The purpose of this short post is to convince managers working in major enterprises to push-back excel based reports, demolish the use of tailored dashboard, and vigorously refuse to attend meetings in which status or graphs are presented using Power Point presentations.
Oh, and of course to stop using emails as your primary means of organizational communication.
While digitalization, big-data, IOT and other buzz technologies are blooming, we managers end up still overwhelmed with the endless amount of information and notifications.
My Team has conducted several surveys with C-level executives, trying to find the common managerial challenges enterprise leaders’ face. One theme is clear, managers are often not aware of the inefficiencies that would eventually effect their goals. Furthermore they lack clear communication channel with the people involved / accountable (mainly because these people are outside their organizational unit)
80% of the top management surveyed reacted that by proactively allocating areas of inefficiency and pinpointing the relevant accountable personnel, managers can grow efficiency and effectiveness by more than 30%.
Let’s start by getting semantics out of our way:
Insight – Is the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context.
Effectiveness – Is the capability of producing a desired result.
Efficiency – The ability to do things well, successfully, and without waste.
So these are my recommendations before you embark on the digitalization journey so that it would really promote efficiency:
Demand concise insights rather than data This will align the BI/IT teams to better understand my needs as they will be required to understand my business / managerial drivers
Make sure these insights are actionable Meaning accountability towards the cause and effect is clearly defined so you can now collaborate, delegate tasks or meet with the relevant people in order to get to the bottom of things and resolve inefficiencies. (Needless to say you must track the execution of such tasks even if they explode to sub-tasks and gets lost in translation)
Make sure insights and actions are always in context Make sure that the entire life cycle of this entity called “Insight” remains in the context of the cause, effect and related people. As we are already swamped with information putting things in context will push our efficiency upwards
So, dear managers, this is the perfect timing to step-up and focus on what we need from this digital transformation – clear, concise actionable insights that would help us meet our goals!
By Ynon Shield
Comments