Saturday, August 1, 2009

DO SENIOR MANAGERS REALLY KNOW WHAT THEY WANT?

A year or two ago we had the opportunity to carry out two consulting studies in two very different and quite large public sector organisations. In each case the objective was to assess whether the senior management within the organisation were getting the information they needed from the corporate systems in use.

The Problem
The basis for both studies was that most computer-based business applications today generally do a reasonable job of meeting the needs of operational groups within an organisation. They tend to be good at automating such things as:
· accounts and financial management
· sales
· inventory management
· production
· records management
....and so on – in other words, all the quantifiable tasks carried out by operating staff and middle management to get their work done efficiently and effectively.

The concern was that, good though these applications might have been, they all seemed to have been designed from the point of view of users from middle management down. Little effort seemed to have been made to properly identify the needs of senior management – generally, efforts in that direction were confined to providing multi-purpose report writers and other data analysis tools. In effect they had given senior managers some tools to work with and then left it to them to work out their actual needs. And most senior managers really weren’t using these tools at all effectively.

Our declared intention in both of the studies was to look at the system requirements from the top down rather than from the bottom up. In each case we looked first at the needs of the senior managements – from the CEO down to the upper middle levels – and then assessed the ability of the existing operational systems to meet those needs.

Study Outcomes
The results from both studies were interesting. After some searching interviews we found that senior managers had four distinct types of requirement:

(a) Regular day-to-day information on the performance of their organisation. We established that they were not always getting the information which they needed, and what they did get was frequently too detailed for them. In most cases the needs expressed by senior managers boiled down to information such as key performance indicators and ‘dashboards’, plus a few regular summary reports of overall operational data.

(b) Ad hoc information to allow them to handle unexpected problems and opportunities. This kind of need occurred irregularly, and very often led to completely unpredictable information needs. Managers complained that the tools available to allow them to get this information (report generators, data analysis tools, etc) were generally far too complex for them to use.

(c) Information which lay outside the operations of the business. Unlike more junior staff, their work frequently called for access to this type of information, which simply couldn’t be provided for by the corporate systems.

(d) To the above I should add that much of their work was not data-oriented at all (for instance, a public relations meeting with executives from another organisation probably needs little access to corporate information!)

As a result of our reviews we concluded that (c) and (d) were outside the scope of our studies, apart from recommending some corporate management training in the use of Google and other general-access systems.

We were able to fix (a), and identified some major improvements in the level of management information available. We were able to recommend some excellent KPIs and regular summary reports for ongoing use. We also picked up a number of operational problems within the two organisations which, once resolved, would clearly improve the flow of information to the management.

This left (b) as a significant issue. The problem is that there are many packaged tools available to allow users to delve into the corporate data base and analyse it in all sorts of ways, but they are generally far too complex for anyone but experts to use. Senior managers simply don’t have the time – and often the inclination – to play about with complex systems. True, they can, and do, ask other specialists to get information for them; but this can be quite restricting and is only a partial solution.

Need for Simpler Packages
The solution, I believe, lies in the provision of a simpler form of reporting/analytical tool. And herein lies the problem: the suppliers of software packages of all types have to provide very comprehensive facilities which are able to meet the needs of a vast number of different users – if they don’t, they fear that they won’t sell many packages. This however leads to much greater complexity, and in the case of management information tools it makes them virtually unusable for senior management users!

My personal belief is that packaged systems in general have become far too complex. The time is ripe, I believe, for a series of software packages which simply do the basics and are easy to use (the same is also true of mobile phones!). This is as true for data analysis tools as for other types of application.

Conclusions
My conclusions are two fold.

Firstly, senior managers do indeed know what they want, but the IT community usually isn’t giving them what they need. They really have been overlooked in the pressure to get the corporate systems in place. The sort of study which we carried out certainly assisted them in having their needs met more effectively.

Secondly, there is a real need for a simple, easy-to-use data analysis tool which readily allows the organisation’s data elements to be mapped and then used by senior managers to produce the ad hoc information they need from time to time. This need not be complete information – if the manager needs to massage the information a little, so be it. The main thing is to have ready access to it.

As a post script, we later developed such an ad hoc facility for another, very large, Australian corporate, and we found it to be well received. The need truly is there.

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