As Andy Mullholland pointed out in a recent post, all too often we manage our businesses by looking out the rear window to see where we’ve been, rather than looking forward to see where we’re going. How we use information too drive informed business decisions has a significant impact on our competitiveness.
I’ve made the point previously (which Andy built on) that not all information is of equal value. Success in today’s rapidly changing and uncertain business environment rests on our ability to make timely, appropriate and decisive action in response to new insights. Execution speed or organizational intelligence are not enough on their own: we need an intimate connection to the environment we operate in. Simply collecting more historical data will not solve the problem. If we want to look out the front window and see where we’re going, then we need to consider external market information, and not just internal historical information, or predictions derived from this information.
A little while ago I wrote about the value of information. My main point was that we tend to think of most information in one of two modes—either transactionally, with the information part of current business operations; or historically, when the information represents past business performance—where it’s more productive to think of an information age continuum.
The value of information
Andy Mulholland posted an interesting build on this idea on the Capgemini CTO blog, adding the idea that information from our external environment provides mixed and weak signals, while internal, historical information provides focused and strong signals.
The value of information and internal vs. external drivers
Andy’s major point was that traditional approaches to Business Intelligence (BI) focus on these strong, historical signals, which is much like driving a car by looking out the back window. While this works in a (relatively) unchanging environment (if the road was curving right, then keep turning right), it’s less useful in a rapidly changing environment as we won’t see the unexpected speed bump until we hit it. As Andy commented:
Unfortunately stability and lack of change are two elements that are conspicuously lacking in the global markets of today. Added to which, social and technology changes are creating new ideas, waves, and markets – almost overnight in some cases. These are the ‘opportunities’ to achieve ‘stretch targets’, or even to adjust positioning and the current business plan and budget. But the information is difficult to understand and use, as it is comprised of ‘mixed and weak signals’. As an example, we can look to what signals did the rise of the iPod and iTunes send to the music industry. There were definite signals in the market that change was occurring, but the BI of the music industry was monitoring its sales of CDs and didn’t react until these were impacted, by which point it was probably too late. Too late meaning the market had chosen to change and the new arrival had the strength to fight off the late actions of the previous established players.
We’ve become quite sophisticated at looking out the back window to manage moving forward. A whole class of enterprise applications, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), has been created to harvest and analyze this data, aligning it with enterprise strategies and targets. With our own quants, we can create sophisticated models of our business, market, competitors and clients to predict where they’ll go next.
Robert K. Merton: Father of Quants
Despite EPM’s impressive theories and product sheets, it cannot, on its own, help us leverage these new market opportunities. These tools simply cannot predict where the speed bumps in the market, no matter how sophisticated they are.
There’s a simple thought experiment economists use to show the inherent limitations in using mathematical models to simulate the market. (A topical subject given the recent global financial crisis.) Imagine, for a moment, that you have a perfect model of the market; you can predict when and where the market will move with startling accuracy. However, as Sun likes to point out, statistically, the smartest people in your field do not work for your company; the resources in the general market are too big when compared to your company. If you have a perfect model, then you must assume that your competitors also have a perfect model. Assuming you’ll both use these models as triggers for action, you’ll both act earlier, and in possibly the same way, changing the state of the market. The fact that you’ve invented a tool to predicts the speed bumps causes the speed bumps to move. Scary!
Enterprise Performance Management is firmly in the grasp of the law of diminishing returns. Once you have the critical mass of data required to create a reasonable prediction, collecting additional data will have a negligible impact on the quality of this prediction. The harder your quants work, the more sophisticated your models, the larger the volume of data you collect and trawl, the lower the incremental impact will be on your business.
Andy’s point is a big one. It’s not possible to accurately predict future market disruptions with on historical data alone. Real insight is dependent on data sourced from outside the organization, not inside. This is not to diminish the important role BI and EPM play in modern business management, but to highlight that we need to look outside the organization if we are to deliver the next step change in performance.
Zara, a fashion retailer, is an interesting example of this. Rather than attempt to predict or create demand on a seasonal fashion cycle, and deliver product appropriately (an internally driven approach), Zara tracks customer preferences and trends as they happen in the stores and tries to deliver an appropriate design as rapidly as possible (an externally driven approach). This approach has made Zara the most profitable arm of Inditex, a holding company of eight retail brands, and one of the biggest success stories in Spanish business. You could say that Quants are out, and Blink is in.
At this point we can return to my original goal: creating a simple graphic that captures and communicates what drives the value of information. Building on both my own and Andy’s ideas we can create a new chart. This chart needs to capture how the value of information is effected by age, as well as the impact of externally vs. internally sourced. Using these two factors as dimensions, we can create a heat map capturing information value, as shown below.
Time and distance drive the value of information
Vertically we have the divide between inside and outside: internally created from processes; though information at the surface of our organization, sourced from current customers and partners; to information sourced from the general market and environment outside the organization. Horizontally we have information age, from information we obtain proactively (we think that customer might want a product), through reactively (the customer has indicated that they want a product) to historical (we sold a product to a customer). Highest value, in the top right corner, represents the external market disruption that we can tap into. Lowest value (though still important) represents an internal transactional processes.
As an acid test, I’ve plotted some of the case studies mentioned in to the conversation so far on a copy of this diagram.
- The maintenance story I used in my original post. Internal, historical data lets us do predictive maintenance on equipment, while external data enables us to maintain just before (detected) failure. Note: This also applies tasks like vegetation management (trimming trees to avoid power lines), as real time data and be used to determine where vegetation is a problem, rather than simply eyeballing the entire power network.
- The Walkman and iPod examples from Andy’s follow-up post. Check out Snake Coffee for a discussion on how information driven the evolution of the Walkman.
- The Walmart Telxon story, using floor staff to capture word of mouth sales.
- The example from my follow-up (of Andy’s follow-up), of Albert Heijn (a Dutch Supermarket group) lifting the pricing of ice cream and certain drinks when the temperature goes above 25° C.
- Netflix vs. (traditional) Blockbuster (via. Nigel Walsh in the comments), where Netflix helps you maintain a list of files you would like to see, rather than a more traditional brick-and-morter store which reacts to your desire to see a film.
Send me any examples that you know of (or think of) and I’ll add them to the acid test chart.
An acid test for our chart
An interesting exercise left to the reader is to map Peter Drucker’s Seven Drivers for change onto the same figure.
Update: A discussion with a different take on the value of information is happening over at the Information Architects.
Update: The latest instalment in this thread is Working from the outside in.
Update: MIT Sloan Management Review weighs in with an interesting article on How to make sense of weak signals.
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