Lately we’ve experienced a number of companies that are seeking to enhance the value of internal performance metrics provided by Operational BI solutions by exposing these to their clients. It’s an interesting approach and quite the reverse of the more typical “gather data from external suppliers and channel partners and bring that into the company”. What I’m seeing is companies taking data from inside the company and pushing it externally to stakeholder, mostly their customers. While there may be a number of reasons behind this, it is primarily aimed at the following:
- enhancing customer satisfaction by providing transparency into the service quality and outcomes the company is delivering;
- engaging the customer directly in the continuous improvement cycle in relation to the services provided to them; and
- extending performance management into the customer’s processes such as procurement and forecasting.
Of course there are some risks to this approach – what if the service being delivered is really bad? Well the customer is going to figure this out sooner or later and proactively delivering accurate information and involving them in the performance improvement process will generally yield a far better result than waiting for them to discover the issue on their own.
The upside is gaining a competitive edge and setting the bar in terms of customer expectations. Being a first-mover has distinct advantages in a competitive marketplace. In many cases the performance metrics will highlight an issue where a simple process change within the customer will make that will improve your efficiency, service and product quality, and outcome consistency. Exposing those performance metrics proactively enables a productive conversation based on factual data and could lead to some breakthrough decisions made jointly with the customer.
In a future blog, I’ll outline some of the technology advances that are enabling this “Inside-out Data” approach to BI and Performance Management.
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