Note: Running Fridays in FromGregsHead.com, is a continuing series of tips brought to you by Greg Price. These run Sunday evenings during the BusinessMaker’s Radio Show on KPRC 950AM. Audio files can be found on the PKF Texas – Entrepreneur’s Playbook® page of the PKF Texas website.
Every day business executives at all types of organizations are faced with making decisions that are critical to their business. My experience in helping hundreds of organizations in my over 30 years of experience is that these decisions are based mostly on inaccurate, uncoordinated and incomplete information from their own internal systems. When I press most of these executives they will usually admit to some type of intuition or comparison to industry norms outside their organization.
Following up to that point is a recent survey by Forbes in 2010, whereby over 200 executives were asked about the reliability of their own business processes. Not surprisingly a 61% indicated that their own internal systems suffered from bad on inconsistent information.
I have consistently seen that in all types of organizations, information silos of data are building on local hard drives, laptops, etc. which are then totally inaccessible to the broader management team. So now we have tons of data, not shared and probably not consistent with the needs of the organization. Most executives think the information is in the system, just waiting to be accessed.
The reality is most information and the process of accumulation and verification hasn’t been properly vetted to ensure accurate, reliable and consistent information is available for use.
How do you begin to correct these problems?
In our next segment will offer some ideas about this difficult task.