Representing big data on the 2014 Economic Forecast panel, Zilliant CEO Greg Peters shares his forecast. Federal Reserve Bank - Houston Branch, October 17, 2013
Business is ComplexTwo driversDigital revolutionAccess to global marketsEnormous opportunities and challengesCommunication is cheap and instant (employees, customers, suppliers, prospects, investors and so on)Today’s businesses are more connected and the speed of those interactions is ever increasing, more than ever beforeOur customers business is complex100,000’s of products and 10,000’s of customersAnd changing competitive dynamicsIndustry consolidationEmployee turnoverChanging priorities, etcComplexity is on the riseHow’s that working out?
Management practices not keeping paceDeficiencies getting exacerbated by the slow economyInherent Inertia settling in
Boat on auto-pilotInherent inertiaAs revenue becomes harder, companies acting opposite of what they should doChoosing to eitherDo nothingTry to make things simplerChange processesIncrease controlsShould fix the root causeExample of poor pricing decisions leads toMore price change requests leads toMore price exceptions requiringMore software to manage the process
Offset this inertia with systematic knowledge (CHANGE OR DIE)Overcome complexity Not with simplificationExploit it for greater revenues and profitsMy story as CFO – but in sales that was really hard Easy if you are deciding to buy some inventory and need to analyze how much you have and what your forecast is But difficult in salesSales is very complex todayWhat products to sell, who to call on and what price to chargeVery difficult due toSheer Volume of decisionsLack of timeLack of informationLeads to non-optimal decision making ANDlost revenues and profitsResults in the MS slide previously shown
Technology revolution of the last 20 years has attempted to deal with this (both add to complexity and deal with it)ERP, CRM and supply chainExplosion of dataLead to analytics and reporting tolsBackward lookingView into the business on what has happenedI think of these tools as Communication from employees to managementLine field employees actions lead to data (sales, inv, leads, etc)Data gets summarized to tell a story to mgmt.For sales you have reporting aboutPipelineLeadsForecasts, etcRarely does to help someone make a future decisionIf so, very manualOut of date quicklyBreaking the Inherent Inertia (systematic knowledge)Optimize your data and provide predictive guidanceConnects management goals to employee actionsPredictive guidanceGartner says 2/3rds of surveyed companies have a big data project underway (100% of you here)To be useful, it needs to be optimized for a specific purposeFor the 1st time, provides a scalable way for management to efficiently communicateIt is the next evolution in analyticsBusiness strategy can be fused with data patterns to produce answersThose answers are provided to employees as decision guidanceRather than simply talking about objectives, you provideActionable direction to employeesTo achieve this objectivesThis is how to upgrade your businessAnd we want to be your #1 partner in that effort