Big Data, Big Innovation: Enabling Competitive Differentiation through Business Analytics

Chapter 5Organizational Design

It’s one thing to know you need something. Knowing where it should go is something else. Not to understate how hard it is to change culture, there’s obviously more to success than just setting the right direction. Flourishing through the age of uncertainty requires an excellent ability to analyze, predict, and act.

The worst thing to do is to run out and hire people just because someone thinks there’s a gap. Instead, the focus should be on making the existing people successful by giving them the right support. They need the right structure, the right focus, and a management mandate to make things happen.

Getting the design right helps tremendously. When correct, it creates economies of scope and scale. These enable structural cost advantages that in some cases can actually create differentiation in their own right. In reinventing an organization, there are four things that should be considered:

1. What should it look like?
2. What should it focus on?
3. What services can it offer?
4. What data does it need?

This chapter will answer these questions and lay the foundation for effective organizational design.

WHAT SHOULD IT LOOK LIKE?

Every organization carries baggage. While there’s sometimes the unique opportunity to build things from scratch, more often we need to work with what’s already there. Getting things right means understanding where we are as well as working out where we should be. Because of this, moving from generating insight to creating value ...