Were you rushing or were you dragging?

“- All right gang whiplash a little”. These immortal words kickstart the famous scene in the movie ‘Whiplash’ where the actor J.K. Simmons challenges his jazz band drummers to not hold back and give it their all.

Andrew, the young drummer with the band, starts playing but according to J.K. Simmons’ character, Fletcher, he’s not keeping the right tempo. The fact is, the tempo thatAndrew is keeping in the scene is almost perfect. According to @djsunkid, who has meticulously analysed the scene, the differences between Andrew’s strokes are but a few milliseconds (BPM). So small in fact they are unperceivable to most of us. Fletcher was simply being an asshole. He was pushing a colleague to outperform and reacting to his gut feeling – rather than analysing and reacting to the right data.

Why you need to become a data drive company

We want to become a data driven company; we have relied for too long into gut feeling and unrealistic assumptions and we’ve been dragging into the path of innovation. Always suffering the burden of less appealing tasks that we perceive as easy to automate, not adding value to you or the business and the list goes on.

We see our competitors utterly fearless when it came to taking chances, and, the further out there they got, the more successful they became. But, let’s start being realistic; there’s only a few companies or individuals that will be leading the new path to the future. A very sensible position for the rest of the mortals is to be a fast follower; which in return may result in a very good ROI (Return of Investment).

“In everyday situations, leaders who don’t understand or trust the data will simply fall back on their instincts. Worse, during a crisis, the pressure to act decisively could lead to inadvertent use of immature data and rush to improper conclusions”. Anthony M. Townsend. Smart Cities. 2013

Primary levers in your journey to data driven company

Start little by little. If we look at organisations with the wider prism we will realize that most of them they are today living in a hybrid landscapes where they have both on premise and cloud applications.

We’ve started planning how to adopt and embrace change in our organisation and now we have a clear roadmap; in case you missed it, check-out this article: “Plan your journey” to get the most of your strategic planning.

• Revenue; pricing effectively, deploying and incentivising the sales force for the highest impact, and optimising marketing and advertising spending
• Organizational simplicity; Streamlining and simplifying both the company and the strategic agenda can dramatically increase the punch and implementation power of the organization and significantly reduce reporting layers and costs
• Capital efficiency; Utilizing capital is vital during a transformation and can help meet short-term cash needs and improve return on investment, positioning the company for growth.
• Cost reduction; Short-term measures such as improving procurement, shuttering facilities, and reducing personnel and overhead costs can be very e effective—and sometimes mission critical.
• The cost of doing nothing; technical bankruptcy, a failure to keep up with versions and/ or patches leads to technical debt.

Orchestrate your transition

Challenges

• Extensive modifications, extensions, and interfaces.
• Poor understanding of the system by users and IT alike.
• Direct involvement of IT personnel in business processes.
• Legacy system atrophy as shadow IT emerges.
• Upgrade or replacement hard to justify.
• Fragmented systems

Look at your pace

As one may note reviewing the impact on manufacturing plants of the arrival of electricity; you couldn't get a paradigm shift simply by ripping out the steam engine and replacing it with an electric motor. You needed to change everything: the architecture and the production process.

Pace of innovation is the speed at which technological innovation or advancement is occurring; because this change is about, people, technology & processes and ultimately is measured on how much output can you squeeze out of the inputs used (productivity). We tend to see apparent patterns where innovations are too slow or too rapid. These rates have effects on people and we have a very limited capacity to embrace change, our brains are just not suitable for that. Less plan and more strategy.

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