Many businesses are digital already; it's sometimes called "shadow IT", but if you really open your eyes, it's out in the open, for all to see. Can you pivot to take advantage of it? It's a leadership challenge, and a great opportunity.
A simple but comprehensive method for defining your budget - gives a complete picture of all the costs, reduces risk by minimizing the unknown, and makes it easier to compare alternatives.
Most manufacturing companies face challenges when contemplating Digital Products and the IoT, because they are not making Highly Valuable Things or Mass-Market Things, but Specialty Things – niche products with very targeted appeal. And “Information as a Product/Service” will be a radical departure.
Few cloud computing vendors are able to produce a plausible cost model with any level of detail. All of your SMB customers are asking the same question, so why don't you have a simple, clear, canned answer? In the absence of a vendor model, this article will help you quickly work up the big chunks of the opportunity in short order.
We've got the activity captured, and now we have "effectiveness" ratings for the people in the group - how will we put them together and see a relationship? Mechanically, this is a simple XY scatter graph - a standard chart type in both Excel and Google Docs. Let's take a look at a sample data set that illustrates the idea: This is the picture I expected to see: the more you use the system (the X axis), the more results…
For years, web sites have been measured - and valued - by user traffic. Who is looking at this site? When are they coming, and how long are they staying? Driven by the advertising business model that values "impressions", web analytics have evolved in a number of ways; the interest has shifted from Passive to Active. Advertisers want to know who is clicking, selecting, comparing, buying, and abandoning. Games track Daily Average Users, Social Networks quantify contributions and visualize connections,…
I'll tell you about this visualization from a recent internal conversation, but I may end up aggravating some career IT people out there. Yes, I have massively oversimplified things - but I'm trying to develop a broader understanding, and I think it's a good first step. The original question was "How do I manage IT?", but it quickly morphed into "how can I drive / derive value from IT?" (note the powerful difference that a single letter makes - derive sounds sustainable)…
Deriving information out of raw data involves seven separate, dependent processes - the Data Value Chain. Your team needs to have a multi-layered ecosystem of skills and experience required to effectively extract the most value.
Have you ever waded into a process improvement project that had trouble finding a place to start? Consider, for example, a strategic sales team (for RevCo, famous maker of Widgets), working their established product families to generate breakout new customers and revenues. They've implemented a CRM system, but are having problems getting adoption and seeing benefits. The difficulty, of course, is that they have not changed their marketing strategies, and can't see beyond "automating our current process" as a measure…
One of a series of posts on presenting a summarized view of Corporate IT using SQDC-style KPIs - a Lean Management-inspired way of speaking in a language your Manufacturing Operations teams will understand.