Forbes.com BLOG – You can grow wealth in 2011 like Amazon, Apple, Priceline, Colgate – http://blogs.forbes.com/adamhartung/2010/12/24/you-can-grow-wealth-in-2011-like-amazon-apple-priceline-colgate/
This article lays out a great set of recommendations, but HOW do you execute these? For every company in every industry in every market, the key to accomplishing the recommendations in this article lies within the company’s information warehouse and business analytics functions. That is, in order to make decisions on each of the key points above, you must know your markets and your customers deeply – better than your competitors. But, 1 in 3 business leaders make decisions on information they do not have or do not trust, and 1 in 2 don’t have access to the information they need to do their jobs (IBM CIO Study 2010 – http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/cio/ciostudy/executive-views.html).
So the New Year’s Resolution you must make, is to invest in providing your executives and Line of Business managers with the information and insights they need – actionable insights, based on trusted information. With sooo much data and information available today, to everyone, companies need to integrate it all together into a trusted data warehouse, mine that information to identify trends, patterns, business opportunities, cost savings, who your most profitable customers are, what your optimal marketing mix is, which business segment is most profitable, etc etc etc. And provide visual reports, scorecards and dashboards on key performance indicators.
You can bet that your competitors are fast at work doing this. Data warehousing and business analytics are more important in today’s global economy than ever before – when the economy is growing, even a monkey on a rock can make money, but it takes deep insights and better, faster decisions to make money in a tough economy.
Once you have this insight, then and only then, can you implement the suggestions laid out in this article.
Larry Heathcote's Blog 