The Cost of Operating in the Dark
How Lack of Visibility Is Killing Your Company
October 1, 2024
STOP FLYING BLIND
Visibility isn't just an advantage.
Visibility isn't just an advantage.
It's a necessity.
Your organizational strategy is only as good as your execution. Yet HBR reports that two-thirds to three-quarters of large organizations struggle to implement their strategies. Forbes describes an even worse success rate: Up to 90% of strategies fail before they even launch.
The problem–and the solution–are both tied up in one insidious killer hidden inside nearly every organization: lack of visibility.
OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF CONTROL
The Imperative for Enterprise Visibility
Every day, your teams and leaders must decide: What work do we do right now to achieve the goals we need to reach tomorrow?
How are you making those decisions? Does your organization have the ability to quickly and objectively assess the impact of an idea or a delivered product on strategic goals? Or are you leaving these vital decisions to “gut feel”, or worse, avoiding the decisions, keeping teams busy on outputs but not impacting outcomes?
When we embrace enterprise visibility, teams can see both how their work connects to strategy, and also how it contributes to the overall outcomes of the business. And they can access this information automatically, without spending countless hours validating spreadsheets or creating presentations.
And in organizations that have achieved enterprise-wide visibility, leaders have mechanisms that enable them to gauge how well the teams are delivering what’s needed so they can react and adapt quickly.
Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.
Peter DruckerWhile great strategies can be crafted, it's the lack of visibility that hinders execution, leaving businesses blind to the very data they need to succeed. Yet few organizations succeed in providing anywhere near that level of enterprise visibility.
What everyone needs are answers. All they find are more questions:
- I know the data exists, why can’t my team find it?
- Is my strategy actually working?
- Is this work aligned with the company's strategy? How can I tell?
- What is the actual cost of this work?
- How much will it cost to pivot strategy? How much will it cost if we don’t?
In this reality, leaders and teams resort to making “good guesses” about which projects to prioritize and where to add capacity. And when millions (or billions) of dollars are on the line with a single decision, that’s just not good enough.
Stop Guessing. Start Thriving.
You can escape the million-dollar guessing game by building enterprise visibility.
In a data-driven enterprise, near-real-time data is woven through every process, tool, and business decision, with minimal intervention and maximum clarity. In this reality, leaders and teams can see at a glance the actual cost of work for each project or job, and how the work being delivered is impacting the bottom line and moving the needle on strategy.
Making that kind of real-time visibility possible is daunting. There is no magic potion, no easy button, that will magically make organizations transparent, collaborative, and flexible.
There are, however, 3 critical actions organizations can take today to begin moving in the right direction.
- Create the context for a data-driven culture
- Connect data hiding in your tool sprawl
- Confirm decisions and enable conversations with dashboards
Create the Context for a Data-Driven Culture.
Lasting change begins and ends with people. Highly engaged teams outperform the rest when it comes to business outcomes that are critical to the success of your organization.
But highly engaged teams are harder and harder to find. A recent survey from Gallop found that employees are worse off than they were four years ago. They were “more detached from their employers, with … lower levels of satisfaction … and less connection to its mission or purpose.”
| 45% |
Only 45% of employees know what is expected from them at work. |
| $1.9 Trillion |
Disengaged employees cost about $1.9 trillion in lost productivity. |
Here’s the reality hiding behind those numbers:
A CEO at a large telecommunications company once said, “Data without a purpose is just reporting.”
If your processes do not support visibility within and across your organization, and if your people are not provided with a clear strategy and direction nor a way to effectively demonstrate value delivery, your attempts at visibility will only ever be “just reporting.”
So before you invest in one new tool or audit a single tool stack, first take the time to ground your people in the why of increased visibility and transparency. Replace the fear and concern that often surround transparency with empowerment and opportunity by providing context.
CONTEXT
CONTEXT
Begins with Understanding
First, provide some facts. Share this recent Fivetran study, which found that 86% of respondents need access to real-time reporting of ERP data to make smart business decisions, yet "only 23% of responding companies have systems in place to make that possible."
Remind everyone that when teams and leaders don’t have access to accurate, real-time data everyone makes uninformed business decisions, which ultimately leads to lost revenue.
CONTEXT
Fosters Empowerment
Next, explain that you are building a culture of action, of empowered teams who have the knowledge they need to deliver on target. Remind everyone that without data, it’s nearly impossible to have the confidence to innovate, to be able to quickly tell whether an experiment worked or how an idea could be tweaked to be more effective
CONTEXT
Reinforces a Growth Mindset.
Share how continuous learning is only possible when people feel safe to report both successes and failures. Remind everyone that the alternative to safety is a situation where the teams and program-level leaders work to “manage the message up” by manipulating the data to support a better story.
Your goal here is to help people understand how enterprise-wide transparency is not about blame and punishment, but about impact, engagement, and freedom at all levels of the organization.
Connect the Data Hiding Inside Your Tool Sprawl.
Once teams are grounded in context and understand the why, it’s time to find and connect the data lurking in all of your tools.
Today’s businesses are spoiled for choice when it comes to technology–and that’s not necessarily a good thing. It’s not at all uncommon to use one app for email, another for instant communication, another to track work, and another to report the results of that work. And that’s probably only in the first 15 minutes of a typical day!
The actual number of apps an employee needs to interact with is much higher. An average department now has 40-60 tools. And not all of those apps are unique; in many cases companies have 3-4 instances running simultaneously! In fact, the average company spends $135K on unnecessary software licenses!
The common name for this phenomenon is tool sprawl–too many tools on too many platforms–making it difficult to move data from one to another. Plus, even inside the same tool suite, subtle changes in setup and execution from one business unit to the next cause issues with data sync.
Because data is inaccessible from one tool to the next, organizations spend countless hours manipulating data into spreadsheets and slide decks that are stale by the time they’re even completed, leaving teams and executives hesitant and unsure about the insights. Maybe that’s why a mere 6% of organizations report that they can locate meaningful insights throughout the enterprise.
- Audit. First, look at your entire technology stack as it exists today. Understand what everything your entire organization is using to do work, regardless of area. Find it all. Quantify it. Categorize it.
- Analyze. Look for overlaps and redundancies inside each category (Gitlab, Github, Bitbucket–do you really need all three?)
- Streamline. Minimize redundancies via integration or consolidation. You might want to work with a partner in this effort, someone who can help you understand best options for streamlining
- Connect. Invest in a select suite of technology to connect the right data to make decisions in your particular environment.
Make Your Tools Work Together, Not Against You.
SINGLE-PANE-OF-GLASS VIEW
Your Window Into the Future
Once you’ve streamlined your tools and located your data, it’s time to invest in technology and data conversion to access real-time data from your remaining tools.
Some organizations solve this via an all-in-one tool suite (Planview perhaps, or the Atlassian suite + Jira Align). These comprehensive tools can be a great solution for certain businesses. (Take the Jira Align readiness assessment to see if that’s a good fit for you.)
Other organizations find these all-in-one solutions to be too heavyweight or more prescriptive than is appropriate. For those organizations, a tailored solution involving a combination of tools and custom integrations (such as Tempo, Tableau, and Advanced Reporting) is the perfect prescription for their needs. (Need help putting together the perfect package for your needs? Give us a call and we’ll walk you through it.)
Whatever path you choose, it’s essential to connect all of your data together, so that leadership and teams gain clear insights into how to adjust funding, prioritize projects, and allocate resources to drive business forward. (Use our ROI calculator to help you compare the cost of implementing visibility tools and solutions to the savings and benefits gained.)
Confirm Decisions & Enable Conversations With Dashboards
Fostering a culture that runs on data and connecting that data are essential steps toward ridding your organization of its visibility problem. But they aren’t enough.
To truly run your business on data, you need to present the right data to the right people at the right time. Only then can you experience the kinds of cost, efficiency, and customer satisfaction improvements you are seeking.
It’s time for big visible dashboards.
What is a big visible dashboard?
A big visible dashboard offers a single-pane-of-glass view into your data. It helps to unlock your Big Dashboard Energy, giving teams and leaders an at-a-glance view into the data they need to make decisions not just fast – but with a solid understanding of the impact and the dependencies of those decisions.
The view is customizable based on what the audience needs to know, bringing together execution and strategy, providing an executive line of sight, facilitating adaptive prioritization and funding, and enabling flexible resource and scenario planning.
For a PMO office, for example, a dashboard might well look like a look into the status of all open projects, with the ability to drill down into specific tasks as needed.
The CFO might want to look at the status of each project and money spent to date per project to understand the cascading effects of diverting resources from one project to higher priority work or to invest more in a well-received feature.
The COO might use the same data set to proactively manage the supply chain, identifying issues earlier, optimizing operations, and preventing delays.
Seeing clearly, the flow and cost of work, is the best way to make decisions that you can trust.
HIDDEN COST OF BLIND SPOTS
Lack of Visibility Is the Killer.
Lack of Visibility Is the Killer.
Enhanced Visibility Is the Cure.
It takes time to establish visibility throughout the enterprise, but the effort is worth it. According to a survey by McKinsey, [6] enhanced visibility between teams and leadership is proven to improve operational effectiveness by 30-50%.
Stop Playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey With Your Organizational Strategy.
Rip off the blindfolds so teams can hit the target!FAQs
With statistics like these, why are you still trying to operate in the dark? Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Your organization will not survive, let alone thrive, without achieving visibility into the flow and cost of work.
Foster a data-driven culture, making transparency and innovation the standard way of doing business. Exchange tool sprawl for interconnected technology, and start using the data you are already collecting to make better decisions. Finally, create a visible connection between strategy and execution, and join the rarified air of organizations that bring their strategies to life.
Praecipio has the expertise to get your organization thinking beyond enterprise visibility, to taking the right actions at the right time at the right level. We bring both the visibility and expertise to align your strategy to effective execution.
What is enterprise visibility and why is it important?
Enterprise visibility refers to the ability of an organization to see and understand its operations, performance, and data across all departments in real-time. It's important because it allows businesses to make informed decisions, align strategy with execution, and respond quickly to changing conditions. Without real-time visibility, organizations risk making decisions based on incomplete or outdated information, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
How can my organization achieve end-to-end enterprise visibility?
Achieving end-to-end enterprise visibility involves several key steps:
- Connect execution data to strategy by integrating tools and platforms like Jira Align to align team efforts with business goals.
- Consolidate data from different sources into a unified executive dashboard using tools like PowerBI or Tableau for a comprehensive view.
- Collaborate across teams to ensure that data is contextualized, discussed, and understood, facilitating data-driven decision-making.
What are the main challenges in implementing enterprise visibility?
The main challenges include:
- Data Silos: Data scattered across different systems and teams can be hard to consolidate.
- Tool Sprawl: Using too many tools can create complexity and make data integration difficult.
- Cultural Resistance: Employees may resist changes in processes or the adoption of new tools, especially if they are used to manual or siloed systems.
How can organizations avoid the pitfalls of misleading data?
To avoid the pitfalls of misleading data, organizations should:
- Ensure data is placed in the correct context, combining both quantitative and qualitative insights.
- Foster a culture of transparency where both positive and negative findings are shared openly.
- Regularly validate data through cross-functional collaboration and continuous review processes.
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