Data, data everywhere but what do we do with it ?

“Can we do something with Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, to be better than our competitors or disrupt the market ? We are growing faster than the average, but I constantly fear where the disruption will come from to our industry”. Thus spoke a technophile CEO of a mid-sized multinational company. They had grown inorganically acquiring brands, products, and small companies in growth markets to grow and increase their product portfolio to stay relevant to their customers.

It is an exciting time to be in the technology world with technology at the center of almost every disruptive thought and asset light digital business model. It is an exciting time to be a consumer with everyone bending over backwards wanting to provide offers and promotions on anything and everything. It is indeed an exciting time to be an entrepreneur with unimaginable ideas beginning to take root and come into the realm of possibilities with fast evolving technology allowing for rapid prototyping and success.

It is a mobile first world where everyone wants their App on your phone, send you notifications, read your address book, track your location, and gather petabytes of data to analyze to eternity. Data is everywhere, it always was, though not in a form that could be capture effectively, assimilated and explored. Technology has evolved allowing semblance of sense out of stray wisps of information in the large volume of data to form pictures and scenarios; newer insights, action items progressively improving outcomes.

Big data is getting bigger, analytical tools are evolving rapidly, compute is getting faster, storage and retrieval quicker, and business hungrier for data driven insights. Democratization of technology and availability of tools creates a perception of easy pickings which continues to add to shelf ware for the IT organization. CIOs are being pushed to create new centers of excellence or hire skills that will help make the business grow faster and more profitable; consultants are filling in the gaps across the value chain with limited value delivered.

Internal innovation and new ideas are nurtured in few enterprises, this was not one of those; the company had always rewarded subservient behavior with stray incidents of brightness escaping attention. With a cautious approach to every spend in the past, managers were unable to rise to the occasion fearing being snubbed. The technology organization had decent set of tools, they were well aligned to operational IT requirements, but limited expertise and ability to shift gears into a new level of thinking and execution.

The CEO threw the challenge to the management team to come up with a plan on how the company can break away from the normal. Two quarters later there had not made any significant progress or breakthroughs. The CEO thus hired a global top consulting company to help create the roadmap for digital disruption. After three months of Workshops, brainstorming sessions, offsite and many weeks spent in conference rooms, the exercise was declared complete and the management team invited to unveiling of the new strategy.

Sounds familiar ? This is the story of almost every enterprise where information is consumed in reports from traditional ERP systems or data dumps massaged in spreadsheets. Scores of reports with columns represented in different places or one additional data element make up the repository of analysis. Smattering of dashboards at Board Meetings, Investor Conferences, and external presentations represents the visual data creation and consumption. People love their prints but also want tablet computers !

A big hole in the pocket, they had a document with multiple streams and action items; teams were created and tasked to generate new customers, markets, and disrupt competition. The consultants stayed on to oversee execution and find faults; they churned dashboards, progress reports, control towers, to keep telling the management why they had still not achieved the desired results. A year later and a bigger hole in the dwindling treasury, breakthrough success continued to elude them as competition grew fiercer.

A new age company CEO reaffirmed the hypothesis that data is the future lode mine proclaiming they generated and consumed a petabyte of information daily. His business added new revenue streams every quarter, evolving with consumer demand while shaping the market. His company had redefined the industry becoming the benchmark, taking calculated risks and staying close to the ground through the journey. He did not scoff at the old, he just decided to create a new path giving his team freedom to explore.

Can old age companies emulate such examples ? There are a few examples, but still a few; survival is not threatened for most, relevance probably is !

Harsh realities in a tender world, buying decisions gone awry

Vision of the company had received high visibility with an audacious plan and well-articulated fast track execution; everyone wanted to be associated with this new star which demonstrated some pioneering traits. Global consultants and local talent flocked to provide inputs to the team flooding them with goodwill and empowering them to create the hereto unknown foundations for similar future projects in the industry. The company had done well to define boundaries in which they needed to procure services and products.

Soliciting interest they were flooded with requests to partner leaving them spoilt for choices. They fell in the ambit of tender based selection which was run fair and square despite a few pushes and pulls from vested interests. As the project progressed, they also realized that success begets many leeches and catches attention of the unscrupulous; pressure from highly placed sources put the management in a spot freezing decision making. The grandiose plans which had brought them into the limelight now began to appear out of reach.

Rifts began to show between the well-meaning Advisors and the internal decision makers, who were finding it difficult to stay unaffected by the pressures. The goals had not shifted, path to achieving them now needed to traverse and overcome boulders and potholes that had suddenly appeared to slow them down. Each step required careful analysis of impact, outcomes and how to keep decisions fair with the highest levels of integrity. The friction started slowing decision making, bickering started and soured relationships within the team.

There are many types of enterprise buying behaviors; these are institutionalized based on past experience or driven by industry, geography and status of the company –private, public sector or government enterprise. Public and Government enterprise typically use tendering as a vehicle to evaluate potential vendors and solutions. They have fairly rigorous processes, documentation and compliance requirements which need to withstand pressures, regulatory scrutiny as well as challenges from sore losers.

Tenders were created as a process to bring in transparency and independence from biased buyers who may be influenced by various means – ethical or otherwise. Tenders require capture of detailed requirements, terms of reference and engagement, qualification criteria, timelines, definition of success and failure, and what have you. These voluminous and comprehensive documents also clearly define the process that will be used to select the final bidder thereby ensuring that no aspersions can be cast on the process or people.

Over a period of time the tendering scene became a vehicle to source the lowest cost services or merchandise for defined requirements or specifications. Technology led reverse auctions became a price discovery mechanism for the lowest cost after tender based selection for minimum viable product or service meeting specific requirements. Celebrations were short-lived with compromises associated with lowest price leading to even more rigor in the pre-selection stages with resultant delays in decision making.

To overcome the challenge, another stream evolved with Quality and Cost Based Selection or QCBS improving the decision making. Weightages could now be attached to quality and cost based on which mattered more. Typical scenarios ranged from 70-80% focus on quality to the advantage of the buyer to get better quality at a good price. The perceived highest quality provider needed to be competitive too to get the benefit of QCBS; similarly the lowest price did not guarantee business if comparative quality was low even if it met MVP.

The company had adopted QCBS with independent marquee advisors and evaluators providing their experience in the creation of the tender documents and subsequent assessment of MVP leaving the final decision to fate determined by price. Bidders big and small attempted no holds barred efforts to create high and low watermarks for their participation and leave out others citing highest value at one end to the lowest price at the other. Push, entice, threaten, cajole, plead, they tried everything and anything they could.

External advisors refused to put their credibility on the line, unwilling to bend or change their scores or dilute specifications; the dialogue broke down frequently, the outcomes now uncertain. Inaction was not an option; market reputation began to show signs of withering jolting into action some of the people who wielded power and influence over the direction the company could take. Mediating and helping the impacted stakeholders, they were able to fend off the undesirable elements paving way for an objective decision.

Myth or reality ? The story repeats itself every day in almost every organization attempting to stay above board, more so when there is a perception of incorrigible nature of the buyers created over a period of time.