The Velocity Chain: Creating the flywheel for business acceleration
Enterprise executives are actively looking for novel ways to both accelerate and differentiate their business. To outpace competition and create differentiation, the name of the game is speed. Unfortunately, speed only gets you so far. Enterprises need to increase velocity (speed + direction).
To do that, companies need to make more accurate decisions, faster. Sitting at the core of this process is data. Rich in value, data is largely an untapped resource within the enterprise.
At the same time, AI’s arrival is a force multiplier. AI provides dual opportunity as a reason to drive business acceleration and the solution. This one-two punch is causing executives to rethink how they approach business challenges.
The ability to accelerate their business is quickly pushing executives to get their arms around enterprise data. Yet many enterprises do not have a good handle on the data they need with some estimates showing an incredibly significant gap.
Data driving insights
Considering the gap, enterprises are rethinking their core data strategy around both structured and unstructured data. Data resides in enterprise systems of record (think SAP, Salesforce, AWS, Google, etc). But also resides in file systems, spreadsheets and documents. Much of this second set of data sources is ‘dark data’.
How does an enterprise get their collective arms around this untapped data? In two words…it’s complicated. Boiling the ocean is not trivial and makes past arguments about building a data warehouse look small in comparison when considering the complexity. Yet, that’s exactly what CIOs and vendors alike are gunning to do.
Enterprises see the power of AI and in the past few years have accelerated their understanding of the opportunities and challenges to using AI. As AI’s proliferation increased, so did the awareness of governance challenges.
There is a whole, separate discussion on governance needed to address the challenges facing enterprises. Most are talking about data governance, but there are several layers to governance including agent governance. Not enough people are talking about it, but it is currently one of the biggest challenges to AI adoption.
On the positive side, one successful approach is to start small. We can thank the drive to leverage AI agents for this accelerated move. Two points here: Start with relatively smaller data sets but then focus on acceleration. By doing so, you can understand the data and lower the complexity for data governance. More on acceleration in a minute.
Aligning insights with objectives
There are so many different opportunities presenting themselves to enterprises. Which opportunity(s) do you start with and why? The business objectives become the core for aligning which efforts get priority. Again, start small, but accelerate. Start with efforts that can provide solid results, provide insights that align with business objectives that lead to healthy decisions. And accelerate!
Accelerating through decisions
You may have noticed that I’m mentioning the term accelerate several times. That is not without purpose. Today’s enterprise must focus on accelerating their business.
Working backwards from acceleration of the business is acceleration of the organization. To do that, leadership must have the ability to make better decisions, faster. Note this is not a linear path. There will be ups and downs, but the net-net is an organization that is accelerating over time. In essence, increasing their velocity.
The flywheel of velocity
Organizational acceleration feeds back into the process by providing more data which, in-turn, feeds the flywheel. Each revolution of the business acceleration flywheel speeds up a little faster than the last.
Over time, the organization can fine tune their data strategy to dial in which data and insights lead to the best decisions more quickly. Instead of boiling all the data within the enterprise, the exercise gets far more precise to only include the relevant data to address the specific outcome. This leads to greater performance and cost advantages. It also leads to speed.
Sidenote: A fascinating byproduct of the business acceleration flywheel is organizational agility. The faster the organization can respond, the quicker it can adapt to change.
As this process matures, it gets more efficient and refined with each revolution of the flywheel. The tools are out there to get the process started. Start small but work to increase speed with each revolution.
☆ Passionate relationship champion and people connector ☆ Builds and leads PE/VC/Tech Company advisory boards and events ☆ CoFounder & Managing Director @Korn Ferry CIO/Tech & Digital Officers Executive Search Practice
2moSimply brilliantly simple… well done, Tim Crawford!