Shaun Nicholson takes a look at our need for information and suggests we can find the truth, if we know where to look
IN a world that grows increasingly dependent on flow of information, we often miss the point of what lies before us. We visit google for an answer before we reach for a dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopaedia. We spend enormous amounts of money on CRM software packages and all manner of other business intelligence tools. We succumb to the software giants, adding features to our existing IT platforms in an effort to know more, and to know it faster, often when we haven’t really understood and reacted well enough to the information we had before.General Norman Schwarzkopf said, after the Gulf War, that the future of war was going to be all about information. This is why countries like the US have spent in excess of $4bn over the last couple of years on some 7,000 drones to be deployed in theatres of war and other locations of interest. If anyone has seen the movie Body of Lies starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, they would have witnessed first hand the amazing ability of what technology can deliver for information hungry spooks.
However, all the taxpayers money and all the petrodollars in the world can still buy you bad information. If you act on this, you can find yourself engaged in a conflict, which will suck more dollars out of your account than you stand to make. Case in point: the entire US operation in Iraq is fuelled by oil refined outside of Iraq at such places as Mina Abdulla in Kuwait. According to an article, written by former Professor of Petroleum Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, Charles A. Kohlhaas, if the US tried to recoup some of the billions spent on the war by adding, say a $3-per-barrel tax to Iraqi oil it would bring in about $2.4 billion per year. This would not even be enough to pay the interest of the war spend. Yet, we as sideline commentators all think it is a war built purely around the control of oil. If you look hard enough, and gather your own intelligence, you will find many more reasons why the US has spent in excess of $600 billion dollars on the war in Iraq, when life is not a bed of roses on their very own doorstep.
Ask yourself, “Are you another US war machine?” But in your case, spending vital dollars on marketing tools, client management software and other intelligence gathering channels, just to pull in another client.
Do you truly understand the information you are gathering and then act on it (or not as the case may dictate) in the most economical way?
Have your customers changed as a result of the recession we find ourselves in? If so, how have they changed? And what have you done to adjust your offering to them to ensure they maintain their annual spend with you?
Are your only sources of intelligence (in an ever changing landscape) trade magazines, sales rep rumours and titbits off the factory floor? Is it comments made at functions held by the paper merchants or other consumable suppliers? How is that information comparing with the client surveys you run? Are you running client surveys at all?
What about your own financial data, and performance? Do you have the tools to decipher the trends and react ahead of time?
As a financier, I talk to a range of business owners, suppliers of capital plant and consumables to industry, and all manner of staff from the person on the factory floor to the CEO of multinationals. Undoubtedly, the common factor amongst everyone is the need for more information and you can read this as the word truth. We all want the intelligence but we also want it to be the truth so we can make accurate and timely decisions. With so much information now at our finger tips, deciding on which source is the most accurate is key.
In my usual format of providing free stuff, cool stuff and inspiring stuff I have located tools which I hope will help some of you gather your own intelligence.
Free Stuff
DO you want to have a business dashboard that filters your business results into graphs and other professional mediums? Look no further than www.jaxworks.com. You may also like to visit www.dashboardspy.com and see some of the cool work done by Hubert Lee. Subscribe and you receive free HTML dashboards.
Cool Stuff
OKAY, now gathering your own intelligence can mean different things for all of us so just for you Jason Bourne fanatics and diehard 007 fans here is the quintessential website to gain all those information tit bits: www.spy-tools-directory.com
Inspiring Stuff
“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand” - Thomas Carlyle Hubert.
