Thankfully, the old days when business analysis and planning functions were cumbersome, clumsy back-office affairs that required many days – or weeks – to yield useful and insightful information are over.
Security managers who have the good sense to implement new, state-of-the-art business analysis and planning systems are creating an enormously important in-house resource that can provide comprehensive and detailed information about every aspect of the organisation’s activities, while also facilitating a rapid response to new, unforeseen opportunities or challenges.
Leading research concern The Gartner Group has crystallised the objectives of business analysis and planning into the phrase ‘Business Activity Monitoring’, or BAM for short. This phrase aptly sums up the purpose of the business planning task: “To monitor an organisation’s activity in every sense, and to develop an understanding of what’s happening now with the business, where the organisation is going and where the major opportunities for increased profitability lie within it.”
BAM covers a wide range of technologies and applications for measuring and optimising business performance, analysing data across multiple variables, producing reports into the business’ activity at any given level of detail and for tracking key customer interaction developments. Above all, BAM is a process that’s usable by security planners and which arguably makes the best sense for your organisation’s strategic development.
Facing up to the challenge
BAM may sound like a highly technical concept, but in fact is grounded in robust and solid common sense. All of us experience fundamental challenges in managing the various and different aspects of our everyday working lives, and keeping a handle on the information which we need in order to do so. For an individual, the number of business contacts can run into the thousands.
A major organisation will typically employ many hundreds or thousands of people who carry out different activities in numerous departments located (often times) both domestically and abroad.
Typically, the organisation will also have a very large client base (be they security end users or, in the case of in-house teams, their own company’s direct suppliers and customers, etc). There’s a truly daunting challenge to be faced in terms of getting to grips with all the information generated from these relationships. More importantly perhaps, there’s a challenge to be faced in using that information to its fullest for maximum success and/or profitability.
On the face of it, trying to accomplish the task without access to state-of-the-art technological support might appear fanciful in the extreme, not to say slightly ludicrous. In particular, as a manager you need to pay proper and timely attention to important fluctuations in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are the crucial success factors which organisations need to measure carefully in order to assess what progress they’re making in their activities.
In truth, careful monitoring of KPIs allows you to spot potential challenges before they become problems, and to identify important opportunities for winning new business and/or increasing profits.
In practice, then, for those security company managing directors and in-house operatives who really want to excel in a competitive sense, BAM is not so much an option as a necessity.
The general consensus is that the most useful type of BAM employs a technique known as ‘On-Line Analytical Processing’ (OLAP). So what’s OLAP? It’s a BAM resource that’s available to the end user on an on-line basis, whether within a network or across the Internet. Furthermore, OLAP systems have security protocols in place such that unauthorised external organisations or individuals cannot gain access to them.
The most important benefit of OLAP is that it creates a community within your organisation of both ‘planners’ and ‘business monitors’ who can be provided with the very latest information about the organisation on an ongoing, continuously updated basis. They can therefore generate their own perspectives as to where the organisation is going, and how best it should proceed.
In essence, OLAP works by furnishing its users with real-time, on-line access to all of the crucially important business indicators that enable a comprehensive picture of the organisation’s operations and customer behaviour to be created and adjusted accurately on a daily basis.
Essential data for BAM
What’s the kind of data that might be included in any BAM process?
Who your customers are. Where they are physically located. Which channels you use to communicate with them. What they want from you. What they buy from you. The costs of your different operations. The profitability of different operations. The revenue and profitability obtained in different geographical areas where you operate. Customer satisfaction levels, and employee productivity.
To be honest, the depth and scope of the analysis is only really limited by the scale of your own (as a manager) and the organisation’s overall ambitions.
Advocates of BAM and OLAP generally believe that the most exciting application of these high tech resources lies in the opportunity for you to analyse all aspects of the organisation’s activity in numerous dimensions. With a better handle on the business, you too will perform more impressively on site.
These dimensions are different measurements of various parameters which apply to different aspects of the organisation’s activities. Dimensions are particularly useful when applied to analysing customer behaviour, whether the analysis focuses on patterns of customer spending, changes in preference for particular products and services, responses to marketing material or whatever else interests the organisation.
In practice, whether the dimensions relate to the organisation’s activities generally or to its relationship with its customers in particular, there’s no limit to the different types of dimensions or parameters that can form part of the analysis. Also, the number of dimensions that might be analysed simultaneously is much greater than the familiar number of physical dimensions of our own world. The best BAM systems can offer sophisticated modelling techniques involving no less than nine dimensions simultaneously. Even Dr Who would be hard pushed to manage that little lot!
Making a good start
How, then, might you gain access to the BAM and OLAP tools you need?
One useful solution is to engage the services of a truly independent consultancy that specialises in BAM via OLAP, and devotes itself not to selling a particular proprietary solution but rather to listening carefully to what you want, and understanding how your business is going to be developing in the future.
A consultancy that’s truly independent of any software vendor will provide best advice to you at all times, and its highest priority will be to assist all clients in harvesting the remarkable benefits which BAM – delivered by OLAP – can bring to you as a manager, and thereafter the company as a whole.
