Business Analytics for Sales and Marketing Managers: How to Compete in the Information Age

REVOLUTIONARY VERSUS EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS CHANGES

This section adds a process perspective on how to make customer analytics, in order to explain the different kinds of information, such as lead, lag, and learning information. In this context, we define a process as a series of coordinated actions with a common goal in mind. The goal could be to sell a pair of shoes to a customer, and the process could be to pull a list of customers who have not purchased any shoes from our Web site lately, identify which kinds of shoes that each would be most likely to buy, and then send the offer to the customer by email.

If you are the process owner, there are two ways you can improve this process: through evolutionary or revolutionary changes. The corresponding information types and the way that you typically work with them can be divided into two categories: lead and lag information. The two ways of optimizing a process are:

1. Evolutionary business process changes have to do with optimizing already existing processes within their existing framework. Typically these changes are triggered by the people who operate them based on such information as control charts and reports, which document the historical performance of the process in play, or simply by clever and engaged employees.

2. Revolutionary business changes have to do with reconfiguring a process by abandoning existing ones or developing new ones where needed. Typically these changes are triggered by the functional strategy team ...