The Informed Upstart

This week consulting firm Gartner started the Australian leg of their Gartner Predicts series of presentations where the firm’s consultants look at what will be the big IT issues of the year.

One of the key predictions from the roadshow is how businesses will struggle with “big data” – the wave of information flooding into our inboxes as technology starts delivering on the promise of giving us much more insight into our operations, customers and markets.
 
Gartner analyst Steve Prentice observed, “for 20 years, business leaders have been knocking on the doors of IT demanding better business data. Business leaders should be careful what they wish for.”
 
This flood of information from social media, databases and other customer relationship management (CRM) software already threatens to overwhelm most big and small businesses with many of us struggling making sense from the noise and identifying the nuggets of wisdom we know are there.
 
Clay A. Johnson’s recent book The Information Diet covers this topic from a broader view. His idea is that a poor intake of information is just as detrimental as eating badly.
 
The solution, according to Clay, is to have what he calls “infoveganism’ – being selective with the news sources we listen to, try to shop locally and, most important of all, having diverse sources that do more than pander to our biases and prejudices.
 
We all favour sources of information that confirm we are right – whether it’s the morning shock jock, the newspaper columnists’ safe views or what our peers are saying at the Chamber of Commerce.
 
Mixing up those views, and looking at data from an objective standpoint, are an important part of surviving in a changing economy. Many in business are misreading markets and making major mistakes.
 
Big Australian retailers are a good example of this. Having ignored the web for a decade, they suddenly woke up last year to the reality that markets were changing and – to confirm their own biases and misjudgements – blamed the tax system.
 
Plenty of keen young entrepreneurs have already seen this changes in retail and damaged the incumbents whose comfortable managements were more concerned about protecting their bonuses rather than meeting the market. Now those opportunities are spreading across industries.
 
Many big corporations are suffering because their internal information systems are poor and their outsourced customer service centres aren’t capable of collecting the market intelligence they need.
 
Vodafone Australia are a good example of what has gone wrong in larger businesses; on last week’s restructure their internal memo is quoted as saying they need to be “more responsive to customers and more cost-effective in a highly competitive market”.
 
The fact the company had lost contact with customers, and refused to acknowledge its problems, is a good example of not paying attention to key data – no doubt management KPIs were being met and any evidence to the contrary was being ignored.
 
Not paying attention to inconvenient data is going to be the downfall of many businesses, as smarter and more nimble operators analyse and understand where the opportunities lie.

It’s a good time to be an upstart competitor.

Business Tech Talk explores how technology is changing our companies, markets and society. Business owner, blogger and broadcaster Paul Wallbank looks at how we can use the net, computers and smartphones to make our businesses more profitable and competitive.