The Makings of a Great Business Intelligence Analyst

My gal pal and I got into a deep discussion on aptitudes the other day. According to smarty pants Johnson O'Connor folks,

Aptitudes are natural talents, special abilities for doing, or learning to do, certain kinds of things. Manual dexterity, musical ability, spatial visualization, and memory for numbers are examples of such aptitudes. 

Anyhoo, Gal Pal wondered what makes for a great BI analyst. And being me, I couldn't resist making a slide preso 'cause I thought other penetrating minds would want to know too.

The slide preso is after the jump..

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Tips to Lead Successful Corporate Change

Change is stressful, even welcome change, because it challenges people to be different than they’ve been before. That’s an uncomfortable place to be until people absorb the new ways of being or doing activities.

Leading successful change within a corporate environment is a multi-stage process, requiring a combination of leadership, planning and communication in each stage. Check out our systematic approach to change management below to see how we roll.

Henry Kissinger summed up leadership this way,

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Why Netflix failed as a social business

Today's podcast is an excerpt from a discussion between Dr. Natalie Petouhoff and I on Netflix -- and why it failed as a social business.

Our thanks to Focus.com for allowing us to replay excerpts from our 10-week Roundtable series on Simplifying Social Business. We based the Focus roundtables on our ebook series of the same name.

(If you want to watch/listen to the full discussion rather than an excerpt, you can download the file here. Select Episode 1 - The Proimse of Social CRM, part 1.)

Now, here is today's podcast...

Why Netflix failed as a social business

When Is The Right Time to Launch A New Corporate Initiative?

The article title is a common question asked in the business world.

Larger companies might not struggle as much with the answer because of their more extensive resources. But for small- to medium-sized companies, getting the answer right is of paramount importance because of the demand on more limited resources.

I advise my clients to start by doing a SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis.

This valuable insight can help you initially prioritize among competing initiatives. You can undertake a SWOT analysis before building a detailed business case for an initiative. And it has the advantage of providing information that can later be used in the construction of the business case.

Here are example questions you can ask to build the SWOT analysis:

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Is Your Company Ready For Collaboration?

Although I write a lot of posts about being customer-centric, it’s important to remember that customers form only part of the corporate relationships agenda. Another category of important relationships are partners.

And partners will only become more important in the Digital Society.

A recent article by John Hagel III and Marc Singer entitled Unbundling the Corporation hit home just how the importance of partners will grow within the Digital Society. The article appeared in the McKinsey Quarterly.

Hagel and Singer wrote,

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Wrong-headed Hoopla About Social ROI

Too many social media pundits hold the view that a social Return on Investment (ROI) can’t be determined. You’ll hear all kinds of reasons like too many unknowns. And there’s my personal favorite, “Don’t worry about the ROI, just get a strategy and start doing something.”

Well, I agree with part of the above statement. You do a need a social strategy to before you can even begin to determine the social ROI (smROI). But the rest? They’re mythtaken.

Social ROI can be determined. So why do the myths around ROI persist? Here are a few reasons:

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Focus Roundtable – Becoming a social business

If you missed The Business of Social Business live talk on Focus, catch it on replay. This was the first of several sessions where Dr. Natalie and I discussed the 7 steps to become a social business.

This week, we covered the first 3 steps: 

  1. Understand the impact on traditional functional roles.
  2. Understand the impact on the business at large - people, process, & technology.
  3. Listen & discover with social monitoring.

Next week, Dr. Natalie and I will continue the discussion, focusing on social objectives and strategy.

Both of these sessions are based on content from our The Business of Social Business ebook.

Social Business Impacts People, Process, & Technology

If you want to build a successful social business, then you need to understand how it will impact your company. For example, you need to understand there’s a difference between activities like launching miscellaneous marketing campaigns using social media channels and implementing corporate-wide initiatives.

The latter situation is a change management issue – and that means it will impact people, processes, and technology

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