and evaluate their contribution to the project

SECTION-3 KNOW HOW TO CONDUCT A CONSULTANCY INTERVENTION

3.1 Identify the resource implications for gathering different types of data/information and evaluate their contribution to the project

Before we begin any project we require Information in order to design, shape, inform and review our activity. But what is ‘information’? When we consider information, we are ideally looking for business intelligence that is relevant, targeted and that can be used to inform follow-up action. Spending lots of time gathering (often unnecessary) data and information is not a good investment for a firm, and consultants’ caught doing this will be challenged by their clients or even by external media. Thus, when we talk about data and information within business and business projects, we are sometimes referring more specifically to ‘business intelligence’.

According to the website Intelligence101.com (2020) the difference between ‘information’ and ‘intelligence’ can be explained as the following:

What's the difference between information and intelligence? Information is knowledge communicated about a particular fact or circumstance. Intelligence is all about finding out information, determining what it means – and then using it to take action!

Business intelligence Overview

Usually companies and consultants are looking to sensibly and proportionately allocate their resources in order to achieve strategic objectives. In striving for their outcomes, against ferocious competition, they may ask for employees and business divisions to work to SMART objective; these being … specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Moreover, the discipline of management and project management is often implemented by the use of individual employee targets that are established as Key Performance Indicators

(KPIs), where specific individual and team targets and performance requests can be measured and recorded. Such methods generate information that is an intelligence product because it is targetable, actionable and relevant (Bingley: 2015).

Such methods are used by firms to drive forward activity, a sense of corporate interoperability, to reinforce quality controls and a sense of fairness. To explain the last point by way of an example: Everybody supposedly fits into one clear system of corporate rules. For example, with Key Performance Indicators, everybody from the CEO to the facilities officers subscribe to targets, development plans and corporate objectives that are accountable to the Executive Board. Furthermore, the delivery of overall key project deliverables and contributing milestones, all require data gathering techniques in order to support and evidence progress to project sponsors.

Data gathering and information research departments are thus nowadays expected to directly support and align to core business goals in any firm (Tecce: 2009). Moreover, this is to be done in a structured and coherent way. There is nowadays little tolerance for random ‘background briefings’ and snippets from in-house subject matter experts, which may have impressed and reassured Executive Boards in the past. Significant reputational loss, punitive legal penalties, market sanctions, and bottom-line cash loss, are the consequences that any business can expect if it stumbles haphazardly from gathering core information and data sets in a random and ill-disciplined manner (Bingley: 2015). For example, keeping poorly documented and poorly secured employee personal details, including ID and prior qualifications, can lead to huge fines and public shaming via the 2018 EU General Data Protection Regulation.

Several influencing factors have therefore converged, at time of writing, which have established a global-market-wide desire for intelligence-led decisionmaking. The quantification of business management approaches, ICT convergence, the expansion of corporate litigation, and the efficiency squeeze ushered in by the latest international financial crisis, are all factors that have driven up demand by Executive Boards and Corporate Governance committees to insist that they become equipped for decision-making with timely, accurate and relevant information. The idea of an activity trap has been posed by crisis

management academic Geary Sikich and others who carried out isomorphic learning lessons on the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, caused accidentally by an explosive blow-out of an oil platform owned by a subsidiary to the oil major, BP. Management academics noted that in some large firms, the overall commercial goal becomes eclipsed by an entrenched fulfilment to traditional process. Companies become automated and inflexible, unable to adapt to changing conditions within their operating environment. Poor ground intelligence has been identified as a contributor in many corporate disasters. But this is often not the case. It’s the inability of a big organisation to adapt fast enough to the new information or incoming ‘intelligence’ that is so often the problem (Sikich: 2013).

In response to such concerns, many firms and senior executives, now seek specific business intelligence reporting either in-house or contracted in by specialist research consultants. The Business Innovation Council has adopted “intelligence-led” business decision-making approaches, where a blend of “current, estimative and research” intelligence products are woven together to help inform executive decision-makers about strategy and courses of action to take, reports Computer Weekly magazine (Computer Weekly: 2019). Some CEOs report that their entire corporate agenda setting is intelligence-led because they could not possibly fix medium to long-term objectives without the most appropriate, up-to-date insights, which can help to facilitate the best possible decision-making cultures.

Where does Information/Data and Business Intelligence fit into the Risk Management process?

Figure 1: Risk Management Model:

Source: Striking Project Management: https://strikingprojectmanagement.com/qualitative-risk-analysis/

In contrast to merely utilising intelligence at the beginning of the risk management process (Identify & Analyse Exposures), business information/intelligence activity and reporting can play a critical role throughout the entire risk management process and its core five phases (see Figure 1). Organisations will wish to stick to strategy and objectives. But those that are more adaptive - and are therefore able to avoid or mitigate emerging risks or exploit emerging opportunities – tend to be those that have embraced and embedded business intelligence techniques within their own organisational cultures. Just as people who carry out regular exercise and health checks tend to enjoy a better longevity, in the sphere of organisational performance and resilience, it’s precisely the same; active knowledge-gathering of upcoming problems, followed by exercise and adaptive techniques to evade the risk, are also core ingredients for corporate survival and prosperity. “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored,” the Brave New World novelist Aldous Huxley poignantly wrote (Huxley: 2007 revised).

Integrity and compliance:

Gathering business intelligence is sometimes controversial because it often involves gathering information related to employees, stakeholders and competitors. The integrity of information, source protection and legal compliance are all critical responsibilities for a project team. Such skills and methods will help safeguard business intelligence functions, the project’s viability and also the client organisation’s overall reputation. If information is gathered or handled illegally, or source identities compromised, the consequences for a corporate body, or government organisation, can be severe.

In some sectors, such as Banking and Insurance, business intelligence functions are ubiquitous processes that underpin and influence almost every other sphere of work. Business intelligence functions can include financial risk monitoring, anti-fraud detection, due diligence around new depositors; these stricter due diligence measures are warmly welcomed by many consumers and stakeholders including the media and political decision-makers, especially since the 2007/8 banking crash, caused in part by too much bad debt poisoning the wells of the banking sector (Bingley: 2015).

Each organisation is different, with a unique culture, mix of employees and a unique combination of incoming events which undoubtedly impact it (Lipkin and Perrymore: 2012). Therefore, it may well be that many organisations establish their own ways to read, anticipate and map-out their own operating environments. Management tools which help us to draw a map of our business environment are as critically important to the lives of private firms as navigation charts are to the survival of sailors. It is therefore worth familiarising ourselves with some widely familiar business-environment analysis models. Essentially, these are information gathering models to follow. If deployed correctly, these management tools can hugely assist consultants and project managers to harness control of resources and target operations to optimum effect.

Three business information management models: PESTLE, PORTER’s and SWOT:

A widely favoured business tool is for business researchers and analysts to work to the PESTLE (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental) model to evaluate important external and internal forces that can impact and organisation. On the positive side PESTLE can provide structured information that can then be exploited by a firm, because it has a coherent list of forces at work in its own operating environment. PESTLE, and other variations to this famous mnemonic out there, really does help business planners to dig under the skin of an operating environment. PESTLE challenges organisational autopilot and collective comfort zones. Like all of these business analysis tools that we’re looking at in this Chapter, PESTLE provides for a crucial episode of corporate reflective learning. This management tool also nurtures a sense of belonging, and corporate purpose, to all executives who play their part in devising the PESTLE.

Figure 2: PESTLE Model

Source: Polemic Digital: https://www.polemicdigital.com/pestle-strategic-visionfuture-seo/

Reflective Exercise:

In your private notebook. Imagine your own workplace or an external firm. Going through the PESTLE, list-out the significant threats and challenges to your business over the next five years. How will these impact any major projects led by external consultants?

Professor Michael Porter’s Five Forces Model helps firms to summarise the five competitive forces that provide a risk or opportunities for them within an industrial sector (12). These can literally be identified and listed under the following categories, Porter suggests:

1) Threat of new entrants 2) Threat of substitute products or services 3)

Bargaining power of buyers 4) Bargaining power of suppliers 5)

Competitive rivalry between firms

Figure 3: Porter’s Five Forces Model:

Source: Strategic Management Insight: https://strategicmanagementinsight.com/tools/porters-five-forces.html

However, it might be that a firm choses to look more internally at the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities (SWOT): the team, product and brand that it has at its disposal to take on the world. SWOT analysis, credited to

management academic Albert Humphrey, has been a very popular management tool deployed for several decades (Bingley: 2015). This model enables teams and firms to articulate and address some weaker points in a positive and transformational manner … rather than allocating individual blame to individuals or departments. This is because SWOT analysis tends to be collectivist and can be concluded by focusing on the more positive organisational elements (strengths and opportunities) towards the end of the exercise. This modus operandi should leave the team forum satisfied and reassured, if not entirely exhilarated.

Figure 4: SWOT Analysis Model:

Source: Modlhub: http://modlhub.com/decision-making-and-planning/swotanalysis-template

Summary

The three information gathering/management models above can all be considered effective and well-known corporate business tools to provide and

intelligence-led decision making. If you get five or ten minutes to address a CSuite (senior executive board) officer, give consideration to deploying some or all of these in a presentable and engaging manner to your target audience. One key benefit is that information laid out in this format in a presentation is optically very strong for the audience/recipient.

Reflective Exercise: In your private notebook. Hopefully, as you have read through the course content and further reading materials below, you will have noticed that significant resource implications arise from gathering accurate, relevant and actionable information (business intelligence). Perhaps the first resource implication is providing the right Human Resources in order to find and refine the wider information/data sets into actionable business intelligence. Spend at least two hours identifying and explaining some other resource implications for data gathering within an international company. You can choose either a global bank based in London, or an international hotel chain based in Qatar, for your scenario.

Further Reading:

Hair, J. (2015) Essentials of Business Research Methods. US: ME Sharpe

Sikich, G., (2013) Enterprise Risk Management Lessons From the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster. Accessed at ‘Continuity Central’ on 20/1/2020 at: http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0790.html

Hasan, R. (2013) Apple Inc. An Analysis of PESTEL Analysis. US: Grin Verlag

References:

Intelligence101.com (2020) definition was accessed on 20/1/2020 at: http://www.intelligence101.com/information-vs-intelligence/

Bingley. R., (2015) The Security Consultant’s Handbook. Ely: ITGP

Tecce, D. (2009) Dynamic Capabilities & Strategic Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Op. Cit. Bingley (2015)

Sikich, G., (2013) Enterprise Risk Management Lessons From the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster. Accessed at ‘Continuity Central’ on 20/1/2020 at: http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0790.html

Computer Weekly (2019) Many companies fail to empower employee datadriven decision-making. Accessed on 20/1/2020 at: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252472588/Many-companies-fail-toempower-employee-data-driven-decision-making

Huxley, A., (2007) Brave New World (Revised Ed.). London: Vintage Classics

Op. Cit. Bingley (2015)

Lipkin, N, and Perrymore, A., (2009) Y in the Workplace: Managing the ‘Me First’ Generation. Franklin Lakes, US: Career Press Op. Cit. Bingley (2015)