I’ve been thinking about the old Road Runner and Coyote cartoons lately. The reason is this—in each encounter with the Coyote, the Road Runner proves that speed and innovation wins out over mere innovation every time.
This insight ties in nicely with a recent online article posted by Wayne Eckerson, ?Director of Research at The Data Warehousing Institute™ (TDWI). Entitled “Revolutionary BI: When Agile is Not Fast Enough,” Eckerson’s article is a real call to action for anyone working in BI today. In it, he states that, “Too many BI teams are shackled by outdated modes of industrial organization. In our quest for efficiency, we’ve created rigid fiefdoms of specialization that have hijacked the development process…” Eckerson points out that rather than to be hamstrung by such traditional linear processes, organizations like Netflix and the University of Illinois have turned instead to cross-trained and interdisciplinary team to accelerate their processes and results.
The Need for Speed
Eckerson’s thoughts really struck a chord with me, especially in light of today’s rapidly evolving business environment, where lots of little entrepreneurial mammals are running circles around the old enterprise dinosaurs. Here at Clarabridge, we certainly believe in the need to run smarter and faster. In fact, BI and text analytics (our focus) share a lot of common traits. In order to tap into the true “Voice of the Customer” for clients, we take large amounts of textual data and run it through transformation techniques to distill it into essential insights that can be used to improve customer experience.
Because we are blazing new ground at Clarabridge in defining this emerging core discipline of customer experience management, we’re staging a revolution in how we manage the text analytics process, as customer sentiment literally can shift from day to day. Our people, as well as those on BI teams, need to come up with the key business questions that make sense to build into reports and other analytics.
Agile, Meet Super Agile
My point? It’s easy to find tactical tools to use, and employees with the technical skills to perform data integration, or develop a report that someone has already formatted for them. However, to provide a revolutionary impact on our customers businesses, you need people, tools, and processes that best apply the business principles at hand—and more importantly, can produce the best business applications.. Without having the right tools, and without understanding the key business questions, the data that exists to support those questions, and the end user that is targeted for the report, you’re certain to miss the mark.
That’s why at Clarabridge, we’ve wired super-agile best practices into the way our products and our people work. Our products automate processes that with other text analytics solutions require tedious, manual effort. We automate the data sourcing process, the categorization process, and the data integration process. We’ve prebuilt rich analytics and sentiment capabilities into the solution. But we also understand that our customers have ideas, want to change things, and want to apply new ideas and principles to the way they work with our text analytics platform. So we hire people who work creatively with our customers, and who can think on their feet with ease about business and technology. Our team of consultants is cross-trained on data integration, consulting and facilitation techniques, and of course using reporting and analysis tools to allow for extracting maximum business inisights and delivery of the right information to the right people at the right time. As a result, they are able to serve our customers with greater accuracy and speed to answer the pressing questions around customer experience and ensure successful implementations.
So who do you want to be? Certainly not the company whose great insights are left in the dust by another outfit that’s just as smart but faster to implement. We can all be roadrunners if we apply the Super Agile approach to our workforce and workflow.
