The Digital Project Budget: A Simple Way to Express Digital Costs
Getting Real with the Internet of Things
The SMB Business Case for Cloud
Tracking in the Enterprise – Correlation versus Causation
We've got the activity captured, and now we have "effectiveness" ratings for the people in the group - how will we put them together and see a relationship? Mechanically, this is a simple XY scatter graph - a standard chart type in both Excel and Google Docs. Let's take a look at a sample data set that illustrates the idea: This is the picture I expected to see: the more you use the system (the X axis), the more results…
Who is Using the System? Tracking in the Enterprise
For years, web sites have been measured - and valued - by user traffic. Who is looking at this site? When are they coming, and how long are they staying? Driven by the advertising business model that values "impressions", web analytics have evolved in a number of ways; the interest has shifted from Passive to Active. Advertisers want to know who is clicking, selecting, comparing, buying, and abandoning. Games track Daily Average Users, Social Networks quantify contributions and visualize connections,…
Managing IT: Three Archetypes
I'll tell you about this visualization from a recent internal conversation, but I may end up aggravating some career IT people out there. Yes, I have massively oversimplified things - but I'm trying to develop a broader understanding, and I think it's a good first step. The original question was "How do I manage IT?", but it quickly morphed into "how can I drive / derive value from IT?" (note the powerful difference that a single letter makes - derive sounds sustainable).…
Seven Links in the Data Value Chain
Structured Process Improvement for Unstructured Processes
Have you ever waded into a process improvement project that had trouble finding a place to start? Consider, for example, a strategic sales team (for RevCo, famous maker of Widgets), working their established product families to generate breakout new customers and revenues. They've implemented a CRM system, but are having problems getting adoption and seeing benefits. The difficulty, of course, is that they have not changed their marketing strategies, and can't see beyond "automating our current process" as a measure…