February 08, 2013 2:20:01 PM by
Josh Schow
Cloud apps turn stakeholder’s collective wisdom into Lean Management
Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) January 30, 2013 -
9Lenses announced the release of five landmark crowdsourcing applications to reduce the uncertainty faced by government contractors.
“Federal service providers face uncertainty on nearly every front. Budgets are uncertain, contract renewals are up in the air, and regulatory modifications are making it increasingly difficult to decide how to invest scarce resources,” notes Edwin Miller, 4 time-CEO and Founder of 9Lenses. “Contractors trying to win more bids with fewer resources, and that’s placing a lot of strain on the C-suite’s strategic abilities. I wanted to help, so we developed our ‘GovCon’ suite which allows executives to leverage the knowledge that’s already in their company to mitigate risk, and improve win-rates.”
Every app reduces uncertainty by linking executives to insight from stakeholders across every part of their company. Here are the apps:
· Automated Strategic Planning: The Strategic Planning app captures the collective wisdom of employees so executives can craft better roadmaps with better data at the next offsite.
· Lean Management: The Lean Management app interviews stakeholders to discover ways to reduce cost and risk across every part of an organization.
· Bid Process Optimizer: The Bid Optimizer engages employees and executives for data-calls, go/no-go bid calls, and benchmarks the “bid process” to improve win-rates over time.
· M&A Analyzer: M&A Analyzer helps organizations in the midst of large structural change pinpoint knowledge and alignment gaps to smoothly navigate the transition.
· 360 Your Business: 9Lenses 360 apps “snapshot” the health of every part of a business, project, program, or group so executives can optimize performance, end-to-end.
9Lenses has a fast growing customer set in the government community, including Raytheon, HP, Knowledge Consulting Group, a.i. Solutions, OnPoint, MSTI, XL Associates, Micropact, Centuria, Chilliad, and Navanti. All of these companies are using 9Lenses apps to create a quantitative approach for driving clarity, collective learning, and alignment in their companies.
In 2012, Raytheon used 9Lenses apps to engage their stakeholders in a strategic dialogue. They identified over 19 knowledge gaps, misalignments, and operational challenges. Lisa Brown, the President of Raytheon Trusted Computer Solutions, felt that “9Lenses provided great clarity into the business. It cut through the labyrinth of management and strategy theories that leaders are constantly trying to adapt to their organizations and really pinpointed the areas where focus was needed.”
After running several apps, Raytheon decided to partner with 9Lenses to develop an operational playbook using Six Sigma Lean Management principles. Division COO John Graves wanted to see if his crowd could find ways to reduce expenses and streamline processes.
Crowd sourcing business strategy was new to John, but when asked about the experience he replied, “I am enthralled with the approach 9Lenses takes to focus “process improvement” initiatives and eager to gain greater insight into the analytical underpinnings of the cloud platform. I look forward to a rewarding partnership and broadening the 9L's “sphere of influence” across Raytheon.”
William J. Weber, the President and COO of XL Associates, offered similar feedback when asked about his experience with 9Lenses’ government contracting solutions.
“As XL Associates and ALON Inc. began to merge, I sought out an enterprise management platform capable of revealing and synthesizing each organization's strengths. I wanted to move toward harmony and stave off the confusion that so often accompanies large acquisitions. 9Lenses provided insight beyond my wildest expectation. It's like E-Discovery for people’s knowledge instead of documents. With 9Lenses, it's easy to conduct internal assessments and business intelligence studies inside one platform, and the analytics made my data insightful and immediately actionable. Any company in the government services sector who wants to keep their edge and avoid falling into the "just another contractor" syndrome should consider 9Lenses’ apps.”
December 17, 2012 9:55:30 AM by
Josh Schow
The Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu understood something about war that is frequently forgotten by those who have never waged it. If a military leader understood the battlefield, his enemy’s thinking, and the limits of his own resources, he would rarely lose. While business is less bloody than war, Sun Tzu still has some relevant advice: the more complete/organized the information, the better the strategy.
The Strategy lens organizes and examines a company’s go-to-market plan with precision. There is a ubiquitous amount of literature regarding the subject of business strategy . Every good businessperson wants to know the winning strategy. Yet the best businessperson realizes that success is more of an art, less of a science.
When considering the general strategy, a company will examine the broader goals of the strategy. This concerns the broad vision of the organization. However, a good strategy will have an enormous range of practical steps as well as theoretical justifications. Pricing strategy is helpful for understanding how the market will respond to the product. This harkens back to the market lens. In order to have a sound pricing strategy, a company needs a sound understanding of the market.
While it might be exciting to go big, or go home one must consider that the limits of resources restrict the company. Understanding these resources means gathering insight into the market lens, the people lens, and the finance lens. Thus, strategy is limited based on the assets available. The way businesses determine this limit is through crowdsourcing. The strength of the 9Lenses schema is that it makes crowdsourcing easy and cross relatable.
October 08, 2012 2:32:36 PM by
Zach Enos
Top down strategy is dead, but executives still have to lead, and they do so by setting forth strategies. Those strategies control how even the most social companies behave. Strategy will always matter most, but in the social era it’s holistic rather than top-down. The most important question then, is how does the social era affect strategic planning?
Meet Social Strategy: Or Strategic Planning Gone Social
Even social businesses (e.g. KickStart, which relies on a crowdsourcing-as-service model) fail to bring social strategies into the boardroom. For most organizations, “social” means nothing more than CRM, marketing, and product feedback cycles. Few realize the exponential rewards hidden in every company’s “Social Consciousness.” That’s what social era leaders need to tap into.
Imagine a business where every employee, customer, executive, board member, and investor could share his/her perspective on the organization’s performance with the CEO before the next strategic offsite. Pretend for a moment, that the executive leadership team collaborated and strategically planned around up-to-the-second data that accurately reflected the business’s health.
Stop imagining! The age of social strategic planning is here, and it all starts by connecting every part of a business; here we say by connecting all 9Lenses. Business leaders need to find social tools that don’t just collect data, but organize it, make it meaningful. The best social tools use schemas to map and interrelate business data end-to-end, cut through the clutter, or at least organize data in a super useful way, to make insights actionable.
Too few organizations are applying social principles like transparency, collaboration, innovation, and connected learning to strategic planning. That’s probably because it’s difficult to know how. Social technology is new, and many executives are still struggling to discern the best way to integrate new solutions.
However you chose to take on social strategy, remember, you need to listen and learn from everyone affected by you business. Your employees, customers, investors, and advisors have knowledge you need to strategize effectively. Find a way to hear “the crowd” across your entire business, and connect rather than segment the input. Now you’ve got a thousand strategists pushing information to the top in a way that enables good decisions, instead of the top dictating a strategy that a thousand innovative employees think is bunk. Or, worse, nobody knows if it is or isn’t because the business isn’t connected.
We’ve crowd sourced business strategy: check it out!
Let me know what you think of this post, and sign up for our RSS feed because Part II: Structuring the Social Strategy is coming out soon. Don’t miss this step-by-step guide for executives who want to use social data to drive strategic planning initiatives.
Tags:
business analysis
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business improvement
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Business Strategy
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Data
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Data-driven Offsite
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enterprise management software
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Offsite
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Social enterprise
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Strategic Development
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Strategic Management
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Strategic Planning
,
Strategy Automation
October 04, 2012 2:16:41 PM by
Zach Enos
Most executives I speak with intuitively understand the value of leveraging “social” business solutions. Companies that foster transparent collaboration, innovative pipelines, and passionate communities are redefining the marketplace.
Success is all about breaking down bureaucratic hierarchies, doing a few things well, and creating continuous social feedback loops. Unfortunately, “social” solutions are great, but social tools are often too unstructured, disconnected, and complex to gain traction in enterprise-level boardrooms.
Welcome to the Social Era:
I’m borrowing the term “Social Era” from the popular Stanford lecturer Nilofer Merchant. She’s argues quite persuasively that Schumpeter and Taylor’s traditional model of strategy is dead. Traditional strategy rests on 5 key pillars that Merchant believes are incompatible with flexible, collaborative business communities:
- Top Down Strategy Matters Most
- Size Matters
- Stability Rules
- Sustainable Advantages Exist
- Company Controls Everything
Traditional Strategy:
I think she’s right on the money. Vertical integration became a central principle of successful big business management towards the mid-twentieth century and by the 1970’s was above reproach. 19th century steel tycoons like Carnegie pioneered this methodology by chopping out middleman and processing their own raw materials from ground to product. In the 20th century, companies like Ford and Wal-Mart mastered integrated end-to-end supply-chain management systems. “Bigger is better” was the adage, and companies thrived by pushing their weight around, swaggering, and consolidating competitors.
But things have changed. As Nilofer points out the 800-pound gorillas of yesteryear need to become “a herd of 800 nimble gazelles.” Businesses that emphasize flexibility, creativity, and synergy are now winning the race to the top, and they’re doing it by becoming more social.
- Nordstrom and AT&T are pioneering innovative pipelines and in-store labs.
- Twitter and LinkedIn and creating value through social dialogues.
- Goodreads, Yelp, and Pinterest are only successful because they engage (crowdsource) lots of people.
Dispersing power and enabling innovation are the next dispensation of business; that means top-down strategy is fundamentally different or dead. Traditional strategy has clearly perished. The question now is what does that mean for the future of “strategic planning?”
Tags:
business analysis
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business improvement
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Crowd Sourcing Applications
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Data
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Employees
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social
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Social Media
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social networking
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Strategic Management
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Strategic Planning
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Strategy Automation
October 02, 2012 2:48:52 PM by
Zach Enos
30 years after Janet and Rick moved into their cozy historic little home, they made the discovery of a lifetime. One afternoon, as Rick cleared the attic, he discovered that the floor was made out of antique railroad signs. The entire attic was covered in priceless relics—worth over $30,000! Can you imagine what that feels like? It’s your home; you work, eat, sleep, and (hopefully) spend time with loved ones there. Suddenly, your home goes from personal sanctuary to jackpot and national story.
Similarly, managers and business leaders often fail to recognize the valuable treasure that’s been a part of their business for years—their employees! The real experts in any organization aren’t the guys in fancy suits charging $100,000 and taking three months to assess issues and make “recommendations.” Instead, the real expert is sitting the next cube over, standing on the loading dock, or busily laboring on the factory floor.
Make an effort to discover the valuable resources already in your organization. Use a tool if necessary. As workforces become more distributed and virtual, using tools to gather unfiltered insight, uncover hidden expertise, and facilitate communication becomes mission critical.
Learn How to Crowdsource Strategic Planning, Today.
Tags:
business analysis
,
business improvement
,
Business Strategy
,
Crowd Sourcing Applications
,
Data
,
Data-driven Offsite
,
enterprise management software
,
Social enterprise
,
Strategic Development
,
Strategic Management
,
Strategic Planning
,
Strategy Automation
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