Transformation Leadership Skill 4 - Enterprise Intelligence

The purpose of Enterprise Intelligence is to support better decision-making by the executive leadership team. 

Enterprise Intelligence is defined as:  An ongoing practice in which you proactively analyze disparate data sources to identify the vulnerability, threats, and opportunities across the enterprise to make proactive and intuitive decisions to achieve enterprise desired outcomes.

Mentioning Enterprise Intelligence, or its smaller scope component Business Intelligence, typically triggers an assumption of technology applications among executives. The truth is that technology is just beginning to provide solutions for predictive and prescriptive information, but success is much more dependent on executive experience and talent in defining the focus, opportunities for proactive decision-making, and experience in understanding the linkage of cause and effects in the enterprise.

Building enterprise intelligence is most successful when done as a part of more comprehensive effort to develop executive capability for proactive and intuitive decision-making.  The process for Proactive and Intuitive Decision-Making includes three critical steps:

1. Focus

2. Information

3. Decisions & Actions

Focus

The transformation leader must first assure that the decision-making focus is relevant to the priorities of the enterprise and are of manageable scope. Many enterprise intelligence initiatives have failed because they have required collection of such a broad scope of information that it could not be established or sustained.

Information

Information can take the form of descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, or prescriptive. Predictive provides the future projections necessary for proactive decisions, and prescriptive provides additional information of recommended actions based on the projections. Artificial Intelligence technology has just begun to utilize Machine Learning and Deep Learning to imitate human intelligence for these purposes.

Decisions & Actions

Decision-Making and Action Definition will remain heavily dependent on executive talent and experience for quite some time. Even if technology were now available to completely mirror human decision-making, the successful application of the technology would be hindered by the executive team’s ability to accurately define business rules, experiential cause and effect relationships, tradeoffs in values and priorities, and opportunity definition considering enterprise controls and possible options.

The Supply Chain Transformation Leader must provide a comprehensive approach in aligning focus, information, decision-making,  and actions to assure successful development of Enterprise Intelligence.

To learn more about this and other Transformation Leadership Skills go to: CSCTA.net