Thursday 1 May 2014

The fastest route to achieving operational excellence lies in re-mastering your enterprise DNA 'digitally' as a 3D data cube

Managers driving HR, compliance and performance initiatives need 3D (CUBED) federated data perspectives – but how do you get clarity when data is siloed in hybrid enterprise software applications?  And why does it matter?

As an organizational designer I spend much of my week working with business owners and line-of-business managers leveraging people assets, reducing costs – and more recently installing more robust policy governance and growing performance.  One of the more challenging aspects of my role is helping non-IT people get their head around the importance and value of looking at data in multi-layered perspectives rather than on ONE flat view.

Consider process accountability for example:  All organizations have capabilities (things they do to create customer value and sustain their business continuity) supported by a cascading tree of mission critical processes, then sub processes, and process steps.  Each process step SHOULD have a matrix of role accountability, responsibility, things to be done etc.  From an organizational design perspective I need to know EVERYTHING about the fine-grained action that happens right at the bottom in order to make sure it happens, and that it happens right.  That means I want to look at each action from the perspective of being a customer (customer science), being  a shareholder,  its contribution to strategy (performance), how often it doesn’t happen and the consequence on customer value produced (Six-Sigma), the impact on policy governance and risk (compliance)….

…and today, in most businesses, you can’t do that. 

So what? Why is it so important to digitize the DNA of an enterprise?

With a 3D digitized view of your enterprise, decisions can be made through more useful insights.  Leaders and managers can ‘ask their own questions’ and be curious about how the business works. When things don’t happen as they should, it’s easier to spot.  NEW LEARNING that results from customer and stakeholder feedback can be directed to the right places in the enterprise where these lessons can be applied. Digitizing the enterprise is fundamental to understanding, is fundamental to operational excellence, compliance, performance, success!

All too often, business leaders want the outcome of projects ‘by tomorrow’ (quite understandable!) and so the last thing they ordinarily want to do is start at the very top of the tree formalizing a data model of the enterprise.  They’d rather pick the low hanging fruit.  They want to see the swishy dashboards - and they don’t care how the data gets there.  But, if you want accurate perspectives on data and you want to be able to examine topics (and answer new questions) then SOMEONE has to build-up the DNA of the enterprise into a reliable data structure.  When this preparatory work isn’t done it means consumers of the data are likely to misinterpret what they’re seeing.  This can lead to all sorts of bad outcomes and consequences. 
Invariably, taking these short-cuts can move things forward quickly to begin with, but every successive step takes longer, and the absence of a unified data-mart to interrogate means that every question requires a new report, a new spreadsheet, another new process… aaargggghh!

One time my satnav took me the quick way to Edinburgh late one week-day as I made my way to a conference from my home in The Midlands, England.  A little after 11pm I found myself cross a cattle grid on top of a wind-swept hill with cows watching my progress on all sides!  Some shortcuts are not worth taking.

What people do ‘get’

Appreciating how data works in cubes can be thoroughly mind-blowing, but what people do ‘get’ are spreadsheets.  Most business people work with spreadsheets – and as everyone knows, spreadsheets are great to use and very versatile for looking at data.  Whilst they can also be exploited and multi-layered using pivot-table features, most folk will use spreadsheets in a flat format where each spreadsheet compares ‘x’ data by ‘y’ data.  That’s great – to a level, but when you want to examine ‘x’ by ‘y’ from the perspective of ‘z’ spreadsheet skills start to separate the men from the boys.

Organizational Designers need software too!

I find that most enterprises don’t hold data in very useful ways.  IT systems are purchased from each department or discipline – and every application manages its own data in its own ways, under different labels.  That’s a problem for me as an organizational designer.

It’s not until you have a 6000 column by 8000 row spreadsheet that you realize, as an organizational designer, you’ve not got the tools you need to become ‘operationally excellent’.  Many stakeholders have a deep interest in data that describes an enterprise, what it does, how it delivers what it does, what it produces. Fundamental to Compliance, Governance, Risk, Performance, Human Resources Management and many other disciplines is the fundamental knowledge of:

How is the organization structured (in terms of legal entities, organizational units, roles…)?
What is its strategy?
How is the strategy executed?
What are the processes that are critical to its success?
What ACTIONS must be done to achieve the plan and run the processes?
What is the stakeholder value (particularly the customer value) produced?

All of the above requires landscape views of data that aren’t normally accessible to organizational designers because the data is not held in a form that lets you slice and dice the data.

The answer IS NOT Business Intelligence 

Scale data analysis projects to enterprise data proportions and we have to deal with the thorny issue of data being held in silos of operation and ‘data silos’.  The last few years have seen many different forms of so-called ‘business intelligence’ software platforms enter the market to solve the issue of helping leaders and managers understand what’s happening in their business by interrogating back-office data silos.  The problem with all of these systems is they consistently fail to answer the ‘so-what?’ question.

You see, most things that leaders and managers want to know they don’t measure because they’re new questions (were they old questions then they’d already have systems and people in place to manage the process!) That means most actionable insights are answers to new questions. The problem for Business Intelligence tools is that it takes SO LONG to formalize the root and branch data structures needed to reliably get at data from wherever it’s being held that it becomes inflexible.

Moving forward

To make organizations BETTER BY DESIGN, business leaders and organizational designers MUST be able to understand how their organization works in 3D to deliver perspectives on operational activity that are needed to deliver optimal customer value, meet compliance expectations and drive performance.

It’s said ‘there are many ways to skin a cat’ but the solution we’ve developed here is to use a private-cloud platform called ENCANVAS to produce an adaptive lens across existing data repositories that removes the challenges of ‘getting hold of data’ and ‘organizing data into cubes’ through its built-in data connectors and transformation tools.  What gets produced is a personalized data cube that produces ‘always purified data’.  ENCANVAS also offers a suite of compliance, performance and operational analytics (reporting) tools to then allow senior managers and organizational designer to construct their own applications and views on data.

We’ve used the ENCANVAS platform to construct our own Organizational Design tools to facilitate the production of 3D cubed views of data for Human Resources Management, Performance and Compliance.
The reason ENCANVAS works when other systems don’t is because of the fact it works like LEGO® bricks and removes the need for IT projects or coding to produce the required outcomes.  It humanizes the process of shaping technology to do our will rather than the other way around.  You can ‘shape the bricks’ in workshops with stakeholders to make sure the outcomes work for the organization and the users.

Of course, a few rules apply:

Garbage in, garbage out – If your operational systems produce trashy data, ENCANVAS can purify and treat most of it, but if the data isn’t being captured (or captured correctly) that can become a problem.

Technology is never the answer – ENCANVAS, and platforms like it, are just tools; by themselves they never solve anything.  What’s needed are domain experts that fully know their processes and how the processes need to work.

Ian Tomlin is European Regional Manager for US Tech Solutions Inc. and advises on federated solutions for compliance and performance, customer science, actionable insights and organizational design.



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