Michael Mink from Investor's Daily just released a new article titled "Embrace Analytics, Present Data Powerfully." You can find the full article here. The article is a good read for business leaders looking to make investments that will improve their operations, as the U.S. economy finally begins to turn the corner. The article has several key-takeaways but we feel these are the most important (and what we constantly emphasize to our clients):
Start Small -
To often businesses have gone for the "big-bang" approach only to end up 6-12 months into development and recognize they have had massive scope creep. Remember, innovate with silver bullets NOT cannonballs. Put differently, by innovating with iterative (minor) improvements, you end up with an IT system that ACTUALLY does what you want it to do rather than adjusting your processes to meet an out of the box solution.
See All Numbers -
Do not neglect internal reporting metrics and information as insignificant. Being able to, in real-time, look up the productivity or status of a project, project manager, or sales associate is critical to the management of your organization. Time is money. Any time saved by Information Technology from contract generation to the re-keying of data can incrementally add to your bottom line by improving the productivity of your workforce.
Go Beyond / Think Outside the Box -
As Bill Franks says, "It is quite possible that analytics or actions that were not realistic to pursue even a few years ago could be very achievable today." With Kinetech, this point is particularly interesting as clients struggle to grasp that custom applications can actually be developed more quickly, for less, than "out-of-the box solutions." Information Technology has progressed significantly over the last 20 years. You no longer have to try to fit a square peg (your unique business process) into a round hole (an out of the box solution).
