This is Fun, But Not When You Are Under the Gun!!!

Gartner has launched a new focus area called “Pattern Based Strategy”, based on the need of businesses to capitalize on large amounts of data and the new rules for business process adaptation.

Here is a great verbatim quote from the Gartner web page.
The depth of the recent recession blindsided most businesses. As the economy starts to recover, many business leaders are thinking, “If I had seen this coming sooner, I could have acted faster, decreased my risk and enhanced my opportunities for growth.” There is a way to see things coming. It’s a framework for proactively seeking and acting on the early and often-termed “weak” signals forming patterns in the marketplace. It’s also about the ability to model the impact of patterns on your organization and identify the disciplines and technologies that help you consistently adapt. It’s called Pattern-Based Strategy.

The key to Pattern Based Strategy is automatically revealing intelligence that is hidden in the data/information.  Companies today are running more lean than ever before. Employees across all organizations are inundated with work and overloaded with data. .   There is a great need for technology that will make our jobs easier and make us more productive. At Gartner, the idea that emerged, led by Yvonne Genovese, is called Pattern-based Strategy (PBS).

We are victims of too much information, missed opportunities and ‘@#$% I wish I could have seen that!‘ moments. Connecting this to a rather timely/charged topic - Think about a recent attempted terrorist attack by the Nigerian traveler who bought a one-way ticket,  paid in cash, checked no bags, boarded an international plane. There were a very large number of ‘red flags’ in the sequence of events, and there was a large volume of data hiding all this intelligence. A Hope Strategy is to hire tons of people and make them search the data for red flags, more importantly sequences of red flags.  This may work sometimes. But it is a poor and expensive strategy, and rarely does it produce the desired results on time! (making it quite useless, actually!)

As companies start to incorporate intelligence from data into their operations, one of the primary issues is the ability to have the intelligence automatically come to you. ‘Digging for insight’ is a poor, time consuming, expensive strategy.   We need the technology to work for us.  Second, it is also important to start focusing the insight with a particular business function/strategy in mind. Sales, Marketing, Operations, etc.

Connecting this back to what we do, Emcien provides analytics that automatically reveal customer buying patterns in sales data. The analytics reveals the popular choice combinations, key differences by region, key trends and new emerging segments.  This is an example of technology working for you, bringing insights back so that you can act on it.

Quoting a Regional Practice Manager and the Senior Architect for Siebel -
Emcien offers rigorous and repeatable detection of buying patterns, enabling your customers to act on them, while supporting your product objectives (margin, inventory, velocity, …)

Quoting a former Oracle Practice Manager and Senior Siebel Architect -
Emcien offers rigorous and repeatable detection of buying patterns, enabling your customers to act on them, while supporting your product objectives (margin, inventory, velocity, …). Emcien’s offerings readily integrate with Siebel, enabling immediate improvements to revenues.  Few projects offer such potential for improving the customer experience and increasing revenues, with so relatively little development or integration efforts.

Automatically revealing patterns is required today as we all drown in data, and do not have time to hope that someone may find the intelligence that the organization needs to act on. Thanks to Gartner for launching this focus area!