The beginning of a New Year: A good time to BONSAI your organization design

Do most business leadership teams think deeply about the design of their enterprise? Generally no. The design and internal behaviors of organizations develop organically over time as an enterprise grows.  If you believe that organizational design is a bi-product of good management and effective leadership, you could argue that OD is an unnecessary profession.  Certainly, some organizations work exceptionally well WITHOUT teams of consultants, HR and Change Management practitioners running all over them with measuring sticks and psycho-analysis tool-bags.

I often find myself debating whether it's better to have an enterprise that flies by a 'seat of the pants' management method or alternatively adopts 'systematic management' methods.  The great joy and challenge of understanding how organizations work is their a unique blend of science and creativity, of systems and people, of tools and culture.

Getting the best out of an enterprise usually comes down to a blend of everything.

But how do you get the blend right? Even when organizations are led by great leaders, and have great people in them doing the right things, it doesn't hurt for everyone to know 'what the plan is' and 'how they contribute to it'.  And there's the rub.  When organizations aren't thoughtfully designed, they grow in an unkept way. They grow 'slack' in their processes, theifdoms build, budgets grow, resource pools become ever larger and unkept.  Department managers grow their teams based on departmental needs. But what of the big picture?  What if markets and customer needs are changing?  Focusing on department needs and priorities, resources and plans could simply be encouraging wasteful practices to be repeated.

Most people will be familiar with Bonsai; the Japanese art form using miniature trees grown in containers. The main reason for the pastime lies the opportunity to contemplate the world by performing a slightly trivial task. The result of the activity is a more aesthetically pleasing tree design.  But the ACT itself, of nurturing an attractive tree design through a constant vigilance on the part of the practitioner, has huge parallels to the role of an Organizational Designer.

Businesses require a ROLE that is constantly monitoring the health and growth of the enterprise - an Organizational Design practitioner. Think of it as the person that monitors the BONSAI and makes sure it grows in a healthy way.  Without this role to shape the growth of an enterprise into a thoughtful design, it soon becomes unkempt.

Organizations work better when resources are aligned in the best possible way to the things that need to be done to achieve stakeholder outcomes.  Designed well and the people working in the enterprise will produce more with the least resources - i.e. You get more growth for your feeding and watering. (Ask business leaders to state what proportion of the activity that happens in their enterprise contributes directly to strategic goals and you'll be surprised by the answer.  If they say any more than 65% they'd be very lucky.  And that's a lot of someone's energy being wasted on things that don't really sum up to very much value at all.)

Organizations CAN be designed to work in an optimal way.  Partly it's about agreeing on a smaller number of agenda items that REALLY will make a difference to the success of the enterprise: Most organizations (and management teams) try to do too many things.  But it's more about ALIGNMENT: aligning strategy to stakeholder needs, aligning customer value with stakeholder value, aligning processes to outcomes, aligning roles to processes...

As an Organizational Designer, trying to make sense of all the data needed to comprehend how an organization is designed and how to adapt it can be mind-bending.  Many-a-time I have blown up my spreadsheet owing to the volume of data that needs to be brought together and understood!

Like most professions, Organizational Designers require tools to harvest data, build it into logical structures, maintain it and make sense of it.  The key areas are:

• INSIGHTS: Data that describes and evidences the drivers that underpin the decisions made on strategy.
• PERFORMANCE AND STRATEGY: Data that describes the strategy of the enterprise, how it plans to achieve the stated outcomes and what progress is being made.
• POLICIES AND PROCESSES: Data that describes how the enterprise operates to produce its outcomes.
• ROLES AND ACCOUNTABILITY: Data that describes how duties are divvied out to people and resources.

The good news is that unlike the BONSAI owner, you don't need to go buy your tree!  This means you only need to think about where to start trimming and nurturing your design.... NO!

The first job is to make sense of the existing design (what's the point in Change Management if you don't know what you're trying to change into?).  Few organizations have a clear picture of what their strategy is, who does what and why, what processes and policies exist and how they dovetail together. That's where an Organizational Design Tool-Kit comes in.  As the name suggests it's a tool-kit for Organizational Designers: a relational database-powered system that helps OD practitioners to make sense of the big data that defines how an enterprise works.

Using an OD Tool-Kit, it's easy to bring the large quantities of data together and articulate the design of the enterprise.  Then you will see the BIG PICTURE of your BONSAI.  Only then should you consider your first trim ;-)

Digital Marketing - Which Analytical Insights Really Matter?

Digital Marketing Analytics is an important area for most companies at present as online channels become ever more influential in the marketing mix. Sometimes I get the impression that marketers are unnerved by the digital arena because it's challenging to build a robust performance management model.   In this series of articles sponsored by Adobe, marketers get to understand the key threads of knowledge they could, should or must invest in. It goes some way to demystify the digital marketing arena. Take a look...

Metrics That Matter

Using behavioral science to improve the customer experience | McKinsey & Company

This is an interesting article by McKinsey that highlights how business is now coming to terms with the need to register how customer structures and behaviors impact directly on operational excellence and performance.

Using behavioral science to improve the customer experience | McKinsey & Company: "e"

What Is Customer Science?

This week I've been putting together a presentation to introduce Customer Science and why I think it's now come of age thanks to Cloud CRM data-marts.

At one time, marketers like me really struggled to build a rich understanding of the customers in their target markets.  The first major challenge was to get customer data into a usable form.  With so many business systems designed to support a specific process or discipline, it's not uncommon for data to be held in many different back-office systems.  The Web made this situation even worse.  Even when marketers could get their customer database onto a spreadsheet (and you were lucky if it didn't blow up when attempting this due to the files sizes), data quality and inconsistency issues meant that marketers faced hours if not days of data crunching to get their data consistent.

In today's digital world a great deal has changed.  For one thing, the state of markets changes so quickly.  It would be a nonsence to try to attempt this type of 'single view' when customers ebb and flow on eCommerce websites on an hourly basis.  Another issue with digital customers is they don't interact using phones and face-to-face visits.  They don't want suppliers to call them out of the blue to ask them a hundred questions about their product interests, buying preferences, future plans or buying behavior.  We live in an era of event-driven, remote - practically always - online thoughtful consumers and buyers.  They're always on the look-out for a good deal, positive product or service recommendations, happy to snack online in pursuit of their purchasing interests - it's a very different world to the one Micheal Porter described in his marketing 'how to' articles.

In this presentation I've put down my thoughts on Customer Science and how it's rapidly maturing as a discipline.  I find the subject fascinating because, like many marketers, I share a huge interest in the fit between customer value and shareholder value.  I also have a belief that most customers are willing to buy your product or service if it addresses an unmet need - IF ONLY you can communicate to them in a fine-grained, relevant way.

I hope you enjoy this article.  Do let me have your feedback!

Ian.

What Is Customer Science - And Why Should You Care?

A Single View of Customer Data - Thanks Cloud ;-)

Sourcing a single view of customer data can be painful for marketers

In this article I take my first walk around using a BIG DATA private-cloud data-mart for marketing and comment on what it’s actually like as a marketer to be armed with a ‘single-version-of-the-truth’ when it comes to customer insights.

I’ve spent my career as a business-to-business marketer being (one of) the last to leave the office because THE NEXT marketing activity required data in a certain sort, form and quality that required me – and often my willing team – to stay behind and fix all of the wrinkles that fall out of exporting data from operational systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Contact Management (CM) or Intranet repositories.

The marketing industry has spent a life-time grappling with poor quality data from operational systems and using it for a different purpose to what it was intended.  The vision of CRM and other systems was to create a ‘single-view-of-the-customer’.  Great.  Or at least it would be great if systems didn’t change, acquisitions didin’t happen and marketers only wanted to use data that exists within the organization. But this is the real-world, and in the real-world all of these factors impact on marketers to stretch their day.

Thankfully, the advent of cloud computing – and applications platform technologies like ENCANVAS – happily means that nowadays marketers don’t need to rely on operational systems to form their customer data-mart into a single view of the customer.  Private-cloud data-marts are a new form of technology solution to the age-old problem of how to create a nice, neat bundle of customer data that marketers can get their knife and fork into without first having to herd cats.

Sometimes falling under the all conquering umbrella of BIG DATA, CRM private cloud data-marts are a secondary layer of glue-ware:  Instead of creating a ‘new system’ and yet more data entry screens, CRM data marts harvest data from existing operational systems and website to build a holistic view of the customer and market landscapes.  Data is securely uploaded to the cloud using Business Process Management and Workflow tooling (in the case of Encanvas it’s called INFORMATION FLOW DESIGNER), and as it’s harvested, clever algorithms are applied to the data to correct all of those horrid things that marketers usually have to spend their time manually correcting in unwilling spreadsheets – missing postal codes, incorrect salutations, duplicate records, invalid email addresses and telephone numbers.  These algorithms cut a huge chunk of workload off of the marketers’ average day-job and can even cope when salespeople do ther inexplicable data entry faux pas like ‘dead@dontsendemail.com’.

Services like USTech Solutions’ Big Data Skunkworks mean that marketers are able to get up and running with their truly holistic view of customers remarkably quickly and start to show their metal by doing the great things that marketers joined the profession to do rather than the tedious data crunching stuff that drives them to distraction.

SO YOU WANTED A SINGLE VIEW OF YOUR CUSTOMERS – WELL NOW YOU”VE GOT ONE! SO WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH IT?

I’ve only been experiencing the impact of CRM data-marts through ENCANVAS deployments over the last few months and so (even though I’ve been waiting for 20-years to see the day!!). I’m only now getting my hands on the sort of data and tools that I dreamt of as a spotty marketing assistant back in the day.  The results I’ve experienced have so far been outstanding (I may well up!).  Using the interactive charting and mapping tools that are available now to marketers in CRM data-mart platforms it’s now possible to dive into views of data presented in charts or maps and see the related records below to see the detail. It’s also possible to click on the data that DOESN”T have an email, that DOESN’T have a scheduled reminder or scheduled follow-up – so action can be taken to act on what’s missing by resolving the poor working practice.  One can even filter the source of poor quality data to an original system, sales team or sales person!  There’s nowhere to hide for poor quality or incomplete data.

Having the ability to identify patterns and buyer behavior segments is proving extremely useful.  Having defined rules in the system of what constitutes a BAND A customer. or a BAND B customer, the platform will again manage these rules so that, any time a customer inherits these characteristics, they pop into the appropriate group.  Customer data can then be analyzed, sorted, formed into campaign lists (or whatever) by adding this additional ‘filter’.  From a practical perspective this means that marketers can be far more granular with their campaign straegies; they can select customers with or without certain data attributes, by band, by location, by date last contact, by income, by spend, by shopping behavior – gosh it’s fun!!!

Another factor that feels like it’s taking a load-off happens when I see poor quality data and I want to tackle it.  Instead of having to export ALL of the records that have no email address or no Cell/SMS number, I can now concentrate efforts on tackling the BAND A customers that have no email and make sure the most likely sources of business impact are handled first.  Very handy.

One thing I wasn’t expecting is that the data in the cloud data-mart is consistently good even when the data held in sourcing systems remains poor.  This is because the extraction tools that automate the population of the CRM data-mart cloud will install sorting, de-duping, cleansing and enriching treatments not just once but everytime a data upload takes place.  This means that if you’ve instructed the platform to look through your emails and kill any non-conforming data, it does so every time the source data is uploaded – so the result is the cloud always stays PURE.

Does this mean the world of the marketer has changed forever?  Not on a base level; the same old instincts, methods and skills apply. What is different is the IMPACT pragmatic marketing can make on business POWERED by private-cloud CRM data-marts.  It’s and accelerator to marketing innovation.  Of course it also saves me LOADS of time by not having to be knee deep in dodgy data which now allows me to go home at the same time as my sales colleagues that were probably the folk who put the poor quality data in the CRM database in the first place!! Thanks guys – I  forgive you (now).