Enhancing the business ability to anticipate and respond - By Hamid Soltani

 We live in a world of constant variability and change and amongst such uncertainties, business has a difficult challenge of making real sense of their often complex internal & external environments, making rational decisions, developing effective strategies and intelligently delivering solutions for their survival and future sustainability. Over the past two decades, global integration and new technologies have created great opportunities and also added new complexities for organisations to deal with. As organisations desire to improve their capabilities, and in the absence of a holistic, intelligent and fit for purpose solutions, they can waste their precious energies and resources on silo and singular technical solutions. The hidden key in capability development lies in their Business Intelligence (BI) for them to holistically anticipate and respond to internal and external environments. 

BI has become a well recognised strategic tool and is endorsed by executives and business leaders as instrumental in driving business effectiveness and measurement. The biggest challenge for business however, is not just having the right hardware or software for the job, but how to create the necessary paradigm shift in their overall management practices, culture of thinking, leadership capabilities and understanding how to structure and use the organisation’s BI capabilities. Even those satisfied early adopters of BI have found themselves struggling to cope with the new complexities relating to changing Customers, Competitors, Staff, Suppliers and Regulators needs. The ongoing challenges for survival and creation of a sustainable business have added a new urgency for the adoption of Business Intelligence that can organically take root and manifest itself within the organisations. 

successful BI

 A well defined and fit for purpose BI capability enables an organisation to become more self aware, think and operate as one single co-ordinated unit with well established natural structures and capabilities to ensure its sustainable prosperity. Adoption of a robust BI methodology and practices will enable the organisation to:

  • Look and understand their internal pulse and what truly happens at every level of their structure.They can also learn to become wise on how to source the appropriate information and measure them intelligently with a wider organisational view.

  • Look and understand their external ecosystems, events and information. Define the boundary line for how far and wide their organisation would like to look outside themselves and still recognise the information as relevant.

  • Understand the needs, wants and expectations of all stakeholders and recognise how equally important each are to the survival of the organisation and how finely they should be balanced and managed in order to achieve true sustainability for the organisation.

  • Intelligently measure the ramification of forces acting upon them and to respond intelligently, effectively and decisively.  

  • Create a holistic plan of action (one coordinated organisation voice) in order to mobilise capabilities for appropriate outcomes to ensure ongoing sustainability for the organisation. 

The BI Journey for Leading Organisations

The starting point for an organisation is to acknowledge the current limitations and problems within their appropriate organisational context. This could include noted problems / issues with various stakeholders’ dissatisfactions, internal capability gaps and strategies that fail to deliver intended outcomes. 

It is acknowledged by industry experts that technologies by themselves cannot provide complete solutions. Industry sources report that inappropriate, incorrect and an improper business context use of technology can be the biggest limiting and costly force for many organisations. The technology solutions and the related services are often sold by vendors in silos and without true evaluation of the overall systemic organisational environment and/or fit for purpose considerations. 

The real essence lies in the way we think, structure and manage our organisations. How we perceive the organisation is highly important to how we organise ourselves within such structure.​

For example, if we think of an organisation, as a series of functions, activities and people with no clarity on the complex and systemic nature of the interrelationships between the parts, we could organise ourselves into silo structures. On the other hand, we could see organisations as living beings that, on one hand, have a complex adaptive nature and on the other hand, they acts very systemic. 

The complex adaptive side deals with external variability and constantly reorganise itself and often hard to constrain. The systemic aspect deals with the internal and acts like a single body with full co-ordination of its mutually interrelating parts. With such two sided understanding of the nature of organisations. we then have a better holistic appreciation of the forces and within such framework in mind, we can deliver harmonious (balanced stakeholder satisfactions) and sustainable business outcomes. 

Therefore the required shift for applying BI involves adoption of both complex and systemic views of the organisation, courage to do the right things for the long-term gains, engaging management practices that are encompassing of all parties within the organisation scope. 

An appropriate BI adoption allows the organisation to mature from the “survival attitude” to a truly thriving and sustainable one. In the BI environment, the required changes to the leadership practices and cultural shifts can permeate naturally throughout the organisation. 

Benefits & Outcomes of a well Implemented BI 

It allows the organisation to: 

  • Organically become self aware & naturally self adjust from their surviving to thriving state

  • Create real vision, paradigm and fundamentally shape organisations for sustainable prosperity

  • Establish new leadership structure with real capabilities to deal with the whole organisation

  • Conduct organic adoption of intelligence without the usual traumas and pains associated with the conventional transformation

  • Provide an inclusive approach and enable people at every level to genuinely exercise legitimate autonomy, empowerment, motivation to excel

  • Create a real and natural balance between expectations of staff, management, customers, shareholders, suppliers and regulators.