07 Sunday May 2017
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Golden Circle – Why, How and What
It is all about the question most days. As leaders, we get to ask the questions and help everyone focus.
Why not should be a big one we ask a lot.
The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’ ~Jeffrey Bezos
23 Thursday Mar 2017
Posted in Digital Business, Strategy
Do you have a content curation strategy?
Do you have a content curation strategy? If not, now is the time to think about it. Original content is great.
But … knowing what others are saying and amplifying it is very helpful. That is the importance of a librarian at the library. It is not so much knowing everything as knowing where to find it.
One of the keys, however, is organization. That leads to a tagging and categorization approach. Is there a logical way you organize what you produce?
Of course, the ability to spot the awesome helps.
Content curation – the process of finding, organizing, and sharing topical, relevant content for your audience that supports your nonprofit’s engagement or campaign goals (or your professional learning) begins with “Spotting the Awesome.” I love that phrase coined by my friends at Upwell. Do you or your organization have formal guidelines for “spotting the awesome” like Upwell (see below) or is it more of ”we know it when we see it?”
via Content Curation: The Art and Science of Spotting Awesome | Beth’s Blog.
09 Thursday Mar 2017
Posted in People
06 Monday Mar 2017
Posted in Customer Focus, Digital Business, Nonprofit, Process, Technology
Tags
Smart Data
Even 2 pieces of unified data is more powerful than one. Having a plan for the most valuable sources and at least integrating some of the data will move insight ahead.
Let’s be honest. This is just plain difficult. I’m a small business. I believe in the value of integrated data. But it is painful and difficult. I use one tool a lot. It is call email. I have another tool for managing Customer Relationships. If I send an email, I can also get it in the CRM tool just by sending it as a bcc. So far so good. But then I use a different tool for eMarketing. I then have to export it from CRM and import it to the eMarketing tool. And on and on it goes from there.
Imagine the challenge for a mid-size nonprofit. It gets worse for large corporations. It just isn’t easy.
That said, it is worth doing as best you can. So that is what I do. And you should consider the same.
First, we need a strategy. Pick at least two systems that will give you a better level of insight. Integrate the core data needed for that insight. Don’t get carried away. If it doesn’t give you insight and you can’t act on it to move the relationship ahead then it isn’t useful.
Second, we need to execute the strategy and evaluate its effectiveness. If it isn’t effective consider stopping. Why waste the energy and resources.
Third, while data integration is generally very complex and difficult, the focus needs to be on simplicity. If a business unit cannot make a case for the insight that the data will bring and the action / results that it will accomplish, I say “move on”. That takes courage and great support from the executive level.
Knowing more than one thing generally leads to greater insight. Our everyday experience teaches us that. The insight I gain by knowing a decision maker at a target nonprofit is opening my emails leads me to see if I can schedule a call to discover more about their challenges. Simply integrating CRM and eMarketing tools can lead to that insight.
As more data is integrated about donors, the biggest issue is data quality and duplicates. If left unchecked, the insights and action will be suspect. It is important to keep the data integrated as simple as possible and pay attention to “master data” and the “golden record” early on. Investing in some level of Master Data Management (MDM) will make sense. Better to make this decision early and enforce integrity to the data.
There are several ways to approach analytics. Simple and easy to use Excel spreadsheets is one level. Data warehouses and data marts takes it to another level. Within systems themselves (think CRM), dashboards are very powerful at providing insight and action (via workflow).
All of this leads to an issue of executive oversight. Someone needs to make the tough decisions in the best interest of the donor. The CEO needs to empower someone to make those decisions. Otherwise your technology team will be chasing its tail on a regular basis with unclear direction and expensive solutions to meet the great demand for integration.
There is clearly a role for oversight for this function. It should be led by a high level business executive who focuses on insight.
Many of the advanced solutions and systems can be very expensive. Senior executives will clearly experience sticker shock when looking at investment decisions. Out of many technology investments to be made, this is one that cries out for clear ROI and a total economic benefit to spell out.
Here are the key ideas:
17 Friday Feb 2017
This is too good to ignore. I’m guessing we could replace the Chief Digital Officer title up top with others and get the same laugh. What about Chief Marketing Officer? How about Chief Information Officer? How about CEO?
Chief Digital Officer
06 Monday Feb 2017
Posted in Customer Focus
Growth in Customer Experience (Forrester Research)
There is no denying that companies are embracing the whole “customer experience” phenomena. This year even more companies will adopt approaches to transform their business. The trend will only continue to accelerate.
What does this mean to you? Why should you not ignore what is going on with your competitors?
Disruption is around the corner. Others may be about to overtake you. Now is not the time to to ignore what is vital to your digital transformation efforts.
Some key areas for focus are:
06 Friday Jan 2017
Posted in Digital Business, Strategy
Tags
It is a great question to think about. Will I be purposeful?
It’s once again the time of year when I publish Temkin Group’s CX trends. In my post last year, we named 2016 “The Year of Emotion.” With my previous post, we declared 2017 “The Year of Purpose.” During this year, companies will be: Elevating Purpose. Over the past year, we’ve seen more articles discussing purpose, and leaders are beginning to […]
via 2017 Customer Experience Trends, “The Year of Purpose” — Customer Experience Matters®
Business Strategy
14 Monday Nov 2016
Posted in Customer Focus, Digital Business, Strategy
Attainable Goal
Goals should be both realistic and attainable for the digital business. While an attainable goal may stretch a team in order to achieve it, the goal is not extreme in nature. We all should have some expectation that it can be achieved. Goals are neither out of reach nor below standard performance, as these may be considered meaningless.
When you identify goals that are most important to you, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true. You and your team develop the attitudes, abilities, skills, and financial capacity to reach them. An attainable goal may cause goal-setters to identify previously overlooked opportunities to bring themselves closer to the achievement of their goals. Attainable goals help focus everyone’s efforts.
Goals should be motivating. They should galvanize the whole team to accomplish something great. They certainly can be aspirational. The work of transforming a company is not easy. Everyone knows that. Everyone wants to be motivated and your transformation goals are important in the work.
If they are not attainable, they become demotivating. We all must have a sense that we can reach the goal.
The purpose of a goal is to actually accomplish the result we have in mind. There is never a purpose that is useful to suggest something that we know can’t be done be a goal. It does happen, however, where a result is suggested and then nothing else is “taken off the plate” or resources aren’t devoted to making it happen. In those cases, it is common that everyone involved knows they are being set up for failure. That is, of course, devastating.
Senior management has a special responsibility to make sure that goals can, in fact, be reached. Employees may suggest goals that are beyond stretch and not attainable. Or employees may suggest goals that are a “cake walk”. In either case, realistic conversations need to occur to level set and make sure everyone is comfortable that strategies and tactics are in place to get us to the destination. If may be very difficult, if senior management sets a goal that is clearly unattainable, for employees to push back and talk about why that is true.
In setting an attainable goal, great consideration needs to be given to what resources need to be devoted to making it happen. Return on investment is real. To expect a return, with no investment, is a fool’s errand. Want something great to happen? What cost are you willing to bear to realize it?
Do you need more staff? Do you need a different kind of staff with different skills? Do priorities need to be set so it is clear this goal is important? Do other initiatives need to be eliminated or delayed to focus on this goal? Making a goal attainable may be about the resources and focus to make it attainable.
Here are the key ideas:
04 Friday Nov 2016
02 Wednesday Nov 2016
Posted in Strategy
Focus
It is so easy to be unfocused. The things to compete for our time are endless and getting more so every day.
Here are three questions to help get focused.
· What is this year about?
· What is this day about?
· What is this moment about?
Knowing the answer to the first leads to great focus on the second. And know the answer to the second leads to great focus all the time.
Simple but not easy.
31 Monday Oct 2016
Posted in Strategy
Tags
Measurable Goal
How will you know “when you have arrived”? How will you measure progress? What does success look like? When will we know that we have transformed our business?
We all want concrete criteria for what success looks like in our transformation efforts. To be effective as digital executives, our teams need to how progress will be measured. SMART goals are always measurable. Measuring progress will help a team stay on track, reach its target dates, and experience the exhilaration of achievement that spurs it on to continued effort required to reach the ultimate goal.
A measurable transformation goal will usually answer questions such as:
Indicators should be quantifiable. Measurable goals are important for several reasons.
It is the leader’s responsibility to make sure that goals are specific and measurable. Anyone, however, can ask the right questions to gain clarification if they are not. If the requirements aren’t clear or constraints identified, it is our responsibility to make sure the goal is restated to make if very measurable.
Here are the key ideas:
24 Monday Oct 2016
Posted in Customer Focus
We have had “customer relationship initiatives” for a long time. Some have paid off. Many have not.
Is it just about the technology (most of which has failed)? No. Absolutely not.
It is all about our goals and strategies, our people and great processes? Is it about our culture? Is it about our leadership? 
Customer service interactions are becoming your primary means of creating true customer relationships. To be a successful business today, you must understand how relationships actually work, and how to build them. While the ways in which you do this may be specific to your business, here are some fundamentals about relationship-building that are universal:
And so, can relationships be “managed”? Should they “be managed”?
Relationships are not easy. Some will say that relationships can and should be managed. They will give you acronyms that promise to solve all your relationship troubles. But unfortunately, in business, as in life, relationships cannot be managed. ~~Mikkel Svane is the founder and CEO of Zendesk
19 Wednesday Oct 2016
Posted in Customer Focus, Digital Business, Strategy
Focus
In addition to be obsessed, the other essential ingredient to success in transformation efforts is focus. It must be recognized, when you are obsessed with your customer, that you can’t do everything. If you think you can, disaster is looming around the corner. You can do a few things very well.
Strategy is about deciding which ideas should be implemented. Focus is doing them. Focus is not about swinging at every pitch. Focus is about swinging at the pitches that are most likely to get you on base or to advance another player so they can score.
It’s not a big surprise that big league baseball players can hit a pitch far better than the rest of us. Research on the game’s best hitters has shown that they have excellent hand-eye coordination and can respond quickly to visual cues. Indeed, one of the keys to a superior ball player’s performance is excellent vision and focus that allow him to see a baseball perfectly as it travels at high velocity toward home plate.
Baseball players who have achieved greatness at the plate have done so by persistently keeping their eyes on the goal at hand: connecting with the ball.
Entrepreneurs must likewise keep their eyes and focus on their companies. They achieve greatness by avoiding any situations that might distract them. As such, they must constantly and tightly fix their vision on the most important components of the enterprise.
Via http://www.forbes.com/sites/alanhall/2012/11/03/the-big-league-secret-to-business-focus-focus-focus/
Wanting to accomplish everything you think needs to be fixed isn’t useful. Strategy is about tradeoffs. What will make a difference in the next 6 months for your customers? If you could only focus on 3 things, what would they be? 3 may be too many still but it is better than 5 or 10 or 20 or 100.
Everything can’t be done. A few critical things can be done. What are the right ones right now?
As an aside, a culture of meetings can suck the life out of focus. People need to be given permission to say no to meetings that are of marginal value to their real focus areas.
Not making a decision about priorities is the enemy of focus. When meetings do occur, one outcome should always be about how important, relative to other priorities, the initiative being discussed is relative to other ideas. Forcing a delay of something else to do the new thing should be question that is always asked. If you live in a world of focus, the question should be, of the 3 things I am focused on right now, which of them should I stop doing so I can take this on? People should be given permission and encouraged to ask. Management should be clear in requiring it be done.
What if you had an accountability culture that said that your year end evaluation would be determined by one result that would be worth 80 percent of your evaluation? What would that one thing be? What if that allowed you to veto other things without formally changing your evaluation criteria to take the new thing on?
Greg McKeowan has written an amazing book, “Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less”, that lays out the necessity of focus. As he so aptly has discovered, focus is about getting the right things done. In this world, the essential question is: What is the right thing to do right now?
The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s not about getting less done. It’s about getting only the right things done. It’s about challenging the core assumption of ‘we can have it all’ and ‘I have to do everything’ and replacing it with the pursuit of ‘the right thing, in the right way, at the right time’. It’s about regaining control of our own choices about where to spend our time and energies instead of giving others implicit permission to choose for us.
See more at: http://gregmckeown.com/essentialism-the-disciplined-pursuit-of-less/#sthash.rewbtAq0.dpuf
Focus allows you to see things clearly. It also allows you to see what is working and what isn’t. If you are doing a lot of things, which ones are working? If something is working, what if you did more of it and not less.
The only way to do more is to do less. It will require going counter to what others want to do. Everyone, including your boss, wants you to do more. Let’s add one more thing to the plate. It is rare that leaders want to stop doing something or think before asking you to do more. Focus will require results that justify doing less. That is the rub.
Focus is your responsibility and yours alone. No one can do it to you. No one can do it for you. Accountability for focus is all yours. If you are a manager, you should help others understand why they need to focus. They will be relieved and give you their all because of your leadership.
Focus is needed at every level of the organization. Everyone needs to spend time to stop trying to do everything. Management, in particular, needs to support this approach.
What if management doesn’t support this approach? You can proceed anyway. The question is will you have the courage to do it. It will take courage. Are you confident?
There is a need to understand constraints. Constraints are real. Everyone knows it but we all like to pretend when we start a project that if we make the case, resources aren’t going to be an issue. Resources are an issue. Resources will always be an issue.
We need to be clear about what can be invested and how much time is available to get the job done. It is easy to live in a world where we “pretend” the amount of hours available to work on something isn’t an issue and that constraints don’t exist. They do exist and they are real.
We believe that if we demand that requirements be added to the work, the money and time to get it done will magically appear. The reality is that they won’t magically appear but failure will.
Focus is amazing. Doing the few “right things” can bring about real transformation in becoming a digital business.
Here are the key ideas:
28 Tuesday Jun 2016
Posted in People
Is hope a good strategy? Generally hope is a a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.
Having hope doesn’t mean anything will happen.
It may not.
Hope is a good tactic however. If there is a good vision and goal, then the desire to see it through and make it happen is a good thing.
We want people of hope working with us. My attitude is important.
Despair isn’t good in any world.
02 Monday May 2016
Posted in Customer Focus, Digital Business, People
Tags
We have a lot to do. Our plate is full. Who needs one more thing on the list?
My guess is, I need one more thing on the list.
Change isn’t easy. Culture is in many cases undefined but well understood. Spending time understanding how employees and customers actually see it is instructive. Doing the tough things to make it what I want is worth it.
05 Tuesday Apr 2016
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We want to collaborate. It just sounds good to say it. Why wouldn’t we? Of course we do. Everyone believes it is a good thing.
Collaboration has become so much easier with the tools we have readily available to us. The cloud tools are amazing and so helpful.
Collaboration tools are free or very cost effective. They just plain work. The ROI can be huge.
Collaboration tools, in the cloud, can be deployed quickly. Measured in minutes, hours or a few days of effort.
So …
Why aren’t we collaborating more?
But regardless of who ultimately controls the budget for cloud applications, the technology is simply the means to an end, Vellmure notes. “The key to this is recognizing that cloud technology is simply a more easily deployable enabler of collaboration and communication,” he comments. “It’s more agile. However, the fundamentals of corporate culture, strategy, incentives, innovation are the true drivers of success.
via Collaborating in the Cloud.
Did we pay attention to our culture? If the tool won’t enable collaboration easily, it is probably a culture and strategy issue.
17 Wednesday Feb 2016
Posted in Strategy
Tags
S
MART goals are specific. Does your goal sound too general? It is probably not a SMART goal yet.
The aim is for something very clear and absolutely unambiguous. SMART goals are stripped of vagaries, platitudes and jargon.
They must tell a team exactly what is expected, why is it important to your customers, who’s involved, where is it going to happen and what experiences are important to the customer.
What are SMART goals?
S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Attainable
R = Relevant
T = Time Bound
A specific goal will usually answer the five “W” questions:
It is important to be specific. For example, your goal may be to grow your business. That is pretty general. It would be more specific to say you want to acquire 3 new clients for your business. Or you might say you want to increase revenue from X to Y. A digital approach might to increase revenue from online sales from X to Y.
Being specific brings greater clarity in know what is to be accomplished. Clarity is the key. When you are building a digital business, as a leader, the more specific you can be about your goal, the better. It isn’t a goal to say we need to have a great presence on Facebook. What is the outcome you want on Facebook? Likes? Driving people to your content? Do you want customers to take some kind of action? What are the outcomes that your customers want? What does that experience look like?
In any kind of business, we can’t do everything. Resources are very limited and constrained. Getting specific with our goals creates great focus and great experiences for our customers.
Here are the key ideas:
23 Monday Nov 2015
Posted in Customer Focus, Digital Business, Strategy
Tags
Goals are very important to the digital executive. They provide the direction on where to go and it is not just anywhere. It is to somewhere specific. It is measurable. It is fixed in time. If you want something that isn’t measureable, create a mission statement or think up your vision. Goals should be concrete.
Goals come before strategy. Strategy focuses on how to reach the goal. On their own, strategy absent a goal, is useless. We love to be “strategic” but forget to think out where we are really going. It makes a difference.
The best example of great goals is the SMART goal concept. SMART is an acronym, which over the years, has stood for different words. The most common now are:
S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Attainable
R = Relevant
T = Time Bound
Creating SMART goals gives the digital executive a level of credibility that those who do not use this type of process never achieve. There is nothing fun about floundering around. Creating goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound has a huge payoff for everyone. It creates a sense that we know what is expected of us.
Most of us want to know where we are going and why are we going there. SMART goals create that sense of direction that is so important for our daily work. SMART goals give us “the why” of our daily work. Without SMART goals, we will wander around aimlessly with no sense of purpose.
We all need to be involved in coming up with SMART goals. The digital executive focuses time and energy in managing the process. That is true leadership to give direction. Beyond the executive thought, there are times any of us can lead if our direction isn’t clear. In those cases, this framework becomes pivotal.
SMART goals can be created at any level of the organization. They may start at a corporate level or not. Even in the absence of clear corporate goals, we all can create them and use them as a way to gain commitment of the next level up or down. When the SMART goal is written down, it creates agreement or disagreement. Either of these is helpful. Always, visually, keeping at the top of what we do, helps create that type of commitment.
Here are the key ideas:
04 Wednesday Nov 2015
To Do List
Waiting …
Waiting some more ….
Will the time be right today?
Who knows for sure. Let’s get it done today. Let’s finish it up and hand it in. Waiting for the time to be right is a perverse form of procrastination. It’s not that we haven’t done anything. We are just waiting for the right time to “be perfect”.
Give it up and get it done. Today!
Waiting for the right time? Don’t wait. The time will never be just right. Finish it up today!
03 Tuesday Nov 2015
Posted in Digital Business
Tags
CIO, CMO, Digital Transformation, HBR, Leadership, Strategy, Trust
Companies that embrace new digital skills and technologies are more likely to experience higher profits and revenue growth, according to new research by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. They are also likely to have a CIO taking a leadership stance in digital transformation.
The research revealed the top seven strategies of CIOs within companies that HBR called “Digital Leaders,” organizations strong in both digital leadership and management.
Source: Infographic: 7 strategies CIOs are using to drive digital transformation | The Enterprisers Project
07 Wednesday Oct 2015
Golden Circle – Why, How and What
Why is important. It is in fact the starting point. Without it, our nonprofit, is just another commodity. Plenty of nonprofits do what we do. Some do it how we do it. It will be rare that any can beat us at the why.
Nonprofits typically do have a mission and a mission statement. Is that really why you do what you do? Is it clear in human terms and not focused on “nonprofit speak”? Is expressed in personal terms that inspire action?
In looking at many nonprofit mission statements many of them are really more focused on what we do as opposed to why we do it. Donors will see it for what it is. Donors connect with real human stories about why we do what we do.
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers … (Filmed at TEDxPugetSound.)
How do you explain when things don’t go as we assume? Or better, how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions? For example: Why is Apple so innovative? Year after year, after year, after year, they’re more innovative than all their competition. And yet, they’re just a computer company. They’re just like everyone else. They have the same access to the same talent, the same agencies, the same consultants, the same media. Then why is it that they seem to have something different? Why is it that Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement? He wasn’t the only man who suffered in a pre-civil rights America, and he certainly wasn’t the only great orator of the day. Why him? And why is it that the Wright brothers were able to figure out controlled, powered man flight when there were certainly other teams who were better qualified, better funded … and they didn’t achieve powered man flight, and the Wright brothers beat them to it. There’s something else at play here.
Why? How? What? This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren’t. Let me define the terms really quickly. Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP.
But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by “why” I don’t mean “to make a profit.” That’s a result. It’s always a result. By “why,” I mean: What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care?
Well, as a result, the way we think, the way we act, the way we communicate is from the outside in. It’s obvious. We go from the clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations –regardless of their size, regardless of their industry – all think, act and communicate from the inside out.
05 Monday Oct 2015
Posted in Strategy
Having an approach or a framework for the work of the digital executive is very important. Being passionate about our customers is great but a scattered approach will not get the kind of traction we need long term. I am suggesting a framework that I have seen, over the years, that works for many of us. If this isn’t the approach that works for you, I do suggest finding one that does. The approach is to organize and execute around the following:
It is natural to want to leap to one or another of these and focus there to the exclusion of some other important issues. Some people want to focus on the technology. But technology may be the wrong issue if the goals and strategies aren’t clear. You might have a great strategy. Does the strategy require change? Have you addressed the change management issues that people are having with the strategy? If not, no strategy alone will overcome change management issues that people have with what you want to do.
There is a sequence to all of this. The best results come from starting with clear goals and strategies. People come next. Processes come after that. Technology, while very important, comes after we have planned for the preceding three focus areas.
I am advocating for a holistic and unified approach. Moving from the flavor of the day to the next creates a level of frustration that is hard to overcome. It is impossible to organize and execute around priorities if at least these four focus areas aren’t somehow in alignment. In our gut, we know that alignment is important. Alignment creates momentum that is impossible to stop or overcome.
Here are the key ideas:
02 Friday Oct 2015
Posted in Digital Business, Strategy
Tags
Customer Obsession
If you are a technology leader, you need a strategy for digital transformation. As more executives obsess over the customer experience, you need to lead and have a seat at the table. Without it, the handwriting is on the wall in terms of long term success.
“The digital heat wave isn’t a mirage. Companies and their IT organizations must begin to meet with external customers and adapt agile processes as we talked about in part one of this series. In concert with external customer engagement and agile processes, IT organizations must implement IT Business Partner or BRM programs to ensure investment roadmaps drive digital customer solutions and company strategy. And finally, IT leaders must help the c-suite by teaching them to treat the IT function just like every other business function. Collaboration between the C-suite and IT, especially linking strategy and IT, are absolute requirements in the Age of the Customer. There is much to be done and great opportunities to drive revenue. Good luck on adapting to the digital heat wave. Your company is counting on you as a leader to make the transitions happen.”
Source: CIO Strategy for the “Age of the Customer,” Part Two
Fortium Partners – Customer Experience Assessment, Strategy and Roadmap – Fortium Partners, in response to and in anticipation of our clients’ needs in a world where the customer experience has become a critical business function, has developed a comprehensive Customer Experience Assessment and Roadmap program available immediately to Fortium clients. The changing nature of relationship management Traditionally, the fundamental focus of the Enterprise has been to […]
01 Thursday Oct 2015
Posted in Digital Business, Strategy
Knowing where you are going, how you’re going to get there and being focused on execution is a key driver for the digital executive who is focused on customers. It is not enough to be obsessed and passionate if you don’t get anything done. Ideas are great. Results are impressive. Customers don’t care that you are well intentioned if you don’t actually improve the experience for them. They want their goals met not just understood. This is the approach we will suggest to you and follow as well. The approach to use is to organize and execute around strategy, people, process and technology.
To set the overall framework, strategy should not be in isolation of a goal that is measurable. The goal is the destination. The strategy is how you will get there. Too many times we get enamored with the strategy not realizing it is taking us in the wrong direction. The goal should be framed as a “lagging indicator”, measured by a time frame and a specific result. The key question is always about business impact and how we will measure it. While this exercise isn’t always easy, it is essential.
The strategy is the “how we will” reach the goal. The best strategies are leading indicators for how the goal will be achieved. They are not voluminous in nature but focused on a few critical items.
Once we have the goal (lagging indicator) and strategies (leading indicators), scoreboards and dashboards keep us all on track. The visual nature of dashboards and scoreboards is very powerful.
The final key for the digital executive is accountability. Without accountability, the whirlwind of everyday emails and meetings will sap the energy of producing results. Most great plans languish for lack of accountability.
In addition to the approach of strategy, people, process and technology, we need to execute our strategy. This should be done through a detailed program planning approach. If you have enough programs, it moves to portfolio management.
Here are the key ideas:
18 Tuesday Aug 2015
Posted in Customer Focus, Digital Business, People, Process, Strategy, Technology
Business Strategy
Is it about our digital budget or is it about having the right strategy, people and processes in place. It may not be “either/or” but it is clear that budget alone won’t get us there.
We need excellent strategies executive by outstanding people. That will with the way.
This year’s survey asked respondents how their companies spend on digital and organize their digital work, as well as the goals, challenges, and best practices they see across these initiatives. Many respondents agree that their companies’ digital programs are growth oriented, that future spending on digital will increase, and that a large portion of future company growth will be driven by digital efforts. But organizational challenges and a dearth of talent are common, significant hurdles that prevent companies from scaling up their digital efforts or seeing clear returns on their investments. So are limited accountability and a poor understanding of potential value. Less than 40 percent of executives say their companies have accountability measures in place, either through targets, incentives, or “owners” of digital programs, while only 7 percent say their organizations understand the exact value at stake from digital.
via The digital tipping point: McKinsey Global Survey results | McKinsey & Company.
14 Tuesday Jul 2015
Posted in Customer Focus, Nonprofit
Online Donor Experience
There comes a time where we have to make a decision. What will we invest in to make the donor experience stunning? It is a serious question and not a budget exercise. If we are going to be intentional and proactive, we need to make an investment. At first that may be just our time as a nonprofit executive. Eventually it will be about people, our processes, our strategies and our technology. If we don’t become intentional in our approach to our digital donor experiences we will continue to be haphazard in our approach; reacting, responding, solving toxic experiences in real time. This intention however must be about heartfelt experiences. It must create a passion from our donors for our mission as a digital nonprofit.
There is of course, a very real cost to reacting. Scrutinize your budget and you will see that most of our fixed expenses are reactionary. What if we invested in proactive and intentional experiences for our donors, from the heart, up front? Could we radically reduce our reactionary and bloated fixed expenses? In fact, my guess is the reactionary expenses vastly exceed proactive expenses. I know nonprofits that are ramping up their expenses in reactionary engagement and relationships. The good news is that they are succeeding in shifting the negative to neutral or even the positive.
So what is the outcome of taking a negative and balancing it with a positive donor experience? Is it donor engagement or damage control?
So what is the cost and value of neutralizing the negative donor experience? Shouldn’t we start with the amazing?
What is the return on that investment in the stunning?
What is probably most concerning is that most of us are not measuring much of this in terms of the donor experience. And why are we struggling to generate more donations? Now think about that question. Why is our revenue flat? Why are donors not engaged and not renewing their gifts?
Is the experience we are creating wonderfully sharable? If not, what is our investment over the next 3 months going to be in changing that? We must invest in not only a positive experience but an experience that screams out for our donor and clients to share it with everyone they know. That encourages others to join in. It also offsets any negative experiences anyone else has shared. Think about it. We all read the ratings and comments. If there are 100 over the top ones we can ignore the one that is virally negative writing it off to a weirdo.
What is the biggest deal for our donors? Trying to offset the negative experiences or proactively creating amazing ones? Creating amazing ones is everything. That is not an exaggeration. You know, from your own experiences as a donor, that it is true. The cost of reacting is always eclipsed by the upside of the stunning.
Think of what you want. You are a donor. You are the donor who wants something from your nonprofit you are investing in. Are you looking for the ordinary? No, you are looking for an experience, no, the experience.
Any nonprofit that recognizes you, remembers you, and gives you an amazing service experience will win your heart. And it is all about your heart. You will be loyal to them no matter what. That is what we know as relevance. A passion of our heart that transcends anything else. What would the answer be if you asked you donors the following question: Can you imagine the world without (XYZ Nonprofit)? On a scale of 1 to 10, what would your average rating be?
And so, that heartfelt experience is not just a so-so something. That heartfelt, amazing donor experience, is everything. That kind of vision is the father of innovation. Who needs the mother of invention in that kind of world?
You have a number of alternatives before you as a nonprofit executive. Which will you choose? One filter should be which of the experiences will create an emotional connection to your mission. Have you factored that into your decision analysis? You can actually measure the difference in terms of engagement. Does one alternative improve engagement or not? Some level of rigor in measuring the results will help.
There are constraints in terms of investments. Consider small tests with some level of “A-B” spilt analysis. “A-B’ tests are not just for the marketing department.
Here are the key ideas:
07 Tuesday Jul 2015
Posted in Digital Business
Tags
Shiny New Toy
There is a shiny, new toy available. It isn’t your toy. What do you do?
You need your own strategy framework for product innovation. It is probably a losers game to always be reacting to someone else. It is imperative that you and your leadership know where you are going, how you are going to get there and have a rigorous continuous improvement process in place.
And whilst we use these to identify specific trends, there’s also one overriding meta-trend that we’re continually struck by: on an absolutely global scale, the quality and quantity of innovation is relentless, fuelled by – and at the same time fuelling – consumers’ insatiable NEWISM.
The “shiny, new toy” isn’t going away. Here are 5 strategies to consider.
Which one is right for you? Consider MIT’s suggested approach based on your motivation to respond and your ability to respond.
03 Friday Jul 2015
Posted in Digital Business
Social Media
As a digital nonprofit executive, you’ve decided that communities and social media are an important strategy. With so much to do, where do you begin?
Here are four key steps.
This is a case where many hands make light work.
When it comes to building community and increasing brand awareness, some organizations hire communications, marketing, and engagement staff to handle these activities. And that makes sense — someone needs to be charged with keeping a close eye on the organization’s community growth.
Jamie Millard and Lori L. Jacobwith also suggest that building awareness for your important work in an increasingly cluttered space can’t be the responsibility of just one person or even a department. When an organization embraces the culture of creating and empowering all staff to become “brand ambassadors,” authentic and exponential growth starts to happen.
More here: Ctrl+Alt+Delete: Rebooting Your Digital Community Building | NTEN.
24 Wednesday Jun 2015
Posted in Digital Business, Strategy
Tags
There is a whole lot of marketing technology in the market place. It would not be surprising to find that you are overwhelmed and over extended by it all.
What are your marketing technology goals? Do you have strategies that support the goals? Are your people capable of implementing the strategy or are they overwhelmed by it all as well?
It is time to be holistic and to stop chasing the holy grail of shiny new objects.
So … what should we do?
During a recent onsite visit in San Francisco, I asked the CMO for a major tech company how many separate marketing technologies her company was using to generate results.
The executive’s response: “I’m not sure.” She checked with some of her staffers, who began ticking off one random solution after another. The end result: no one knew for sure.
The CMO and her team are likely not alone, given the tidal wave of new marketing technology over the last decade. Depending on whom you ask, there are anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 digital solutions currently on the market — everything from marketing automation and retargeting to analytics and testing and personalization.
The executive’s honest answer — and the reaction of her team — raises an interesting question: have we become so inundated with technology, and applied it in such haphazard fashion, that we can no longer keep track of it?
02 Monday Mar 2015
Posted in Nonprofit, People, Process, Strategy, Technology
This is definitely worth the read. Tough questions need to asked. Is technology the failure or is it a failure of a ill defined strategy coupled with bad processes that can’t be executed by staff and volunteers?
It is my position it is not about the technology. The technology will do what you want it to do. The question is do you know what you want it to do?
What if your donors have decided not to give anymore? What if you don’t know that and keep spending money hand over fist to renew their gift? Two very bad things come from that. First, you’ve wasted a ton of money. Second, you have irritated a former donor even more than they were before. If you do this enough, you will be swimming in a sea of red ink with lots of detractors in the market place.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Start with a great strategy. Invest in your people to execute it. Create stunning business processes that wows you constituents. At the end of the day, it may not matter much about the technology if it can support these other 3 items.
Unfortunately, the Constituent Relationship Management promise has not been nearly as effective as promised. According to some estimates 50% to 70% of CRM initiatives fail to achieve their goals. Correspondingly, fundraising – which relies so heavily on a CRM and historical donor data – is stubbornly stalled. One could argue the weaknesses cited with CRM – namely very little “R” and not a lot of “C” either – apply equally to much of the fundraising done today.
Consider these other parallels:
CRM Fundraising is very good at receiving, but not very good at giving. Look no further than dreadful retention rates as proof. After all, if donors were getting what they came for when they walked in the front door, why do they leave so quickly out the back?
CRM Fundraising asks donors to provide access and information without adequately telling them what they will get in return. How often is gift impact and donor benefit talked about, but clearly (based on industry trends) not consistently or widely delivered?
CRM Fundraising pigeonhole donors based on past actions without informing them how to build a more advantageous profile. CRM and fundraising prompt donors to become more valuable to the charity without promising greater value from the organization.
CRM Fundraising is fairly effective at measuring its successes but provide little information about its failures. We faithfully record when donors respond positively to automated prompting and prodding but have no insight when donors do not respond in the predicted way.
CRM Fundraising is therefore, unable to determine whether failures are the result of faulty assumptions, incorrect information or poor execution.
CRM Fundraising is unable to tell how these “failed” interactions affect the donor relationship. It treats all failures as the same and all failures as neutral, when in fact the equity in the relationship may have been weakened or undermined by a poorly executed communications, “engagement” or service encounter.
The worst case scenario is the last interaction results in the donor’s decision, unbeknownst to the charity, to stop giving. This critical failure – that the charity is oblivious too – will be met with 2 to 3 years of organizational spend against this donor (and all others like them) and a sea of red-ink on the balance sheet.
via Why CRM Fundraising is broken and how to fix it. | Kevin Schulman | LinkedIn.
23 Monday Feb 2015
Posted in Digital Business, Technology
Mobile Devices
We know how our customers are interacting with is changing and changing fast. We may, however, be underestimating how fast it is really occurring. Constellation Research has some great information to consider. Now is the time to transform our interactions and the customer experience.
It all starts with a strategy that we can begin to execute with speed. Waiting will only make it worse. A lot is at stake here.
The rise of mobile and cloud computing is driving a cultural and technological transformation in which people expect anytime, anywhere access to colleagues, products and services. To react to this transformation, companies have to rethink the tools and business processes they provide to their employees, customers and partners.
Constellation surveyed more than 500 organizations in education, healthcare, high tech, and retail about the state of their mobile computing efforts. The analysis highlighted three major themes that are critical for success in mobile transformation:
- Mobile transformation is top of mind for most organizations. More than 80 percent of organizations recognize the impact of mobile transformation on internal and external stakeholders and have created dedicated teams to work on solutions. Education had the lowest percentage, with 68 percent having dedicated mobile teams in place while high tech organizations led the way with 91 percent.
- Mobile is not a device but an effective way of working. The term “mobile” is not limited just to devices such as phones and tablets. Rather, mobile describes how people work in motion and in short bursts of time. More than 50 percent of respondents reported switching between devices more than six times per day, and traditional desktop computers are only used one-third of the time.
- Mobile provides a starting point for digital transformation. Mobile transformation requires re-thinking and updating existing business processes or introducing new ones. While more than 80 percent of organizations polled have performed basic updates to their Internet and Intranet sites, less than 50 percent have changed an actual business process.
via The Strategic Impact of Mobile Transformation on Business Value | Constellation Research Inc..
04 Wednesday Feb 2015
Posted in Digital Business, People
Tags
Facebook Logo
Is there anything Facebook won’t get into? Well, here they go into the business market. I remember when Yammer upgraded their experience to give it a “Facebook like” interface. It really took off and Microsoft bought them.
Collaboration is huge. Business needs to focus more on the power it can create when used strategically to enable our people. Always good to see another tool to help.
Overall, I support Facebook entering the business market. They have a product already used by a billion plus people at home, certainly some percentage of those people will be happy also using it for work. I think they chose the right name, “At Work” versus something like “Facebook for the Enterprise”, as I don’t predict any large organizations will adopt this. There are just too many other choices for them that are better suited to meet the needs or large companies. However, the millions of small businesses that don’t have IT departments and may already be using Facebook as part of their marketing efforts may be quite happy using Facebook for secure employee collaboration.
My advice to Facebook, spend 2015 partnering with large enterprise software vendors so that you can announce integrations that prove the validity of Facebook at Work as a platform people can really use to get their jobs done.
via It’s Like Facebook For Work. Wait It Is Facebook For Work | Constellation Research Inc..
21 Wednesday Jan 2015
Posted in Digital Business, Technology
Tags
Put your money where your mouth is!
Mobile technology is exploding. If you were CEO of IBM, would you believe in it so much that you would invest $1,000,000,000 in the underlying technology to drive it’s future?
It is one thing to say “think mobile first”. It is quite another to invest one billion dollars. Now that is putting your money where your mouth is.
IBM is introducing a new mainframe in a bet that clients will need its souped-up speed and security to handle a surge in consumers using smartphones for everything from banking to checking health-care records.
The z13 system can encrypt and analyze data in real time and process 30,000 transactions a second, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM:US) announced today. That means faster and safer transactions for consumers on mobile phones. The system is the result of five years of development and a more than $1 billion investment, said Donna Dillenberger, an IBM distinguished engineer who helped develop the machine.
via IBM Debuts New Mainframe in a $1 Billion Bet on Mobile – Businessweek.
09 Friday Jan 2015
Posted in Book: The Digital Executive, Digital Business, Strategy
Tags
Scoreboard
Scoreboards help you establish if you are winning or not. When you have clear goals (lagging indicators) and strategies (leading indicators), scoreboards and dashboards let the players (not the coaches) easily know where they are. Winning or losing. What down is it? Where on the field are we? How much time is left? The data isn’t complicated. It is easily read and easily interpreted.
Start with your leading indicators as the KPI’s for scoreboards. It is easy to get distracted with dashboards. They are easy to create and we have plenty of data. We actually have too much data. Much of it is interesting but useless. It may tell us the score but it won’t tell us what yard the ball is on. Great dashboards focus on leading indicators. They are easy to read and predict great outcomes. If they don’t, get some new ones.
Begin measuring what you can today. It is way too easy to develop very complicated dashboards. We may think we don’t have the right data and need to wait until we can measure it at some distant point in the future. By beginning to measure what we can today, we will start down the road to knowing if we are on track or not.
Encourage speed and agility in measuring sooner rather than later. Speed is important. Simplicity rules the day. Complexity in dashboarding kills the spirit. Let’s build it now should be the mantra. The digital executive will be impatient in this area. We need to move now and we need to move fast. That is all there is to it.
The important thing is that without a true sense of urgency, true change is nigh impossible. Performance measurement shouldn’t be seen as bureaucratic administrivia, nor as a bandwagon fad. It needs to be appreciated in the broader context of continual improvement, capability growth and problem solving. And that’s one of the reasons why a sense of urgency is a critical ingredient. Source: KPI Library
Scoreboards and dashboards help you know if you are on track or not. We all know that simply knowing the score is not a predictor of who will win the game. How many times have we seen a game where one team is ahead but loses? Way too often. In addition to great scoreboards, we need dashboards that tell the players are we on tract to win or lose regardless of the current score.
The employees who are accountable for the leading indicator should develop and report with their scoreboard. When I report my own results, I tend to own them. When someone else does it for me (or to me), it is easy to quibble about the data. That leads to a lot of wasted time and effort. If I play baseball and a key indicator is how many times I get on base (compared to home runs hit), I can easily measure and report how I am doing. 4 at bats and no times on base tells me I need to improve. From this point of view, scoreboards and dashboards should be closest to the point of action as possible.
Scoreboards and dashboards should not cost a lot to implement. The data should be easily available and not difficult to analyze. Costly, time consuming systems will spell the death of any initiative. Digital executives know they need to start simple and improve over time through a continuous improvement process.
Here are the key ideas:
06 Tuesday Jan 2015
Posted in Book: The Digital Executive, Strategy
Tags
Leading Indicator
SMART goals are very important. They set the direction and tone. How they will be achieved (strategy) is equally, if not more, important. The best way to think of strategy is to focus on the leading indicators that produce the results you want to achieve. Otherwise, any strategy will do.
Leading indicators change quickly and are generally seen as a precursor to the direction something is going. For example, changes in building permits may affect the housing market, an increase in new business orders could lead to increased production, interest rate changes will impact spending and investments, a diminishing of demands for natural resources will often indicate work slowdowns, and aging baby boomers may indicate future stresses on the healthcare system. Because leading indicators come before a trend, they are considered business drivers. Identifying specific, focused leading indicators should be a part of each business’s strategic planning. Source: Projectimes.com
What produces the best results? This isn’t easy to figure out. It will probably take some time, effort and painful conversations to figure out. It may also involve some false starts. There will be lots of ideas. Not all of them will be valid.
It is important to consider strategy alternatives. There are many ways to get to the goal. How do we decide which ones are must useful?
In addition to identifying the impact on people, process and technology for each proposed strategy, we will also need to work with the senior leadership teams from the Business Unit to qualify the strategies. Some areas to think about are:
The focus of leading indicators to drive strategy is to agree on the measurable indicators that will produce the results. Typically the leading indicators can be measured in very short time increments, ideally weekly or even daily.
Equally important however, a lead indicator without a lag indicator may make you feel good about keeping busy with a lot of activities but it will not provide confirmation that a business result has been achieved. In much the same way a Balanced Scorecard requires a ‘balance’ of measures across organizational disciplines, so a ‘balance’ of lead and lag indicators are required to ensure the right activities are in place to ensure the right outcomes.
There is a cause and effect chain between lead and lag indicators, both are important when selecting measures to track toward your business goals. Traditionally we tend to settle for lag indicators, however, do not underestimate the importance of lead indicators. Source: Intrafocus
Many employees should be involved in agreeing on leading indicators for strategy. As much as possible, the closer the employee or group is to the customer, the better the feedback for strategy will be. At the end of the day though, senior management is responsible for setting the strategic direction and being willing to be accountable for the results.
Here are some ideas around requirements and constraints.
Here are the key ideas:
08 Monday Dec 2014
Posted in Book: The Digital Executive, Process
Innovation
Earning relevance with your customers requires much more than the adoption of the latest technology or being on the social media flavor of the month. All of that can be for naught if the experience wasn’t enjoyable, didn’t meet the customer’s needs or was too complex. All of your innovation should about the user experience and simple design. All of your innovation should be about understanding what customers need and then solving them in a simple, enjoyable way.
Technology and channels must be chosen with the fact that it will enable the customer journey and engage them in your mission. If you don’t know that it will, perhaps a small test is in order. Channels should be chosen with an end in mind for the customer. What difference does it make if you are on Pinterest but none of your customers find that helpful?
With all the technology opportunities you have in front of you, where do you start? This is where your goals and strategies come into play. The key is to match technology investments with goals to improve the overall unified experience your customers want and need. The tough work is to prioritize opportunities with investments that have a customer experience return. That will help develop a culture for recognizing an emerging technology to adapt to the right platform before someone else uses it to disrupt you.
Technology can be very disruptive if someone else solves a customer problem or obstacle before you do. If the technology they use makes it easier, more enjoyable for your customer, loyalty will go out the window. They become relevant and you lose relevance. If it happens enough with enough customers, your mission suffers tremendously. Is that happening now?
It is important to leverage investments in disruptive technology through the filter of your long-term strategy combined with a deep knowledge of your customers needs.
If you are investing in every social and mobile platform, are you becoming a jack-of-all trades and a master of none?
Solving a real customer problem, with the right emerging technology that is enjoyable and simple is in fact a game changer.
06 Thursday Nov 2014
Posted in Book: The Digital Executive, Customer Focus
Your customers are sharing experiences they have with you. This profoundly influences the journey others they know will take and the decisions they will make to become engaged with you. Your marketing efforts have one level of effect but they are always seen as your marketing efforts. What others say, in a peer-to-peer way, are the most potent influencers of all. Word of mouth has always been powerful. Technology now allows for exponential reach for the person who shares their experience of you. It isn’t what you say about yourself but it is all about what others say about you that counts.
At some point, a customer will start a journey with your company. It may be small and unnoticeable to you to begin with. Maybe it was that $10 donation they made when a friend who was participating in an event asked you to give. You can give a lot more and you might. Think of what that experience is like for them. Think through it very carefully. Also think through how to help them along the journey to a higher level of engagement. Is it all intentional? Major customers don’t go from $10 to $1,000,000 in one big leap. The $10 experience, however, has to help start and support that journey.
Every one, marketing, sales, advocacy and mission programs need to align to contribute to the experiences that lead to an engaged journey. It needs to be mapped out and it needs to be intentional. And everyone needs to be on board with the strategy. The framework of internal collaboration is not difficult: listen to the customers, learn, create engagement experiences, and adapt to improve the engagement experiences.
Shared experiences (and they will be shared) are ties that bind the decision making potential customers will make. In the connected world with access to mobile, social and the internet anytime anywhere, experiences will be shared on demand. You have a great mission. That isn’t the issue. The unconnected and siloed experiences you are not intentional about may not be what you want shared on YouTube. Design the type of experiences you want shared. You have to assume the experience, whether good or not, will be shared. That level of design will free you from fearing someone sharing the truth.
18 Monday Aug 2014
Posted in Book: The Digital Executive, Customer Focus, Strategy
Not all data is of equal value and not every customer is either. Part of the framework that leads from insight to action is understanding which customers are of more value and those that will lead to greater levels of renewal.
Basic value segmentation looks at low actual value and low potential value. The focus is to mine the data and watch for changes from other data.
A second cohort to segment is high current value but low potential value. The focus is to maintain the relationship to renew commitments.
Third, segment those who are low actual value and high potential value. The focus is cultivate the relationship and upgrade the commitment.
The final segment are the customers with high actual and high potential value. The focus here is to invest in the relationship.
It is critical to recognize that not all customers have the same value long term and to invest in the ones that have a high potential. This type of segmentation requires high levels of insight. Standard business processes can be enabled in lots of systems via workflow.
The digital executive has a specific responsibility to insist that this is core to your marketing, sales and digital strategies. An unfocused approach to engaging with customers can be disastrous. If you are a marketing or sales executive, organize a group to help formulate the strategy and become ambassadors for its execution.
One requirement could be to enhance your data with external sources to assist in process of segmenting. Tools like Dunn and Bradstreet data for corporations and wealth screening for individuals may be useful. In some cases it may be as simple as enhancing data based on zip codes and census tracts to get started.
Here are the key ideas:
12 Tuesday Aug 2014
Posted in Book: The Digital Executive, Digital Business, Technology
Resist the temptation to focus and organize around silos. While silos can maximize a part of the system, they sub-optimize the whole. We are building a customer (digital) ecosystem. Read more here … and here …
There is something as “not seeing the forest for the trees”. In the case of data (including big data), that can certainly be the case. It is easy to get lost in the data. It is important to see data as a way to gain customer insight. Having gained insight, we must take action to improve results for our customers and business.
The digital executive needs to evaluate whether the department silos are structured properly as a part of the overall ecosystem. One area to look at is what is the overall level of accountability around supporting the total results (including renewal and upgrades) from customer experiences and relationships. Structural change may be needed to support optimal results.
In scientific terms, an ecosystem is formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their environment. The ecosystem has multiple, interdependent components that function as a unit. Innovators have long envisioned a similar environment where data, technology, people, and business processes operate in synchronization to improve customer satisfaction and business performance. The key to achieving this vision is having the capacity to discern the true nature of customer relationships in an intuitive manner. This capacity is known as “customer insight.”
The concept of the customer data ecosystem can be further broken down into two key aspects: the Customer Lifecycle, and the Information Lifecycle.
Below is an example from Forrester Research of how an ecosystem could look.
In the customer ecosystem, there are several components that are important.
Integrated customer data forms the cornerstone of the customer ecosystem. Organizations have rich sources of data including customer interaction data, account data, external data sources, and customer information files. This data must be cleaned and properly linked together as fast as the data becomes available.
Digital Business Ecosystem
Individual data elements provide undeniable value in the ecosystem. Integrated data provides even greater value. However, integrating customer data is far from an easy task. Disparate systems and errors in the data typically prevent all of the data from being used by analytical processes. To turn all of this data into insight, sophisticated technologies and techniques are needed to clean the data, discover hidden relationships, and integrate it. This integrated view must then be fed into analytical models to discover and predict patterns in customer behavior. This deep insight into a customer services help organizations fully understand customer profitability, attrition, and retention.
Providing insight, however, is only one part of the solution. This insight must be turned into action to achieve real benefits. Two best practices have emerged in a customer relations focus: dashboards and scorecards.
Dashboards provide a quick way to get an immediate picture of business processes. Similar to a dashboard in a car, data is displayed in an intuitive manner that allows employees to see how the processes that they are responsible for are working. In the customer ecosystem, a dashboard contains multiple information displays that show how customer processes are working.
Scorecards are a vital part of the dashboard display that show specific measurements, also known as key performance indicators (KPIs), for a specific employee role. Unlike financial condition ratios reported to the Board and the IRS, KPIs always reflect strategic value drivers. For example, Return on Investment or functional expenses are common metrics used to judge financial performance, but it doesn’t measure a specific driver of value.
For the customer ecosystem, a KPI measuring the average value of a new customer reflects a strategic objective of acquiring more profitable customers.
In order to drive the right behaviors in the ecosystem, these mechanisms must be part of the daily job role for customer-focused employees. That is, insight must be “in sight” of people in day-to-day operational roles. Therefore these capabilities must be quick and easy to use.
In the business world, there is an old saying that “what gets measured gets done.” Dashboards and scorecards also provide a strong way to clearly communicate business strategy and objectives across the enterprise.
When viewing a report, graph, or KPI, people often need to understand why a specific number is different from what they expect. For insight to be truly “actionable”, a user must be able to drill down into the details. This process is typically called “Root Cause Analysis” because the user must get to the “root” of the problem. For example, if the KPI Average Value of New Customers is lower than expected, the user needs to be able to look beyond the KPI to the underlying data.
Insight Ecosystem
Here are the key ideas:
07 Thursday Aug 2014
Posted in Digital Business, People, Strategy
Tags
Strategy
Let’s start with the facts. In a 10-year study of 1,500 corporation with the biggest market caps, three noted business school professors determined that CEO compensation, incentive pay and tenure were all negatively related to shareholder returns. The reason? Overconfidence leading to bad strategic decisions.
Have you seen this? I bet you have. Is it time to question some of our assumptions about compensation and what produces results? Probably.
If nothing else, there is a clear case here for executive humility.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. Every serious investor knows that to be true. And yet, we all tend to get a little full of ourselves when we’ve had a good run. The better and more sustained our performance, the more overconfident we’re likely to become. It’s human nature. And it goes way beyond investing.
Success is its own worst enemy. Success is self-limiting. It applies to everyone to varying degrees, most notably CEOs and business leaders of companies big and small. And while that concept may fly in the face of common management doctrine, it explains why so many formerly-successful executives end up destroying enormous amounts of shareholder value and personal wealth.
04 Monday Aug 2014
Posted in Strategy, Technology
Is hope a good strategy? For many of us in business, it seems to be on some days. We can break out of that vicious cycle though.
With business technology, we can bring clarity to the business goal and help with a workforce computing strategy that enables the business goal. When thinking of the workforce computing strategy, some questions to answer are:
David Johnson at Forrester Research in Forrester’s Workforce Computing Strategic Plan research has some great insights.
How strange it seems then, that thousands of IT projects begin every day, but more than one third of them crash enroute. Why? I would argue that it’s because there is seldom a clear destination in mind, a rational plan to get there, nor a viable system approach in place to execute the plan. Most of the time, the destination and the means to get there are only vague estimates, and the elements of the strategy are rooted in hope.
via What Is A Workforce Computing Strategic Plan…And Why Do You Need One? | Forrester Blogs.
27 Friday Jun 2014
Posted in Digital Business, Process, Strategy
Are you too busy to improve?
We all are busy. The whirlwind never stops some days. And then the emergency strikes. Yee gads. It may take weeks to recover.
Are you so busy that you don’t see to way out?
Now may be the time to break the habits that are keeping you from taking things to the next level. Now would be the time to focus. It isn’t easy to eliminate non-essential activities but it must be done. There isn’t enough time in the day to do everything.
Here are 5 questions to ask:
25 Wednesday Jun 2014
Do Good, Do it Now!
The mission of nonprofits is to do good. A core question is, how do you measure good?
It can be measured and should be measured. We have an obligation to our investors (donors) to do so. We must be rigorous about it. We must set goals in advance and we must report success or failure after the fact.
When we envision a program, we ought to consider the alternatives and the cost of the alternatives. Strategy is about making choices.
Now nonprofits are using cost per outcome, too. A program to get students proficient in math, for instance, can consider factors like location, teacher engagement, students’ language fluency, grade level, and parental involvement to predict how successful a program will be. It can then weigh the costs and effectiveness for different scenarios: Will it carry out the program five days a week with paid tutors in a location it will rent? Or will it ask parents to work with students at home two nights a week?
13 Friday Jun 2014
Posted in Digital Business
Tags
Strategy
As digital executives, we all start many initiatives. It is also true that some loose steam. Some for a reason and other times for no good reason at all.
One overlooked aspect of all sustainable initiative is what is called “governance”. I must admit I’ve not always been a fan of governance. When done well, it can be helpful, particularly when it comes to setting goals, developing strategy and assuring accountability for results.
It is important to have a content strategy. It is important that it is sustainable. No point in starting a strategy and not sustaining it.
Consider do you have proper governance and assess will that help sustain the initiatives.
An important, and often overlooked, component of content strategy—governance. This means establishing internal workflows and editorial procedures to ensure content is consistent, high-quality, and aligned with your goals; and most importantly, that your content strategy efforts are sustainable in the long term.
via Content Strategy for Nonprofits: Establishing a Sustainable Content Program | Bureau for Good.
19 Monday May 2014
Posted in Digital Business
Tags
Collaborate, Customer Engagement, Digital Business, Discovery, New York Times, Promotion, Strategy
New York Times
We know it is tough moving from a traditional business to a digital business. This is highlighted clearly in the publishing industry where newcomers who are exclusively digital are beating the pants off of traditional publishers. There are many lessons here for all of us. And so, we find an internal report from the New York Times detailing their challenges.
If you are a digital professional or executive committed to digital transformation, it is well worth reading the whole report. Yes, it is 96 pages but it is free and much better than many books on the topic.
A 96-page internal New York Times report, sent to top executives last month by a committee led by the publisher’s son and obtained by BuzzFeed, paints a dark picture of a newsroom struggling more dramatically than is immediately visible to adjust to the digital world, a newsroom that is hampered primarily by its own storied culture.
via Exclusive: New York Times Internal Report Painted Dire Digital Picture.
18 Sunday May 2014
Posted in Digital Business
Tags
Reggie Henry – CIO – ASAE
Reggie Henry joined ASAE in November of 1994. His responsibilities are to implement “exemplary” systems at ASAE that can serve as a model to the rest of the association community and to “ratchet-up” the use and understanding of technology among ASAE members. He has been working with and/or for non-profit organizations since 1985. Mr. Henry holds a B.S. in Economics and Computer Science from Georgetown University. Mr. Henry serves on the Technology Advisory Board of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons Board and the Curriculum Committee for the Institute for Organization Management (U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation). He enjoys cooking, drawing, pottery and golf.
————Guest Blog————-
We all know the stats. The adoption of mobile technologies is far and away the fastest we have adopted any other technologies. Smartphone adoption was/is historical. Tablet adoption (and yes, I consider tablets mobile devices) is on a much steeper curve. These are not just phones and media consumption devices. People now carry around in their pockets more computing power than a room full of computers could provide 20 years ago! It’s estimated that some time in the next two years, more people will be accessing the internet via mobile devices than by traditional laptop and desktop devices. We are way past the time where everyone should have a strategy to take advantage of this. So, what to do? Continue reading
17 Saturday May 2014
Posted in Digital Business
Misfits
It is very, very important to think out clearly the digital goal and strategy. It is obvious if you are an Eskimo that you don’t need a refrigerator. Is that what you are “selling” to senior management? If you know the goal, you can evaluate whether a digital strategy will get you there or not. There is some risk that “just being digital” isn’t good enough.
This isn’t about technology for technology sake. It is about knowing where you are going from a business perspective and connecting with customers with expected digital approaches.
Why the salesman who claims he/she can sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo is a misfit in the world of Digital? A lot of people in the industry have been sold on how the Digital revolution will benefit businesses. There are industries that have benefited by utilizing these technologies for their businesses. The success of these industries (who are ahead on the Innovators curve) has created an excitement amongst the others. And, rightfully so. Hence, the businesses are looking for opportunities to leverage new technologies to deliver results.
15 Thursday May 2014
Business Strategy
The job of a CIO is a tough one. Understanding and being able to communicate highly technical concepts in plain business language isn’t easy. We all recognize that strategic planning is probably the most important thing we do. How good are we at it?
The business world today is extremely complex. Increased globalization; heightened merger activity; competition from nontraditional sources; shortened product life cycles; and a tightened regulatory environment are just a few of the items affecting a company’s strategic plan. Information technology can affect all of these things… and more.
In addition, many companies use technology as the strategic weapon necessary to survive in the fierce competitive environment. It is the job of the CIO to understand all of the aspects of the marketplace in which the company participates to help it effectively use information technology to address these challenges.
How comfortable are you at participating in business strategy conversations? A great question to think seriously about.
07 Wednesday May 2014
Posted in Customer Focus, Digital Business, Nonprofit
Tags
Donor, Guest Blog, Nonprofit, Plan, Strategic Choice, Strategy
Kevin Schulman – CEO of DonorVoice
Kevin Schulman is founder and managing partner of DonorVoice, a company helps non-profits increase retention and donor loyalty with an empirical, proven process to evaluate which communications, messages, events and donor service interactions cause lifetime value and by extension, those that don’t. In short, they put the “donor” in donor-centric strategy and prove the value of this approach in the only way that matters – in-market testing.
Kevin developed the DonorVoice model, framework and product line in the commercial sector as an expert in relationship theory, loyalty and linking attitudinal data with transactional.
————-Guest Blog————–
Strategy Starts Where Your Comfort Level Ends
But, alas this is not how strategy is typically done. To start, we turn “strategy” the noun into an adjective (strategic) modifying “plan” or “planning”. This fateful, unintentional decision likely dooms any real strategy emerging. Instead, we end with a long, tedious document and an Excel file.
The Excel document is some form of a budget that tries to attach the same precision to the revenue (i.e. DEMAND) side of the equation as the cost (SUPPLY) side. The latter is 100% manageable by the organization, the former is not even close. And yet, we go through this long, tedious drill of perfectly forecasting and budgeting for revenue by program and department to match the equally precise cost estimates.
At the end of this many months long process – that we faithfully repeat year after year – we all feel good, comfortable and confident with detailed documents and excel budgeting to support that feeling.
The larger the spreadsheets, the more confident an organization is in its process. All those numbers and data feel analytical, scientific even.
So why do managers and those on the front lines responsible for executing the “strategy” tend to dread the annual strategic planning ritual? Why does it consume so much time and have so little impact on organizational actions? The reason; those people responsible for delivering on the plan recognize the process as it exists today does not produce novel strategies.
Instead, it perpetuates the status quo.
But, if the alternative is ideation sessions and off-sites to come up with radical, big new ideas then these same manager and directors make the right choice in sticking with the process that at least produces some short term comfort versus the 1 day of talking with no action.
The short term comfort (along with a certain amount of resignation) lasts until the returns start coming in and we see – to nobody’s actual surprise – that revenue is not as predictable as Excel would lead us to believe – though the costs are dead on.
So what is the alternative? How do we get back to real strategy? For starters, here are a few defining thoughts.
