Driving Cross Functional Alignment in Times of Rapid Change

“Change is the only constant in life”. If he were alive today, even Heraclitus the Greek philosopher (quoted here) might agree that lately, change in today’s world has been dramatic. The corona virus pandemic has affected everyone and although the impact has varied across industries there are common, vexing challenges. During constantly changing market conditions it has become even more difficult than usual to stay informed about business performance. Collaborating with others to understand business impact across functions is harder than ever. How can we avoid greater organizational disconnects and fragmentation in disruptive times?

Data Analytics has the potential to deepen understanding of business performance by providing insight into what’s happening now, what happened in the past and what could happen in the future. Further, enterprise scale Analytics that’s designed with integrated, cross functional capability can help break down barriers and empower people to collaborate effectively, even when drivers change rapidly.

Analytics can help people answer questions like:  What has been the financial impact of shifting the workforce from onsite to home? Has the cost of expediting material and product to compensate for supply chain disruptions been worthwhile? If we hire more people to capitalize on surging demand, how does that affect cash flow? What has been the track record of marketing spend before and during lockdowns, and how should we proceed?

Breaking down barriers requires an analytical framework that overcomes the structural boundaries and the limitations of technology. Line of business SaaS applications are efficient for running the business, but “…separate systems have made it harder to work together on critical business processes that require close collaboration between the two organizations. Duplicate data and disconnected systems lead to errors, manual work, and process slowdowns that go beyond HR and Finance to negatively impact the entire business.” https://bit.ly/3bIwsBy

Locked within departmental applications is a massive amount of data that can be used to derive insight. A frequently used tool for analyzing this data - spreadsheets - fall short in numerous ways including version control, ease of collaboration and scalability. Spreadsheets are subject to calculation errors and security risks and often elude corporate governance guidelines.

“While providing cross-functional data to line-of-business users demonstrably has value, it often requires a significant amount of work to bring this data together from across the organization and prepare it for analytics.” https://bit.ly/3k0HHYM What’s needed is enterprise scale solution that unlocks the value of the data, simplifies cross functional collaboration, and provides a data-enabled, unified view of business performance that everyone can agree on. This goal can be achieved through an analytical framework capable of integrating data from ERP, HCM, SCM and other relevant sources, and enables a single, common hub or ‘window’ into business performance that everyone can see and agree upon.

What are the necessary components of a unified analytical solution? A common data model that enables alignment of KPI's and visualization across business functions. Self service for users to minimize dependence on IT. Tight integration with source systems to facilitate speed-to-analysis, preserve security and maintain accuracy. Augmentation with machine learning that takes the work out of data preparation, visualization, pattern discovery and prediction. And prebuilt versions of reports, dashboards and KPI's based on industry best practices in each of the lines of business.

Beyond the four walls of the organization, people want to use data from external sources to extend and personalize their analyses. Those sources might include market analyses or demographics, health and safety status and trends, surveys, climate data, etc. The analytical solution should be capable of extending models and content with data from other sources without worrying about disruptive software upgrades.

With the right tools and organization mindset, it IS possible to achieve a unified view of business performance that enables speed, agility and alignment across the organization. One that reduces and even eliminates functional disconnects and fragmentation. There is no better time than now, when markets are turbulent, to take steps towards greater alignment and insight in business performance.