Please help me with about 1 page of writing on the following topic; 175 Karma I
ID: 436612 • Letter: P
Question
Please help me with about 1 page of writing on the following topic; 175 Karma
I need your personal opinion in your own words please.
Thank You!
Current business and technology conditions that complicate effective application of business analytics to business intelligence and knowledge management data, and the prospects for improvement.
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Here is some info on the topic above
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If, as we noted, knowledge management represents accessing and using information existing within the firm, then it must be complemented with so-called "business intelligence" representing other information existing in the firm's environment. And neither of them is worth much unless supplemented with the kind of deep understanding embodied in what are called "business analytics". The nature of these tools, and their ties to the underlying information to which they are applied, are the subject of much current business interest. In this case, we take a look at some of the attitudes and ideas about analytics and business intelligence in light of the general problems of knowledge management. A good place to start would be this general review of the issues of analytics and their application:
Staples, S. (2009). Analytics: Unlocking value in business intelligence (BI) initiatives. CIO. Retrieved December 2, 2011, from http://www.cio.com/article/489257/Analytics_Unlocking_Value_in_Business_Intelligence_BI_Initiatives
A few years ago, Tom Davenport, one of the chief gurus of knowledge management, wrote a piece entitled "Competing with Analytics", arguing that businesses could develop serious competitive advantage by understanding their information better. This has not really developed according to plan, as the second source here notes. Please review these two points of view of the basis for what follows:
Davenport, T.H., & Harris, J. G. (2006) Competing with analytics, Harvard Business Review . Retrieved December 2, 2011, from http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/peopleready/Competing%20on%20Analytics.pdf
Samild, S. (2011) Tom Davenport: Why aren’t most organisations competing on analytics? Analyst First. Retrieved December 2, 2011, from http://analystfirst.com/2011/09/02/1001/tom-davenport-why-aren%E2%80%99t-most-organisations-competing-on-analytics/
One reason, of course, is that the world keeps changing, both in terms of business realities and technological possibilities. The Gartner Group is one of the consulting firms most known for trying to keep up with trends; here is their latest take on what's going on in the knowledge management area (just listen to the recording; you don't need to pay money to download their actual report):
Gartner Group (2011) Gartner Predicts 2012. Talking Technology Series. Retrieved December 2, 2011, from http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/predicts/
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Required Readings
Gartner Group (2011) Gartner Predicts 2012. Talking Technology Series. Retrieved December 2, 2011, from http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/predicts/
Davenport, T.H., & Harris, J. G. (2006) Competing with analytics, Harvard Business Review . Retrieved December 2, 2011, from http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/peopleready/Competing%20on%20Analytics.pdf
Samild, S. (2011) Tom Davenport: Why aren’t most organisations competing on analytics? Analyst First. Retrieved December 2, 2011, from http://analystfirst.com/2011/09/02/1001/tom-davenport-why-aren%E2%80%99t-most-organisations-competing-on-analytics/
Staples, S. (2009). Analytics: Unlocking value in business intelligence (BI) initiatives. CIO. Retrieved December 2, 2011, from http://www.cio.com/article/489257/Analytics_Unlocking_Value_in_Business_Intelligence_BI_Initiatives
Explanation / Answer
Business Performance Measurement (BPM) systems have grown in use and popularity over the past twenty years. Firms adopt BPM systems for a variety of reasons, but chiefly to improve control over the firm in ways that traditional accounting systems have not allowed. Several approaches, or frameworks, for building and managing BPM systems have evolved with the balanced scorecard as the dominant framework in use today. Despite the growing use of BPM systems in organizations of all kinds, significant problems cause firms to experience difficulty in implementing BPM systems. The problems range across a variety of topics: excessive diversity in the field of study, data quality and information system integration problems, lack of linkage to strategy, fundamental differences in how a strategy is formulated and executed in the firm, ill-defined metrics identification processes, high levels of change in BPM systems, analytical skills challenges, knowledge as a social and non-deterministic phenomenon, judgment and decision biases (from prospect theory literature) and organizational defenses that can undermine successful BPM systems use. To help address these problems, a set of critical success factors for BPM projects, derived from the literature, are identified. A minimal set of four criteria for designing successful BPM systems along with 12 BPM system factors to be considered when building BPM systems are discussed. Forty (40) software vendors with BPM related solutions are listed and the role of data visualization and metaphor is discussed as a potential means for addressing cognitive problems with BPM systems. Given the continual information processing and computing power improvements coupled with the advances in business strategy theory, analysis of decision-making, organizational learning and BPM systems overall, BPM systems are at a crossroads of difficult problems and interesting opportunities. In these questions, the “we” and the “us” referred to can stand for individuals, teams, business units, corporations and organizations and cultures. As encompassing as this definition of “we” is, it is necessary because of the ubiquity of communication technology, most notably the Internet, which is causing us (as individuals, teams, business units and companies) to again wrestle with understanding how it is we know who our competitors and collaborators are, what our core capabilities are, what makes us unique and what we should be doing. The technology is allowing a radical increase in the potential gathering and disseminating of information worldwide. The second question also follows from the first. Knowing without acting properly can be fatal. For businesses, these epistemological concerns are increasingly important as markets, competitors and customers are changing faster and causing businesses that had previously been thought of as enduring to turn up as ephemeral. Business performance measurement is an integral component to how businesses do know things and how it is they cause themselves to act in a manner that helps them survive and thrive. It is natural, then, that businesses would show an increased interest in performance measurement, especially since Internet technology makes diffusion of performance measurement across the business or across businesses much simpler than in the past. The measurement mantra continues to reverberate throughout nearly every corridor of business life. In order to survive and succeed, firms need to set strategic directions, establish goals, execute decisions and monitor their state and behavior as they move towards their goal. Once a firm becomes large enough that a single manager cannot sense the firm’s current state and cannot control its behavior alone, the firm must use performance measurement and control systems to replace the eyes and ears of the beleaguered manager. Over the past few decades, firms have used information technology to provide this “sense and control” capability. Several dozen vendors provide business performance measurement information technology solutions. These tools have leveraged the latest advancements in data and application integration approaches, web-based charting and reporting, statistical analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning and expert system technology. Yet despite the technology’s improvement, availability and increasing adoption rate, many challenges to successful adoption and use abound. The challenges in implementing performance measurement arise in the following areas: Technical Data quality & latency, application usability, visualization of data Organizational Business culture, leadership, processes, strategic control and intent Individual Gesturing, biases, framing and decision-making abilities Overcoming these challenges are not as simple as finding the right software, establishing the set of best practices and implementing a BPM system. Issues in each of these areas are teased out of some of the recent BPM and related literature and discussed here. In these questions, the “we” and the “us” referred to can stand for individuals, teams, business units, corporations and organizations and cultures. As encompassing as this definition of “we” is, it is necessary because of the ubiquity of communication technology, most notably the Internet, which is causing us (as individuals, teams, business units and companies) to again wrestle with understanding how it is we know who our competitors and collaborators are, what our core capabilities are, what makes us unique and what we should be doing. The technology is allowing a radical increase in the potential gathering and disseminating of information worldwide. The second question also follows from the first. Knowing without acting properly can be fatal. For businesses, these epistemological concerns are increasingly important as markets, competitors and customers are changing faster and causing businesses that had previously been thought of as enduring to turn up as ephemeral. Business performance measurement is an integral component to how businesses do know things and how it is they cause themselves to act in a manner that helps them survive and thrive. It is natural, then, that businesses would show an increased interest in performance measurement, especially since Internet technology makes diffusion of performance measurement across the business or across businesses much simpler than in the past. The measurement mantra continues to reverberate throughout nearly every corridor of business life. In order to survive and succeed, firms need to set strategic directions, establish goals, execute decisions and monitor their state and behavior as they move towards their goal. Once a firm becomes large enough that a single manager cannot sense the firm’s current state and cannot control its behavior alone, the firm must use performance measurement and control systems to replace the eyes and ears of the beleaguered manager. Over the past few decades, firms have used information technology to provide this “sense and control” capability. Several dozen vendors provide business performance measurement information technology solutions. These tools have leveraged the latest advancements in data and application integration approaches, web-based charting and reporting, statistical analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning and expert system technology. Yet despite the technology’s improvement, availability and increasing adoption rate, many challenges to successful adoption and use abound. The challenges in implementing performance measurement arise in the following areas: Technical Data quality & latency, application usability, visualization of data Organizational Business culture, leadership, processes, strategic control and intent Individual Gesturing, biases, framing and decision-making abilities Overcoming these challenges are not as simple as finding the right software, establishing the set of best practices and implementing a BPM system. Issues in each of these areas are teased out of some of the recent BPM and related literature and discussed here. In these questions, the “we” and the “us” referred to can stand for individuals, teams, business units, corporations and organizations and cultures. As encompassing as this definition of “we” is, it is necessary because of the ubiquity of communication technology, most notably the Internet, which is causing us (as individuals, teams, business units and companies) to again wrestle with understanding how it is we know who our competitors and collaborators are, what our core capabilities are, what makes us unique and what we should be doing. The technology is allowing a radical increase in the potential gathering and disseminating of information worldwide. The second question also follows from the first. Knowing without acting properly can be fatal. For businesses, these epistemological concerns are increasingly important as markets, competitors and customers are changing faster and causing businesses that had previously been thought of as enduring to turn up as ephemeral. Business performance measurement is an integral component to how businesses do know things and how it is they cause themselves to act in a manner that helps them survive and thrive. It is natural, then, that businesses would show an increased interest in performance measurement, especially since Internet technology makes diffusion of performance measurement across the business or across businesses much simpler than in the past. The measurement mantra continues to reverberate throughout nearly every corridor of business life. In order to survive and succeed, firms need to set strategic directions, establish goals, execute decisions and monitor their state and behavior as they move towards their goal. Once a firm becomes large enough that a single manager cannot sense the firm’s current state and cannot control its behavior alone, the firm must use performance measurement and control systems to replace the eyes and ears of the beleaguered manager. Over the past few decades, firms have used information technology to provide this “sense and control” capability. Several dozen vendors provide business performance measurement information technology solutions. These tools have leveraged the latest advancements in data and application integration approaches, web-based charting and reporting, statistical analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning and expert system technology. Yet despite the technology’s improvement, availability and increasing adoption rate, many challenges to successful adoption and use abound. The challenges in implementing performance measurement arise in the following areas: Technical Data quality & latency, application usability, visualization of data Organizational Business culture, leadership, processes, strategic control and intent Individual Gesturing, biases, framing and decision-making abilities Overcoming these challenges are not as simple as finding the right software, establishing the set of best practices and implementing a BPM system. Issues in each of these areas are teased out of some of the recent BPM and related literature and discussed here. Specifically, business performance measurement and control systems are the formal, information-based routines and procedures managers use to maintain or alter patterns in organizational activities (Simmons 2000). A typical performance measurement helps businesses in periodically setting business goals and then providing feedback to managers on progress towards those goals. The time horizon for these goals can typically be about a year or less for short-term goals or span several years for long-term goals (Simmons 2000). Since a BPM system measures performance, it is important to define what performance is. Lebas and Euske (2002) provide a good definition of performance as “doing today what will lead to measured value outcomes tomorrow.” BPM then is concerned with measuring this performance relative to some benchmark, be it a competitor’s performance or a preset target. Measurement systems are comprised of multiple measures. A measure (or metric) is a quantitative value that can be used for purposes of comparison (Simmons 2000). A specific measure can be compared to itself over time, compared with a preset target or evaluated along with other measures. Since a measure is used for the purpose of comparison, it need not represent an absolute value. For example, in measuring customer profitability, knowing the relative distance in profitability between two customers may be as valuable (and more easily gotten) than knowing the absolute value for a customer’s profitability. Moreover, many BPM systems normalize a measure into a value that promotes comparison not just with itself, but also with other measures. Following Simmons (2000), measures can be objective or subjective. Objective measures can be independently measured and verified. Subjective ones cannot. Measures are also typically classified as financial or non-financial. Financial measures are typically derived from or directly related to chart of accounts and found in a company’s profit and loss statement or balance sheet, such as inventory levels or cash on hand. Non-financial measures are measures not found in the chart of accounts, such as customer satisfaction scores or product quality measures. Measures are also leading or lagging. Lagging measures give feedback on past performance, such as last month’s profit, and typically do not provide insight into future performance. Leading indicators, in contrast, are designed to measure future performance, and more often than not, future financial performance. Some leading indicators to future performance might include customer defection rate, customer satisfaction scores or changes in consumer confidence. Measures are either complete or incomplete. Complete measures capture all the relevant attributes of achievement, whereas incomplete measures do not. Measures are also responsive or not responsive. Individuals can influence responsive measures, whereas non-responsive measures are outside the influence or control of an individual (such as consumer confidence). Measures may be related to inputs into a process, feedback on the performance of a process itself or they may be related to the outcomes or outputs from the process. Measures may be related to human performance, process performance or market conditions. Some, but not all, measures are directly related to the firm’s strategy and are critical for its successful execution of its strategy. These are called critical or key performance indicators. Finally, measures can refer to tangible things, often recorded in the chart of accounts, such as inventory levels, accounts receivable balances, employee headcount, or can refer to intangibles such as level of skill or knowledge, creativity and innovation. In summary, below is a listing of attributes that can be useful in examining, selecting, designing and using measures: Objective / subjective Financial / non-financial Lagging / leading Complete / incomplete Responsive / non-responsive Inputs / process / output Critical / non-critical Tangible / intangible When discussing performance measurement, most practitioners (and software vendors) refer to the type of measurement that helps companies monitor its current and past state. Thresholds, both low and high, for key performance indicators (KPIs) are set and managed by exception. When data begins to move outside the threshold limits, the performance measurement system can alert management, who then attempt to diagnose the problem and address its causes. This type of measurement is referred to as diagnostic control systems (Simmons 2000). While this type of measurement provides management with basic control over the firm and an “auto-pilot” capability that can keep the firm on target with its goals, it is frequently insufficient for success. Interactive control systems provide additional control capabilities to help the firm deal with strategic uncertainties. According to Simmons (200), interactive control systems “are the formal information systems that managers use to personally involve themselves in the decision activities of subordinates.” Interactive control systems help managers integrate new data and learning into the decision-making process. Diagnostic and interactive control systems are not disjoint. In fact, an important synergy may exist between the two as multiple diagnostic control systems serve as a basis for dialog between levels in the firm (de Hass & Kleingeld 1999). This strategic dialog can aid in managers questioning the validity of its control system, constituting double-loop learning which challenges controlling assumptions or variables for the process, the business unit or the firm. BPM systems need to provide insight into different units or levels of analysis. Performance can be ascribed to corporations, business units, support or functional units, teams and workgroups and individuals. One key benefit of BPM systems lies in their ability to help align these different levels of analysis in the firm. Many corporations consist of several business units or divisions that compete in different markets with differing strategies. A corporate-wide BPM system can help articulate the theory of the firm (why different business units exist within the corporation) and improve overall performance by exploiting synergies between the business units (Kaplan & Norton 2001). At the lowest level of analysis lies measurement of human performance, for which the literature and examples are rich and long. In between the business unit and the individual lie other layers, such as the functional or service group, workgroup or team and the business activity. BPM systems are often designed to be a vehicle for strategic dialog within the firms. Therefore, performance metrics and scorecards scattered horizontally and vertically across a corporation, need to be coherent so that the conversations between people about the strategy is consistent and all the different measurement units contribute to the performance of the corporation overall (de Haas & Kleingeld 1999). BPM systems can help provide this firm-wide coherency.