Some businesses focus on revenue and domination.
Others on internal costs and efficiencies. Still others on time and emergency fixes.
Business analysts have been serving this forever.
When IBM and SAP (and no doubt the Big 5 consulting companies) were selling solutions in the 1990s, they understood the business scorecard and simply promised features and metrics that would hit that target. So, one implementation was for the organisation who wanted staff savings, while another was for the organisation who cared about exploiting the supply chain. For these organisations, it didn’t matter whether the solution they bought was in their stakeholders best interests, since they were “serving” themselves.
And then big business pushed it further, challenging business analysts to optimise the competition into a corner while working to post the big numbers for their shareholders.
This is all fine, but the race to the bottom doesn’t hold up over time, not in our hyper-competitive world.
Instead, we can think of the quest for better as:
- Objectives that are inclusive, that we continually double-down on in all our projects.
- Objectives that are generous, that exist to give service to the customer and society.