Imagine. In the middle of the Super Bowl; in the middle of Wimbledon finals; as the top of leaderboard approaches the 16 th tee; or during the overtime of the FIFA finals… imagine if suddenly, a score of kindergarten children made their way on to the pitch and began playing. Just one running free on the field would certainly disrupt the game would it not?

Your enterprise is a daily competitive playing field

Every day – all day – there is a possibility that someone is trying to find a way to disrupt your business. The threats come in all sorts and sizes. Oversimplified, there are three basic sorts of cyber attackers.

The first we will call “taggers.” Like vandals and those who graffiti walls and buses, this sort of hacker merely wants to show off that they got into your systems. They want to be sure you know they were there. Shutting down email servers; encrypting your files and calling for a ransom; and flooding your servers to keep anyone else from reaching you.

The second sort we will call “wedding crashers.” A great deal more subtle, these hackers enter your system and hope to go unnoticed. They stay and get to know everyone there… their passwords and access, for example. They hope to blend in and while some folks might wonder who they are and what they are doing in your systems, most will dismiss them as “somebody must know them,” and think little more about them. Just like wreckers of a reception, they will eat, drink and enjoy the dance music while mingling as though they belong. They take data like a crasher may take a few of the prized wedding gifts. Some even stand to make speeches by authoring emails sent out in an official capacity. Eventually, enough people will begin to notice and curiosity will cause them to be outed.

The third sort is the most dangerous. We will call these “cat burglars.” These are the most professional of the three and the most diligent. Much time and resources will be spent to “case the joint” – your enterprise. They want to know what are the most precious items you have and where you keep them. Most patient, many find their way in harmlessly enough and “wait in the pantry” until it is safe to come out and start their crime spree. They, most often, never want you to know they were there and will leave a door or window unlatched to enable them to return when they want to. Sometimes, they may not even take anything that you would notice – simply copy things and go. They covet things like personnel records for ID theft; customer information; vendor information; financials and more. A victim may never know the burglar was there, unless they made a mistake entering and/or leaving.

Despite all of this going on (and incidents on the rise) many executives and managers view security as an obstacle to efficient operations and a cost with zero return on investment. Further, security is most often viewed as “the IT department’s problem.”

The bold truth is that it is everyone’s responsibility. Most of the entry points for attackers are directly with the assistance of unsuspecting employees. When a corporate network is used to do discovery on all servers and storage farms, it often finds, to its dismay, gigabyte after gigabyte of music files; video files; pictures stored on corporate assets that are personal in nature to the employee and either uploaded from a flash drive they inserted in their company PC or a download from their mobile phone or directly from the internet. The seemingly innocuous email offer and/or online deal that can’t be past up, is often just what a hacker needed to get into your corporate systems.

No longer are these merely antisocial technology misfits in a dark room relentlessly tapping on a keyboard. There are well funded, professionally trained computer science teams – around the world – who have created and benefited from this new form of internet piracy. The market will dictate the worth of what has been purloined so just take everything one can from you and someone – somewhere will be willing to pay for what a hacker took. An entire economy is operating on a sub-web that is driven by supply/demand and creative ways to take virtual assets and turn them into cash.

A little off track but the fact remains that everyone has to be sensitive to the need for security. Participate in the creation of security policies and procedures with empathy toward the best balance between operational excellence and a secure environment. A representative from every function should actively contribute to the Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) that comes together to manage and mitigate risk. Explore and identify the “Who? What? Where? When? And How?” regarding the breach and the ways to ensure it cannot happen again. The challenge is to ensure sensitivity is present to how actions in one area have impact on others. The cure should never come at such an expense to a function or functions as to hamper their ability to succeed.

It is an art form to facilitate and optimize the potential for the enterprise while delivering the most effective and comprehensive security. This requires all of the players on the team to play their part. When there is a breach, Legal may need to be involved to assist in managing the potential damage; HR may be needed to address the impact to employees; procurement and finance may be affected; and even if not directly impacted by the breach, all members need to be present to ensure the cure doesn’t do more harm than good.

The return? This question comes up a great deal. Do you recall the last time the power went out in the plant or in your offices? People went home, right? Generators are cost justified by loss productivity.

Now can you recall the last time the e mail server went down or the network was unavailable? Most people went home right? The loss is quantifiable. Now, if all the files on your shared servers were abruptly encrypted by an outside force so no one could access them… how long would it take before people went home? How much time would it take to shut the servers; reformat the drives and restore backup files to the drives? Not to mention the amount of work that has to be redone from the period of the last back up. If an entire department was unable to function for a complete day – salaries and expenses could be calculated easily enough but the work that would have been performed has a value. The cost to redo the work can be figured but the intangible still has value – opportunities lost; disappointed customers; brand impact; lost sales; and more.

Expectant parents pack a “go bag” and rehearse the fastest routes to the hospital. No differently here should enterprises have a Security Platform Plan; an Incident Response Plan; a Remediation and Recovery Plan and a Review of Existing Plans to ensure that this particular sort of breach (and those related) are included and addressed going forward… a well-defined AND DOCUMENTED cycle must exist.

So, the next time you see graffiti covered walls; suspect party crashers or try to figure out where to hide the coffee can with your emergency cash in it… here is hoping these feelings you will carry with you to ensure your organization’s well-being.

About the author: Global Technology Executive with strong business and financial acumen. Strong ability to link marketing strategy and results directly to overall business strategy and company financial goals. Keen abilities to develop strategy from in-depth analysis of buyer and/or customer insights. Documented program development skills, from advertising to digital presence across all relevant marketing channels. Possesses excellent influencing skills and able to drive consensus. Able to recognize and articulate a future direction; provide strategic direction, and have the ability to direct global and localized products, brand, advertising and related specialties while managing budgets. A strong track record of new product development and demonstrated ability to forge strategic alliances with key partners. Accustomed to driving results and delivering return on investment.

View Joe’s short bio

If you can’t explain why customers should do business with you, how can you expect THEM to know

Listen and look closely at advertisements that promote that they are the BEST – HIGHEST RANKED – MOST AWARDED – at something and it always come with the key qualifier. Best “in class,” and most awarded  “in their segment…”

THIS is the very key! Eliminate every opportunity to be measured on a level playing field with everyone else in your markets. Unless, of course, you are already the market leader with a substantial share…but I suspect, to achieve this, the market had to recognize uniqueness and a “bar” was raised with which to measure all others.

Create and play on a field that you know you dominate and force others to compete with you on your terms. One example from my past. Where IBM, NCR, Dell and HP were the recognized leaders in Point of Sale computers, a relatively unknown brand struggled to even be invited to bid. All of the others have nationwide and worldwide onsite repair capabilities with 8 hour response time offered. Too small to credibly compete, we redesigned a point of sale system that was the first and only blade based self service POS that was “purpose built” for POS with technical features (liquid cooled; flash boot; single module replacement from front of POS). The new challenge was a discussion around uptime, availability and purpose built design…something the bigger brand names struggled to adequately address for those who valued these aspects most. The company began winning contracts and industry awards and global recognition for innovation. You want to win more? Change the game!

It doesn’t always mean you have to revamp your entire product offer. Much can be accomplished by better targeting your offer to a segment that values most what you have to offer – where others don’t shine as bright due to their huge size; slow responsiveness; higher costs; or merely they don’t value this segment as highly. Example? EVERYONE wants to biggest utility companies in the Country – Duke Power and/or PG&E for example. To compete head to head against the largest industry vendors can be both expensive and time consuming. Select the target who needs most what you readily have and can do better than the bigger competitors – say CoOp and Municipalities … and strive to be the BEST… for this segment… and you may well enjoy more sales… shorter sales cycles… domino referral sales… greater brand awareness… more profitable deals…a broader customer base making you less vulnerable to fickle customers who change vendors every contract cycle.

So, how do we know which game to play? Everyone could use some help framing the following. You and your team are closer to your business than almost anyone. Your individual and collective perspective would be collected from all sources. Making an extraordinary effort to have these questions answered by a wide collection of sources is strongly advised. Feedback and input from customers; suppliers; sales partners; industry influencers and – ever more important – customers you are losing or have lost. Their perception is their reality – no matter what you say.

1. What do we do? “One sentence”  a. “We make the best value priced metal soft drink can in the Americas.”

2. What do we do uniquely or better than anyone else? (“We are the only one who…”) – a para max and try not to make it a catch all…like, “ we are the easiest to work with, best priced…flexible…custom tailored… mass production…green (recycled)… lightest weight…most durable… stylish…”

3. What Specific Segments Do We Provide a Specialized Offer? Avoid “every customer with a pulse” mentality. Consider lifetime profitable customer profile. Rank and prioritize your segments.

4. What is our Value Proposition to 1) Financial Services (specifically subsegment Client Account Records); 2) HealthCare (specifically subsegment EMR); 3) Telecommunications/Utilities (specifically subsegment Subscriber Records)

5. Identify, Validate and Document (from the target’s perspective) THEIR Value Metrics (I need to manage costs down and I need an cost effective tool to help me); Buying Criteria ( I don’t want to have to change everything I do to use that vendor’s product – the product should suit me and not force me to conform to it); Easy to Position the Benefits to my Stakeholders; …

Position the Problem Statement – then – Position the Value Proposition –– For example, as a customer, I struggle to integrate and make seamless disparate point products that actually create exposures. Where do other approaches fall short – what makes us the better way to go… – one page.

Why YOU? 2-4 page – brief non technical business case positioning paper to highlight the challenges; demonstrate how well you know their pain points and exposures; why the current and/or typical approach is insufficient; position against the competition (highlight the current and typical shortfalls for example – classic security rarely precludes the extraction of digital files on a USB or download from a USB); demonstrate how your offer came to be…the considerations…what was rejected…the rationale that drove the development of your offer…in terms that keep the customer pain point front and center.

About the Author: Orlando Joseph

Global Technology Executive with strong business and financial acumen. Strong ability to link marketing strategy and results directly to overall business strategy and company financial goals. Keen abilities to develop strategy from in-depth analysis of buyer and/or customer insights. Documented program development skills, from advertising to digital presence accros all relevant marketing channels. Possesses excellent influencing skills and able to drive consensus. Able to recognize and articulate a future direction; provide strategic direction, and have the ability to direct global and localized products, brand, advertising and related specialties while managing budgets. A strong track record of new product development and demonstrated ability to forge strategic alliances with key partners. Accustomed to driving results and delivering return on Investment. View Orlando’s short bio

In the day of the simple country store, business intelligence was comprised of knowing what was “in stock,” what was “out of stock,” what it cost to replenish and how much turnover was in a given period. Today, retailers capture how long a product is on a specific shelf and does it sell better here or there – in which season and at what price and it was sold to whom.

Every competitive business recognizes the power in knowledge. The definition of “knowledge” is both subjective and obscure. All too often, a business is unable to succinctly express what information it wants and what it will do with this information. Many earnest efforts are made to develop effective data reporting resources. The most common mistakes are costly, time consuming and wasteful.

Taking the path less traveled can seem daunting and treacherous – when it comes to business intelligence, it can often be the right one

Because different companies have various needs and goals, a business intelligence system will differ from one company to another. Classic business intelligence is merely a reporting tool for historical performance. Effective analytics and data mining can establish a series of “knowns” and expectations from a series of influencing data points to provide a trending forecast that can lend a few potential outcomes with which managers can make decisions. Much like how a meteorologist relies on readings of barometric pressure; wind speed and direction at different altitudes in conjunction with high and low pressure areas, next week’s weather can be predicted better than relying on whether someone’s arthritic knee is throbbing in pain.

It is common to build reports comprised of disparate data points from functional islands reported separately and conclusions are drawn manually. Without a predefined plan, business intelligence can cause managers to react and the overall enterprise can appear rudderless. Managers struggle with the truth but business intelligence isn’t intended to be there to endorse the business’s decisions or validate a specific strategy but to provide sensitivity to how things are progressing against goals and targets– and provide alerts if the targets and goals are slipping away – and most importantly, provide insights into which dials to turn that will get everything back on track.

The most common tool managers rely on as business intelligence resources are simple Excel spreadsheets. As a platform for business intelligence, Excel spreadsheets are inherently flawed. The manual entry nature of most Excel spreadsheets simply means that, on average 7-11% of the data in a spreadsheet is an error. In addition, as exposed by most Sarbanes Oxley audits and security penetration tests, spreadsheets rarely have adequate security, protection and process compliance to ensure the integrity of the data. For example, sales people who aren’t likely to make their sales figure for a period are readily there to change data points that reset their expected sales but the changes are rarely reflected in all relevant data.

Additionally, spreadsheets are portable. This means that there will be numerous versions and even more copies of versions floating around inside and outside of an organization. Those on laptops, tablets and flash drives are the most commonly found to wind up in the wrong hands.

The fact is, it isn’t about the data but it is in planning for how to use the data to create knowledge an organization can act on. For many organizations developing business intelligence, they work to define what data they want, but this is only a small first step – not the end. Assessing, first, how an organization will act with what information is the first real step in assessing the genuine use of business intelligence. Figuratively, as if you are planning a trip, establish your destination objective and plot the most desirable route to your current location. Next, establish an honest gap analysis and assessment of the resources, effort and commitment required to move from where the organization is to where it needs to be. This is a very critical step since a swimmer doesn’t set their destination goal to be half way across a lake.

Establish how decisions are made before deciding what data you want and when

Decisions are, typically, a result of cascading inputs. Analytical systems see this as “if this– then.” Experienced managers use a great deal of information to make decisions. Not all the information is in the same place, in the same applications, in the same form or even in the same functional departments. Inherently, experienced managers gather data points from here and there and the outcome helps guide their actions. Effective business intelligence delivers the collective “reasoning” derived from the existing data points to empower managers to make the best decisions based on all the relevant information available.

Be sensitive to certain realities. In developing effective business intelligence resources, remember that 60% to 80% of the real end users are going to be non-technical. In addition, recognize that what is available is too much for too few. To serve the needs in a separate and compartment alized way will hamper the ability for the organization to operate with a genuine real time dashboard. The components should seam lessly aggregate to a collective overview as easily as it would be to take a snapshot of relevant information in a defined smaller “ecosystem.” While it seems obvious, too few business intelligence systems create a picture that easily delivers the sum of its parts as a refined presentation of results.

Process “Best Practices” call for defined and communicated workflows – complete with interdependencies and relationships exposed. Best practices in business intelligence require the same discipline be applied to the flow, importance and dependency on data throughout the enterprise. A great of data will be discovered to be historically relevant but serve little purpose in overall strategic decision making. Users likely defined the need by stating how that data point has always been a metric watched but few can say why it is relevant any longer.

A business intelligence system can therefore be customized to answer the particular needs of a particular company. The tools and necessary resources can be designed in such a way that it features the company’s unique performance indicators and measurements. This way the business intelligence system will help determine if the company’s strategies and plans are compatible with their goals. This is an important part of the assessment process because it is at this stage that the company’s current status and position is analyzed to determine how it is going to fare in the next few years to come.

To ascertain if your organization is ready for business intelligence, explore how your situation stacks up.

Senior Executive Commitment

• Sponsorship to drive the establishment and reliance on a solid business intelligence strategy is more important that the requirements, design and development stages. Is it being woven into the culture? Are groups likely to feign support? – submit requirements but maintain their own particular reporting tools outside the business intelligence infrastructure?

Well defined short and long term goals

• Is the organization ready to do a genuine assessment on setting, documenting, communicating and steering based on short and long term goals? Are all oars in the water pulling in the same direction and cadence?
• Establish key performance indicators KPIs – as mile markers toward 3-5 year enterprise The foundation of a successful Business Intelligence Competency Center is critical.
• The driving inspiration behind a BICC is (and should remain) a service It isn’t about the IT department– developing and maintaining an application.

Service orientation – for example – good ones implement a classic help desk tracking system to ensure users receive the highest level of support

• Keep as a mantra – Be an adaptive, responsive and proactive resource.
• BICC metrics established in the planning phases – keep an eye on the target.
• Experienced staff with the service mentality to support the functional areas.
• Measured benefits linked to the incentives for a service oriented organization.
• Manage the content to relate to the end user needs.
• Continuous training– for BICC staff and users– with a focus on continuous improvement.

From a technical aspect, Business Intelligence benefits can be derived from the following approaches

• Use of Data Marts that automatically   propagate spreadsheets   in a central work space.
• Locating historical data – collection tools – actions expected- migration of data to a single source for analytics.
• Knowing how to work from unstructured data to deliver a comprehensive executive performance dashboard.
• From the start, establish a regular and natural approach to data cleansing and processes to ensure integrity, security and optimization…as a continuous effort instead of on a project basis.

Start with solid vendor management policies – don’t let vendors drive the strategy and outcome

• Data integration, reports, analytics and performance management tools – being able to buy as modules – when ready.
• Training – feedback loops – development resources for special needs adhoc access

A good business intelligence platform must have:

• Traceability – transparency – meta data integration – compliance with governance and regulatory requirements.
• Ease of adoption by functional areas- relevant– ready to use logical and physical data models, data integration processes, analytical models and a series of cascading standard reports.
• Benchmarks – industry performance –competitor intelligence – market research.
• Solid business intelligence reporting will deliver more than ROI, customer churn, costs of goods sold or other classic metrics, real business intelligence can help to show what combination of offers or promotions have the most impact on aggregate gross margin For example, which bundle of services at what price points deliver the highest profitable ARPU from which segment of mobile customers?

Business Intelligence is not immune to what haunts most other major enterprise initiatives

An organization gets out of Business Intelligence what is willing to put into it. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are just two classic initiatives that experience a 60% to 70% failure rate to complete and/or fully implement. Many senior executives have disparaging things to say about what they got against what they expected and, in almost every instance, it is easy to find where the commitment waned and the effort simply became too difficult to do well.

To relate the effort to how we think:

Business intelligence is less like a diet and more like a commitment to a complete change in lifestyle. Are you really ready?

About the author: Joe Orlando

Global Technology Executive with strong business and financial acumen. Strong ability to link marketing strategy and results directly to overall business strategy and company financial goals. Keen abilities to develop strategy from in-depth analysis of buyer and/or customer insights. Documented program development skills, from advertising to digital presence across all relevant marketing channels. Possesses excellent influencing skills and able to drive consensus. Able to recognize and articulate a future direction; provide strategic direction, and have the ability to direct global and localized products, brand, advertising and related specialties while managing budgets. A strong track record of new product development and demonstrated ability to forge strategic alliances with key partners. Accustomed to driving results and delivering return on investment. View Joe’s short bio