Focus on the Key Strategic Drivers\Levers

Do you know what the Key Strategic Drivers\Levers are for your business? What are the key inputs and activities that drive the operational and financial results of your business? It is common for a Business Intelligence or Data Analytics team to focus on financial result and financial trend reports for a business unit per a financial year, especially if the data deliverables are driven from within the finance department. However, to add real value the focus should be on measuring and monitoring the drivers/levers that drive these financial results or trends. In many circumstances what drives the success of your business may be quite surprising.

Drivers will differ by industry and some examples may be:

• Location
• Number of stores
• Website Traffic
• Production rate
• Years of experience in company
• Employee happiness
• Salesperson effectiveness
• Downtime
• Energy costs
• Perception
• Quality
• Diversity
• etc...

You will need to engage with the various business unit managers in your company to extract what the key drivers/levers are that impact the performance of their business units. This is a conversation you will need to steer and control because inevitably the manager will want you to report on what they have always reported on i.e. retrospective measures such as revenue and cost. Instead get then to focus on the drivers/levers that influence these and that can be measured near real-time if required.

Then identify the appropriate measures and associated business rules that would enable the effective monitoring of the identified drivers/levers.

For each driver/lever identify the various movement increments at which point a distinct level of management in the organization should get involved in i.e. for an identified driver/lever if there is a 5% shift then middle management should be notified, a 10% move may require senior management involvement while a 15% or more movement may require an executive to get involved.

Importantly you must develop an effective method of visualizing the drivers/levers. This can be the most onerous part of the exercise: How to display your data in an understandable and intuitive way. It really does not matter how great your data and insights are if no one can understand it and the dashboard does not tell you the data story.

As a side note, those financial reports mentioned in the first paragraph are important and should be catered for, but you should stop and ask why the present financial system in your business does not already cater for them. Do not settle for the common explanation of: "Our business is unique, and no financial system can cater for us".