COA Solutions - Business Accounting Software

My youngest daughter has always had, what my wife and I would call, a tidy mind and what people with a less intimate familial connection describe as an obsessive compulsive disorder. While other young girls were badgering their parents for the latest Barbie or for the latest doll that performed all number of bodily functions, we were persuaded to buy her a Dymo printer. It seemed a practical present. No child wants to lose their school books, their geometry set, the ruler in the geometry set or their trainers in their PE kit. However, our house was hit by a labelling mania. The TV, the fridge, things in the fridge, tables (including sub categorisations of kitchen, dining, bedside). In fact anything that didn’t move and was in reach was labelled.

This episode always comes to mind when we visit clients and discuss many of their business intelligence and corporate performance management projects.

These projects are often given to someone who has an interest in measuring things. The sort of person who goes around chanting Peter Drucker’s entreaty that ‘you can’t manage, what you don’t measure’ as some kind of mantra. Consequently, the laudable view that we could perform better if we measured and analysed what is important gets corrupted into the more we measure, the better we manage.

So how does this come about? In my view it’s the Dymo printer syndrome. In the excitement of a new gadget or toy or piece of software, we can’t help ourselves and start to measure everything. When you question these measures you are reassured that they will come in useful. Or, that the users really do need these measures if only they could see that they needed them. Finally, there is the view expressed that these measures are beyond the capabilities of our current users, and, if we could just replace them with some decent users, the story would be different.

As a consultant this is one of the most frustrating parts of the job. Clients have impressive transactional systems on which they have lavished huge amounts of money, time and love. They have created comprehensive reporting solutions that measure every minutiae of every process and when we ask:

’What is the most important differentiator in your market?’

We get an answer along the lines of: ‘Oh that’s easy, customer service’. (Replace your differentiator here)

‘And how do you measure that currently?’ We enquire.
To which there are 2 standard replies either:

‘We don’t’
Or, something like:‘I am sure that someone in marketing did some sort of survey of that last year’

The reality is that you need to measure only those things that you need to measure and not those things that you can measure. Sometimes the things you need to measure are not easily found in your systems, but if you want a successful performance management solution you will need to get to grips with these difficult to measure measures and integrate them into your solution. You can take heart from the experience we had with our daughter. The Dymo printing whirlwind eventually blew itself out and the tool is used for just the important things that need to be labelled, and we discovered a good product for removing the label glue from our furniture.

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Tags: Business Intelligence

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Business Intelligence, Musings by Chris Sands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.