my EMBA Chronicle

My next module of classes officially starts tomorrow.  Accounting will continue for another month and the rest of the module is rounded out with Strategy and Economics.  As I’ve been getting psyched about this next phase in my EMBA adventure, I happened upon an interesting post from Peter Payne.   You may not be able to find this on his blog, but it was in an email list that he authors for his company JList.  It’s an interesting narrative about global strategy and economics as well as the importance of adaptability for business:

“Over the weekend we had a bit of an adventure: we made a trip to a Japanese Costco, the membership club that offers the American warehouse shopping experience to consumers in Japan. Costco has been operating stores here since 1999, but until recently all the locations were on the other side of Tokyo from where we’re located, and I would rather fly all the way to California to buy something rather than drive through the chaos that is Japan’s capital, if I have any choice in the matter. When we walked through the doors we were instantly transported to a world of shopping convenience where we could find all sorts of things not usually available in Japan, from American hot dogs to breakfast cereals to fabric softeners and more. We were quite pleased with how much effort the company had put into bringing the standard Costco experience to Japan, and we knew where everything was right away because the layout was exactly the same as the stores we shopped at in San Diego. (My existing Costco card even worked.) While Japanese consumers have gotten more comfortable with buying bulk over the past two decades or so, Costco still has some work to do to adapt its business model to the country, and many of the products they were offering in the store seemed confusing to me, from the bake-at-home pizza that was too big for tiny Japanese ovens to a full selection of children’s books in English, which no one was even picking at, or American pickles, which I am happy to buy but which most Japanese dislike. Paradigm shifts in buying habits always present opportunities to certain companies, and I could see that a lot of American brands were getting a toe-hold with Japanese shoppers who had never seen Downy or Tide or Duracell batteries in the past. It’d be interesting to see if these companies can increase their market share in Japan, using Costco as a springboard.”

www.giladorigami.com/PG_Butterflies2.html

For the past two weeks of school, we’ve been learning about how financial statements and accounting data provide profitability information to shareholders and organizations.  Since I work in higher education, I’ve been thinking a lot about how these principles of analysis for decision making are applied to our primary line of business:  education.

Analytics and business intelligence technologies have been popular topics in the higher ed community.  Especially in the past two years, vendors like Oracle, iStrategy and Microsoft have been promoting technologies and tools to help organizations transform transactional data into actionable data.

More and more, educational institutions are being challenged to demonstrate effectiveness and measure performance.  Unlike the private sector, there is no FASB or GAAP that provides universally accepted principles by which organizations can report on and assess their performance.  Business intelligence technologies provide organizations with tools to transform data into information in order to perform analysis and inform decisions.  But having the right technology is only part of the equation.

Financial reports can be a valuable tool to help organizational leadership make decisions about how to improve the business.  But the tool is useless if it is not used by a culture that is willing to take actions based on the information provided by those reports.  This lack of a “culture of analysis” has been a common theme at the iStrategy user conference that I attended today.  My colleagues at the conference seem to agree that, as users of the best analytics suite on the market, our organizations are extremely well-positioned improve assessment and measure performance.

And we agree that positioning is only part of the formula — to be successful we need to create an organizational culture of assessment.  We all struggle with the same questions:  What do we measure?  How do we define success as it relates to our educational mission?  What kind of actions will we take based on improved access to information?

During his presentation today, Don Norris (nationally recognized thought leader and author of an excellent Educause paper on Action Analytics), spoke about the relationship between analytics and alignment.  Since most organizations understand this relationship in terms of financial reporting I find it interesting that so many struggle to apply the same concepts to performance analtyics.