
Collaboration among employees, partners and customers requires the ability to capture, store and retrieve data created during engagements. Therefore, it must be tracked and analyzed.
“Collaborative decision making is more than simply getting together and making decisions,” says Colin White, president and founder of BI Research. “You must be able to record the decisions you’ve made and the information used in making them.”
Business intelligence (BI) and analytics also provide the critical information that comes in from all corners of the enterprise. “There’s no way you can learn to play offense and defense, or know where to add and subtract, where to deploy and where to take back, without really having effective access to information,” says Ranjay Gulati, professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School.
“It’s being able to mine the data that comes your way, to look at patterns and trends in markets, look at what’s happening inside the enterprise, and be able to take a lot of that information and turn it into intelligence. It’s really about building an intelligent enterprise that knows how to deploy resources where they’re going to get the most impact.”
"It’s really about building an intelligent enterprise that knows how to deploy resources where they’re going to get the most impact."
—Ranjay Gulati, professor of business administration, Harvard Business School
Fortunately, enterprises can make faster and more insightful decisions thanks to integrated data from within and outside the enterprise. The tools used to gather the data—combined with social networking both within and from outside the enterprise—eliminate barriers between divisions, business units, partners and customers, helping people quickly move initiatives and new ideas forward.
Accordingly, White observes a convergence between BI and collaboration. “Collaboration extends the use of BI,” White says. “This happens in three ways:
- “First, there’s simply the ability to interact and share information. You produce a report, share it with somebody else and interact with them.
- “Second, collaboration can enhance BI results. You can provide feedback, you can tag it, or you can relate it to associated information—documents and so on. This enhances the knowledge content of BI.
- “Third, there’s collaborative decision making, where you not only share and interact, but also employ collaborative tools to help improve the decision-making process.”
Making Connections
A high level of cooperation is essential to deal with increasingly complex business challenges, says Gulati. This requires approaches that enable communication and workflow across corporate boundaries, integrating people and processes as well as data.
“To be more efficient and effective, organizations require more information,” Gulati explains. “We must be more effective—not just efficient—in making sure that we are able to move information in a usable manner to the people who are making those decisions. And we must either move the decision rights to the people who have the information, or you move the information to the people who have the decision rights. You have to co-locate information and decision making.”
“You may find that certain types of information, people or processes lead to good results,” says White. “To establish best business practices, you’ll want to capture the way experts work together from across the enterprise to make decisions and turn that into a decision workflow, and provide that approach to less-experienced people.”
Social Networking
To build this capability, organizations have to understand who is driving critical decisions. The integration of social computing and networking adds a new dimension to managing collaboration. For instance, a vice president or chief marketing officer isn’t necessarily the driving force behind collaborative decisions. Tapping into social networking can help uncover the people who are.
Some companies already use social computing analysis of internal and external networks to identify and better engage with key influencers who help shape decisions. “We can analyze external networks to see how people interact with each other and who are the prime influencers there,” White says. “We can do the same in the enterprise, conducting analyses to see who has the expertise or drives decisions.”
Once key influencers are identified, enterprises can take actions to more effectively reach other customers, as well as improve internal decision making, White continues. For example, with social networking analysis, “you may have one customer in a group of 20 people who is driving all of the thought processes,” he says. “If that customer switches to a competitor, the other 19 may do the same, so therefore you want to make them offers.”
Similarly, within enterprises, there may be key influencers who shape corporate decisions on social networks, White adds, and organizational leaders can focus their efforts to reach out to these key influencers to help advance new programs or initiatives.
Experiment and Innovate
The rise of collaborative decision making creates opportunities that expand the reach and capabilities of data warehouse environments—one that encourages greater participation and involvement from business users, White says. For many organizations, existing methods of decision making are becoming outmoded in an era of intense global competition. Informed by the latest data, leadership must work with people from inside and outside the enterprise. A new generation of collaborative technology platforms, integrated with powerful BI solutions, will increase participation and, as a result, levels of innovation.
Joe McKendrick is an author and independent analyst who tracks the impact of IT on management and markets.