The customer expectations are very different, now. Decisions need to be taken in real time, to convert a prospective customer into committing. In an age, where customer seeks instant gratification, organisations that have a longer time-to-market due to cumbersome internal processes, customer loyalty is hard to win. For example, a customer visits your physical store, if you offer a discount at the very first visit, the chances that the customer will revisit your store are high. On the other hand, if you are merely noting customer behaviour which then has to pass through unwieldy processes, later, to mete out a discount coupon, the second time the customer visits your store… if at all, is a thing of the past. The advanced analytics systems now, are able to handle data influx from multiple disparate systems, cleanse and house in the dmp (data management platforms), ready to be queried in real time to cater to predictive and actionable insights, on the fly.
However, if the business methodologies used are not complimenting this speed of data processing, the business will still suffer. The widely used, Lean methodology preaches creating more value for customers with fewer resources. Anything that does not yield value should be eliminated. But organisations need to adapt to only the best of the best practices. Following methodologies by the book, on the contrary, causes bottlenecks. To be able to leverage more out of the Business Analytics systems and solutions, the processes and tools, both, need to be streamlined to create customer satisfaction. A lot of the business intelligence projects take too long to deliver and are inflexible, resulting in the functional business teams procuring BI tools which promise quick wins. The problem with such data discovery tools, apart from creating data silos, are that they lack data governance, hinder data sharing at an enterprise level and increase licensing costs.
It is not a solution to have no business process at all. There needs to be accountability and that comes from business processes. It is a continuous iterative process to find the right balance between processes and the speed of delivering value to keep the costs low and increase the profitability of any business. One size does not fit all and it applies to organisations, as well. Methodologies/processes need to be tweaked, tuned and tailor made for each company. Organisations that try to implement Lean/Agile/Scrum but fail are because they lose the customer focus, some companies do not have a clear strategy in place with employees being assigned foggy responsibilities and lack of communication and this in turn results in the focus shifting from the task at hand to the nitty gritties of such project management methods.
To avoid pitfalls, a clear business strategy needs to be defined specifying business goals in order to maximise gains. The next step is to trim all the processes that lead to this gain.
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