Closing the Intelligence Gap - Gary Cokins on Performance Management

In Peter Evans-Greenwood’s recent blog, Inside vs. Outside, he builds a case that it is not sufficient to shift from an organization’s internal historical view of information to react to towards a predictive view of information. To clarify, he means that awareness of external forces, such as changes in market preferences, is critical. His accusation is that organizations may get excessively pre-occupied by over-analyzing their existing internal data, the traditional space of business intelligence (BI). He suggests this creates an imbalance that should be corrected by greater emphasis on future impacts and the opportunities that can come with them.

He uses the example that traditional applications of BI in the music industry of monitoring and analyzing its sales of CDs obscured seeing the ominous signals from the rise of iPod and iTunes and their adverse impact on CD sales. I really like the diagram in Peter’s blog titled “Time and distance drive the value of information.”

Peter’s article has made me re-think my blog Rearview Mirrors or Windshield? In that blog I made a case that that despite all the buzz about applying predictive analytics, for most organizations there continues to be an untapped treasure trove of historical information to analyze and learn from. Peter’s article does not make me consider that an organization should reduce its efforts on analyzing historical information. It makes me believe even more emphatically that organizations need to expand their efforts much more with applying backward and forward looking analytics and to be even more inclusive of external and exogenous forces for opportunism.