Wrong Data is still a better start than No Data

When the repertoire of enterprise data fails to generate any meaningful information to answer business questions, returning to the drawing board is the wise decision.

Observed carefully, more than often, the root cause points to methodology flaws rather than a direct breakdown in IT systems or integrations.

Problem is, we still treat data as departmental assets and take a territorial approach to fixing problems.   While this is necessary for quick turn around, a holistic approach needs to be in place for addressing data issues impacting across the organisation (involving both IT and business teams), or we’ll end up storing a huge amount of data unusable nor used by the workforce.

Some key areas that should be coehersed to ensure continuous value generation;

1. A focus group with representatives from every unit of the business.
2. Specifying organisational goals that are aligned with data capturing, collecting, analysis and representation accross the organisation (outlining the big picture for your data projects).
3. A common mechanism/process to capture data challenges faced by every unit.
4. A clearly outlined Data policy for internal users ( sharing, redundancies, security...etc)
5. Periodic measuring/ reporting of data assets and its returns ( e.g Data ROI, YoY return, ratio of active and unused data, amount of Intel lead to new growth engine, productivity increase and etc.)
6. Strategic mining of the unused or less used data for new insights on business questions
7. An active initiative to resolve the top three to five data issues affecting the business (e.g. Incomplete customer data, redundancy, bias data, sluggish data delivery to users and etc)
8. 
   

Achieving data utopia might still be a far fetched dream, especially when data is collected through almost every imaginable device/equipment possible. As such, there is no shame in starting with huge amount of wrong data rather than no data. Understand the big picture and take a phased approach, solve one issue at a time. Measure outcome as you move along and the value your data generates will only increase.

Cost , When IT Advisory Breaks Down

No Enemy is Worst than ‘Bad Advice’

When the financial books are closed each year, we meticulously measure the profits; growth of assets;  intellectual property and patent portfolios; accumulated liabilities to employees, suppliers, service providers, regulatory bodies, investors and owners. Subsequently a lesser portion of entrepreneurs, submit further to observe number of unexpected business turns, mishaps or even anomalous increase in operational cost, which consumed significant part of the already tight resource allocations. In other words, the discovery of a series of cash burners that lead to the flushing of valuable resources which could have otherwise deployed

for growth engines. 

For instance, If a small business is operating on a budget of $50 million and is incurring 5% unexpected expenses on average per year, that translates into $2.5 million in financial losses alone. In addition, let’s say that 50% (25 million) of your operational budget is allocated for production which incurred an overrun of 10% of the forecast which translates into another $2.25 million. That is still a total of $5 million over the budget (assuming that no buffer allocation was made for unexpected expenses). Reflecting carefully a little deeper, every one of the drawbacks, may lead us to a point when we received ‘bad advice’ or even worst ‘no advice’ (withholding information intentionally is also a form of ‘no advice’) from a cadre of expert and specialist consultants that we retain as financial, legal, marketing, advertising or technology advisors, among others. According to a survey conducted in the U.K small businesses loss over £6 billion due to misdirections from experts with IT consultants leading the pack (44% followed by management and marketing consultants at 34% and 32% respectively) causing the most damage to businesses.

The common theme here is to take every advice with discretion. As such, investigating IT projects that are currently squandering resources and yet hindering the business from its goals, is a necessary step to identify sources of specialist misrepresentations. 

The Alluring Appeal of the Third Platform Infrastructure and Services

Asian SMBs are pouring billions of dollars (3rd in spending after North America and Europe) into technology with the hope to increase their competitiveness and success rate against larger businesses by adopting more and more of third platform infrastructure solutions (e.g. mobile, cloud, big data, analytics, Blockchain, social tech and collaboration tools) and services (e.g.  AI/cognitive, virtual /Augmented Reality, IOT, 3D, Security, Robotics). Choosing the obvious ‘cloud’ path (both private and public) may have reduced the conventional risks associated with IT projects but even then, there are questions to be asked and answers to be probed to avoid mistakes. Matching the software or services that links best with business operation; choosing the right cloud technology (often to be align with the existing tech eco system); picking the right development platform for mobile or IOT applications and even understanding the various direct and indirect licensing estates, is crucial in realising the returns of investments channeled into automation, optimisation, waste and redundancy elimination. In short, pretty much any decisions on solutions to business challenges depend on sound IT advice.

When Reputed Automation Projects turns into Drawbacks

When strategic IT initiatives get derailed they turn into impediments that weigh on the business forming waste, sluggish business processes, redundant workloads and prone to manual interventions to produce – the very same elements that we are trying to abolish for a much error free and productive business environment. For instance, in 2004 HP stated that is suffered a shortfall of $400 million in quarterly revenue due to a failed ERP migration of its ordering and supply chain systems. The breakdown caused a 12 weeks business interruption with order process and resulted in manual intervention to conduct day to day business, not the least three key executives fired by the CEO Carly Fiorina, at the time for the costly affair. Closer to home, AirAsia was sued by the Australian regulators in 2010 for breaching consumer law by not displaying the total ticket prices on their 
reservation systems. AirAsia later admitted that this was due to a poor localisation of their system for
the Australian market. However, this incident caused them $200,000 in fines. In 2006, CPF took action on a leading global IT Services provider for a failed IT project it contracted in 2001. It was cited that communication breakdown within the parties along with complacency has caused the project to collapse.

Such is the price to pay when IT projects goes awry. While they may not impact the business severely as isolated incidents, a plague can form collectively if not addressed in timely fashion resulting in overrun of budget, miss delivery dates, suboptimal applications that leak revenue, threat from various non-compliance (industry, consumer, data privacy, security, tax, accounting, software licensing), wasted computing resources (comatose VMs, equipment), damage to brand reputation and overall workforce productivity.

But Should Technology Advisors Condemned?

Pointing the fingers never helps anyone. In majority of cases, relationship breakdown between business and IT advisors over accountability and delivery of outcomes, or dissensions arising of it, are the true causes of project failures. The agency theory problem perhaps is best to explain why either party might get derailed from accomplishing project goals in the process of aligning and creating values for their employers (sometimes may involve several business units), partners, customers and their ownself. What’s important to know though, is that most IT advisors (technical and business) are earnest and perform credibly to stay in repute. Nevertheless, provisions should be allocated by both parties to take action in the event of negligence, complacency or breach of contractual agreements, that likely to emanate losses.

In addition, it’s crucial to tap into this rich pool of experience, knowledge and technology mastery in scoping and deliberating on what makes an IT project successful. What a cognitive waste it would be, to just ask this group of plans and recommendations but to never dive in the ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘when’ such recommendations takes full effect to benefit business. Here are some notable areas to heed in navigating conversation with your IT advisors.

Firstly, understand who your IT Advisors are, what they represent, aims and areas of conflicting interests. In any one project, it is common to have several IT advisors with slightly different agendas and strength. On the vendor’s part, sales and consulting has a responsibility to promote, position and sell their solution as the best fit for your requirements. An independent or in-house IT champion may maintain a neutral position to assess what's the best for the organisation but tend to build assumptions and loyalty with certain providers from past experiences, creating a blind side to their judgement. Sizing these advisors and their leverage in key initiative, is the first code to crack. It is also advisable to adjust compensation model if necessary to suit the dynamics of the relationships, their interests and priorities (E.g instead of hourly rate to delivered functions).

Secondly, align expert recommendations and proposals with business, strantegy, users and its automation needs. Don’t underestimate the power of isolated units, their fiefdoms and current workarounds to complete order processing, procuring supplies, making payments or even connecting with other third party providers such as logistics to ensure business runs as usual. Bring together owners of processes to communicate the automation plans and why it is important to the business. Early involvement of all stakeholderst of the respective processes, aids in uncovering challenges that would be otherwise missed.

Thirdly, request your IT advisor to help you visualise a best case and worst case scenarios of success, with current resources, work culture, best practices, governance mechanisms, process methodologies and existing technology environment. This should help match risk areas during implementation, triage of business interruption, impact to productivity and regulatory compliance among others. This information will enable further adjustment to budget, timeline and drive the necessary changes (e.g. skills upgrade for workforce, upgrade of relevant tools and applications, inducing suitable best practices, familiarisation of the futuristic workplace notion) which in creases the success rate and contain risk exposures.

Technology Advisors turns into Priceless Assets

Recognising a reliable and credible technology advisor is somewhat facile. They are ‘rebels’ and ‘masters’ of their field, constantly contending the constraints of modern technology in a value creating business, even though they are not entirely immune to defeat. A good advisor will ensure you invest in the right business areas; choose the right technology solution; lead technology benefit analysis; help define a suitable integration strategy for best inter operability of tools, systems and applications; promotes acculturation of the right skills and best practises; outlines risk exposure; and is never without a mitigation and disaster recovery plan. 

Much importantly, they stick around wielding their prescience and immaculate social intelligence, when a project is hit with unanticipated calamities or additional requirements to include ongoing changes from regulatory, compliance, technology landscape, integration, operation, customer and market behaviour perspective. 


But these traits can only be an asset if the idea to manage failure, change and challenges is premeditated in the governance of IT initiatives. Expecting everything to go exactly as planned is a ‘mortal sin’ in this practise, as much as surrendering to stultifying statements claiming all application projects are headed for Armageddon (as stated by Gartner) which is both highly disturbing and questions the very constituent of IT advisory.

Third party platform may have intensified complications notably in areas of integration, security, data privacy, intellectual property, access to services, and multiple clouds; but instantaneously this also made way for much efficient delivery, flexibility and agility to the business. Exercising sufficient control on bodies of work according to timeline and extracting values as you go, is the new norm of the tech world. If this is understood correctly, than we know which part of our conventional wisdom should be relinquished for the future of a democratised technology environment