Business Transformation: A Roadmap for Maximizing Organizational Insights

CHAPTER 5

Progressive Organizations: Harnessing the Power of Information to Achieve Market Advantage and Expand Their Business Offerings

What we've learned so far: Moving to the Enterprise Level is a key step that provides a foundation for higher levels of maturity. Enterprise organizations are at a tipping point to achieve higher levels of competitive advantage by using their resources and talents to optimize and innovate. Reaching the Enterprise Level does require constant vigilance as it is easy for people, information processes, technology, and culture to slip out of alignment. Maintaining that alignment, and exploring the value that enterprise-wide information brings, is eye-opening.

In the fast-changing marketplace you need to move quickly and proactively to counter market forces. That's the reason to work toward the integrated enterprise-wide view of information emblematic of a Foundational Level organization. Is that enough? While having a clear picture of the value chain lowers your organization's risk, it doesn't take full advantage of the opportunities that come with integrated data. For this, organizations need to head for the Optimize and Innovate Levels.

Optimizing is about more than regularly using insight-driven decision making—as opposed to using it in an occasional project—it is about automating insight-driven decision making. The enterprise-wide view of data ...