Big Data for Leaders: Operational Execution

Transcription

1 The Age of Knowledge is a dynamic and disruptive environment in which organizations must continually adapt themselves to meet challenges and opportunities or face irrelevance or even extinction. It is marked by the rapid emergence of disruptive technologies, the ease of use of these technologies and users that can rapidly and effectively apply information to achieve their own ends and purposes. Jeffery Marshall President, Morgan Works Key Points: Big data, if organized properly and aligned to strategy via well-designed ontologies, can provide valuable insights into operational execution. Morgan Works provides a plan for integrated ontologies, strategy maps, and scorecards to effectively assess execution.

2 MORGAN WORKS Morgan Works provides a suite of integrated planning and execution tools through the Bifrost Integrated Planning and Execution Framework TM. Bifrost is based on knowledge enablement. While information is inert and sits in repositories, knowledge is active and is the active application of information to solve problems, make decisions, and improve task execution. Bifrost s Pentalpha TM Model helps users to actively learn and execute. I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable Dwight Eisenhower No plan survives contact with the enemy popular paraphrase of Helmuth von Moltke s quote. If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. Harvey MacKay A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week George S. Patton Let me put another spin on it. Planning is easy, effective planning is hard. Effective planning goes beyond sound bites to get at key issues, create clearly defined objectives, develop actionable tasks to achieve the objectives, and to create an effective assessment framework with measurable metrics that are linked to established success factors. That's hard work and as the quotes above show, planning is fraught with uncertainty. Yet if we do not plan, as MacKay and Eisenhower note, failure is right around the corner. However, if we substitute vigorously for violently Patton has the answer. Plan, but execute superbly. Planning provides the basis for nimble execution and timely decision-making to support superb execution. Operational execution informed by a strong strategic concept and framework is critical to organizational success. Effective execution depends on a lot of things, not the least of which are informed leaders who can make timely decisions and strong processes that can rapidly and effective adapt as conditions change. Both factors rely on superior situational awareness of the environment and the organization. Organizations need relevant and timely data that alerts decision makers to issues and opportunities and provides them the insight they need to make timely and effective decisions. Part 1 of this series discussed questions, processes, and metrics as key parts of operational execution. This essay will focus on them and show how to use big data to integrate these into an overall execution management system as shown in the diagram below. 1 Morgan Works, 2018

3 In the diagram above, you can see the flow from a strategy through goals to objectives and then to tasks. There is a parallel flow of management tools from strategy maps and scorecards (see part 2) to dashboards. The blocks in black and green show how the organization can build effective and adaptable processes. The orange block with the??? shows the critical nature of constantly sensing the environment and the organization for changes that could impact execution. And it is all balanced on the data the organization gathers and is able to assimilate and to effectively employ. Part 2 discussed the strategy map and the balanced scorecard and their relationship to the organization s strategy. Let us now link the balanced scorecard to the metrics and data. The key to an effective balanced scorecard is in the proper development of success criteria, KPI s and metrics. If the scorecard does not measure and provide insights that allow leaders to evaluate execution, then they are essentially worthless. To do this, the scorecard must access data from wherever needed and ensure the data is reliable. 2 Morgan Works, 2018

4 As noted in Part 2, the scorecards need to be nested to provide a cascading drill down and flow up from the strategic framework down to the task levels. This scorecard framework is shown in the figure below. The scorecards in the diagram above have a significant modification to the typical scorecard. They address the strategic goals, operational objectives, and tactical tasks in the linked strategy. Their columns evaluate the goal/objective/task using the internal and external environments. The evaluated scorecards may help find leaders and planners to identify areas that require adaptations to the strategy and execution. The arrows show the linkage between the strategy map and the scorecards and the flow up from the task level scorecard to the strategic scorecard. Measurements create data that needs to be stored and tracked. The data structure should be in accordance with the approved ontology to provide a direct linkage between the strategy, the scorecards and the collected data. This data provides the ability to show historical performance data and changes in the scorecards over time. It may also be useful in scenario planning and modeling for future efforts. Ultimately, the scorecards need to be presented in some form of dashboard. It can be a Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard specifically tailored to the scorecards using products such as Qlik, Tableau and others; a custom-built portal with dashboards; or something in between like SharePoint. The choice depends on the complexity and organizational requirements. Regardless of how it is implemented, it must have proper governance mechanisms in place that manage users and data and determine permission levels, decision approval levels, and security. Ideally the dashboards should be configurable to meet the decision maker s specific needs. 3 Morgan Works, 2018

5 This whole architecture sounds horribly complicated and a beast to implement. Past experiences with systems that provided plenty of promise and few real benefits also tend to color perceptions about feasibility. However, if the leaders have properly established the strategic and operational ontologies the process should be logical and straight forward. What makes this approach different form others is the foundational ontological approach and a set of building blocks that comprise the overall approach. The framework can be rolled out in a series of modules based on execution levels, functional areas, or tasks that allow the organization to digest the changes and improve the system from roll-out to rollout. If the foundations are properly set, the real issue is how to effectively link data to the metrics on the scorecards. That is the provenance of big data and big data solutions. For existing processes connecting metrics to data could be challenging as they may not have been designed with process metrics and instrumentation in mind. But even if the process was not designed to collect performance metrics, it almost certainly creates a data trail that can give insights into performance and effectiveness. This data could be captured in logs, database entries, and other files. Process owners and process engineers will need to review the process to see what can be captured using a big data approach. For new processes or processes that are being re-engineered, the organization can design them with the strategic framework in mind and ensure they are properly instrumented. The blocks in black in the first figure are the key building blocks to ensure the processes are effectively designed and built. Process owners must completely understand inputs, outputs, and dependencies. They must also be able to clearly define what a successful outcome means. Using these building blocks, they can then develop KSFs, MOEs, MOPs, and metrics. The green blocks in the first chart help to show how to articulate criteria and the key attributes of a process (who, what, why, how, when, and where). The organization s leaders may want to establish a common design approach for processes to ensure process owners and engineers capture all required information and design effective processes that can adapt to changing conditions. The questions are designed to help identify changing conditions that may trigger strategic, operational, or tactical changes. As noted in Part 1, these questions should address what the organization s leaders need to know about the external environment, the organization itself, and what it needs to protect. To increase effectiveness, the questions can be linked to triggers that alert leaders to conditional changes that make require a decision. Again, this is a big data area to ensure relevant data is captured, analyzed, processed and flows into the scorecard. It can range from monitoring social media to protect a brand or determine shifts in the market to stakeholder data, to looking at internal data on financial 4 Morgan Works, 2018

6 performance, personnel turnover, and other key data such as reports, documents, and even s. The key to success is that everything in the great chain of being must have an owner from a strategic goal down to tactical tasks and their component processes. The owner must understand they are owner and what means, understand where and how they fit into strategic and operational execution, and be empowered to effectively lead or manage the parts they own. This is a leadership project, not an IT or KM project, and leaders must drive it or it will fail. It is as more about cultural and process changes than it is about technology. Technology is the enabler for the strategic vision, not the vision itself. Strategic planning, operational planning, and operational/tactical execution and assessment must be integrated into a holistic framework and not treated as separate pieces. Strategic planning divorced from tactical execution is potentially an exercise in futility. Each component needs to reference and feed the other components. This perhaps truer now than ever before with the increasing speed of change and the amount of data that agile and effective organizations can ingest and employ. We will discuss searches that connect the data to the framework in the next installment. Part 1: Big Data for Leaders: Strategic Linkage Part 2: Big Data for Leaders: Ontology as the Lexicon of Strategy 5 Morgan Works, 2018

7 6 Morgan Works, 2018