'Gut feel' is no longer sufficient for excellent business leadership. In today's competitive environment, that sixth sense must be supplemented by "hedge management" - business intelligence that helps to ensure that strategic decisions are based on fact.
This is absolutely critical in a world in which the terms 'leadership' and 'accountability' are synonymous with the role of CEO. In addition, CEOs are expected to motivate and inspire, to be visionary, strategic thinkers - and have the ability to drive their businesses toward achievement of their visions.
And they have to take responsibility if that vision is not attained or even if the realisation of the vision turns out to be less than anticipated.
So, how can CEOs be sure that their vision is real and realisable? How can they know whether or not it will deliver the competitive-edge they need and want?
Luck could play a role. Luck, and gut feel and a highly developed sixth sense. After all, luck plays a role in any type of success: the great golfer Gary Player has often acknowledged the role luck played in his amazing career. He says: "The more I practice, the luckier I get."
CEOs also need that kind of luck - except, instead of practice they need business intelligence. Business intelligence delivers the kind of solid information they need to make informed decisions and develop realisable strategies.
In the past, however, accessing this kind of critical business intelligence could be a daunting task for three reasons:
- . The organisation could not get the data together;
- . It took too long to get meaningful information, or worse;
- . The organisation unearthed incorrect information.
The result was that business decisions were made without facts, decisions took too long or CEOs made poor business decisions based on bad data.
Today's CEOs can't blame a bad business decision on bad, incomplete or 'late' data - not when CEOs are under increasingly heavy fire to meet corporate governance requirements. And remember that corporate governance doesn't only mean being relatively honest and not cooking the books: corporate governance also means ensuring investors and employees and customers - stakeholders - are not prejudiced by an 'unlucky' event or action which resulted in these stakeholders suffering some kind of loss.
Five years ago no one talked about corporate governance, but post-Enron, Health & Racquet et al, it's a common term. CEOs have become ultimately accountable for every aspect of the business, and rightly so.
Companies file incorrect reports about their business activities for one of two basic reasons. Some executives consciously lie about the facts while others lack accurate information. But the majority of CEOs are honest people: they don't mean to file incorrect reports. They just used 'bad' data.
The end result is the same: there is a disconnect between perception and reality.
So the CEO needs better data - and someone, or something, to provide that data.
Enter the IT department. This department is the only one in the entire organisation with the means to extract the data the CEO needs to make good business decisions, to deliver accurate, timely and relevant business intelligence in a useable format, quickly.
But IT is under enormous pressure from multiple fronts. The pressure to cut costs ... the pressure to do more with less ... the pressure to upgrade information security ... the pressure to be accurate.
This is where the term 'IT governance' enters today's business discussions. Basically, IT governance is the management of information flow within a business: processes, technologies, relationships and organisational structures that influence the way information is surfaced, managed and shared.
One of the primary goals of IT governance is to ensure the integration of information across the entire organisation. This results in the flow of accurate information to stakeholders who demand it. Importantly, it also enables CEOs to make confident, business decisions based on more than 'gut feel'.
IT has never been in a more strategic corporate position, and SAS has never been in a stronger position to be a strategic business partner. The company has shown it can help companies grow revenues and trim expenses by ensuring that companies get clear, accurate information about their businesses.
Share