Did Somebody Say Strategy?

5 Steps to Better Business Intelligence

Cindi Howson (Founder of BIScorecard, author, TDWI teacher, all-around BI expert) wrote a good article in the Feb 25 issue of Informationweek on Pervasive BI. Her 5 steps to Better BI are:

More on the IT/Business Alignment Gap

Today’s Wall St. Journal (10 March 2008) has a great pull-out section written in conjunction with MiT Sloan School of Management.  Dr. Amit Basu (Chair of the Info tech and ops management department at Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University) and Chip Jarnagin (founder of LatticeWorks Consulting) have an article called “How to Tap IT’s Hidden Potential” which you can read here.

They say that top executives who failed to recognize the potential value of information technology have helped to build the wall between IT and the Business.  No one is/was bridging the mind-set, language, and social gaps between IT staff and business management.

Their solution for breaking down the wall includes:

7% more EPM ROI

Frank Buytendijk has written about the Hawthorne effect in EPM (a short-term improvement of at least 1% caused by observing worker performance) and Freek Vermeuleun, Strategy Professor at the London Business School, has blogged about another study that shows productivity increases just by telling someone to expect increased productivity to accompany a new process (or tool, or org. structure) – 6% in this case.

Feed the World: Unilever's Bold New Strategy

George Frey writes about Unilever's emerging market and tiered pricing & product strategy in the March 3rd (2008) issue of Barron's.

EPM systems are adept at handling the multidimensionality of pricing by product by geography (by season, by channel, by bundle, etc.)

Always-On Enterprise Performance Management

Thanks to Frank, I found out that Matt Milella and Mike Larimer of Oracle are blogging about Smart Space, their next generation end-user environment for EPM and BI here.

They were generous enough to let me guest-blog my point of voice on their technology.
Have a look into the future.

A More Rational Approach to New-Product Development

In the March 2008 Harvard Business Review,  Eric Bonabeau, Neil Bodick & Robert W. Armstrong, discuss their approach to separating early and late-state new product development cycles.