Is Your Company’s Strategy a Secret, Even to Your Employees?

I was recently in touch with a team implementing performance management in a large technology company. To their frustration, the project stalled when the company’s executive team refused to roll out the strategy maps to the rest of the organization on the grounds that it was "confidential"… Given this type of behavior, is it really any surprise that 95%* of a typical workforce does not understand their organization’s strategy?! To... [Read More...]

Are CFOs Good for Business Intelligence?

Whatever terms you want to use, companies are gradually moving toward global strategies that combine traditional business intelligence with more financially-oriented applications such as planning, budgeting, and consolidation. On the one hand, this is great news (CFOs hold the purse-strings, after all), but CFOs aren’t necessarily the group that are most eager for wider information access. According to an IDC study a few years ago, most of... [Read More...]

Classic BI. Sigh.

Sales Manager: “I have an urgent request! We have a sales training next week, and want to show the reps which products our retail customers have been purchasing from that company we just bought.” Strategy Person: “OK, I’m sure we’ll have that somewhere [copy to BI people in US, Europe], but note that the raw numbers will need interpretation: some products have low revenue but are big competitive differentiators, and since... [Read More...]