The Most Profitable ATM in Nigeria
In a bank client strategy workshop early in the year, I asked branch managers running the branches two questions: (1) list your top five branch customers and (2) the ATM machines of most value in your city. Some did not know because the GL and P&L were maintained by Head Office in Lagos. That evening, I wrote on their behalf to HQ, for it to share more data with branches.
People, there is no way you can prioritize which ATM machines consultants will fix first, if all of them are down, when you do not have any idea where the profit comes. Working smart is good business and that requires insights. Who cares if the only ATM in my village is down when the one in National Assembly is not working? Why should the ATMs located in NNPC or National Assembly ever be down? That could be more than 20% of your ATM business. That information is not only for the Head Office. As I wrote in Harvard Business Review, every business is local; you need to arm your field workers with better insights.
That takes me to analytics: you need to make efforts to make sense of your data even as you do all to accumulate new ones.
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Every year, billions of gigabytes of data are produced by companies and individuals. If the data is analyzed well, and used at the appropriate time, it can help organizations to gather intuitions to improve the businesses further. Analytics can help a company in identifying new prospects, master the requirements of customers better and foresee the buying decisions of shoppers. Making analytics a part of an IT strategy could be catalytic in capturing new prospects for overall business productivity.
Make having better insights on what is happening in your business a New Year Resolution.
One thing is to have the data, another thing is to make sense of the data you have. Interestingly the latter is where the major work is. Aside from knowledge, it largely depends on good thinking and ease of understanding complex processes. Almost every organisation with deep pocket can do the first part, but the second part needs something extra, and it revolves around humans and how they see or perceive what is before them.
