Spend now to re-energise your business in tough times

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 21 April 2009 08:06

Business IT - Technology

She also suggests that BI has a crucial part to play in performance management, by presenting information in a timely and easily consumed fashion, and in “providing the ability to reason and understand the meaning behind performance information through discovery, analysis, and ad hoc querying.”

“Good decision making and performance management are key to business value generation but neither are easy in today’s complex world,” Burnett cautions.

“The corporate focus on IT costs is often driven by the enterprise-wide mandate to ‘do more with less’ and growing demands for compliance and governance-led transparency. BI and CPM solutions help firms answer three key business questions: ‘How are we doing?’, ‘Why are we doing this?’, and ‘What should we be doing next?’ “

According to the Butler report, managers have to strike a balance between becoming more customer-centric and motivating staff in a positive way to re-energise corporate performance, and Burnett says economic pressures dictate that organisations manage corporate performance better to adapt to the different world that has emerged from the “ashes of the credit crunch.”

“The old adage ‘customer is king’ has never been more relevant to business than it is today” says Burnett, and she adds, “I believe that managers have to strike a balance between becoming more customer-centric and motivating staff in a positive way to re-energise corporate performance. This calls for a more inclusive approach to CPM; one that is not only customer focused but also takes into account the needs of the employees.”

“We have already witnessed the dire results of the drop in demand in some sectors such as the car industry that has resulted in closure of factories, shorter working weeks, and redundancies”, says Burnett.

And, Burnett says that even the public sector is not immune to the downturn with less money becoming available for public services.

“This type of uncertainty can have a demoralising effect on the workforce and lead to stress related sick leave and poor motivation,” Burnett concludes.