A blog entry based upon The AV Profession podcast with Tim Albright and guest David McNutt of Navigate Management Consulting.
This podcast is part of a series from The AV Profession about risk management and risk assessment. Today is a deep dive, talking about the risks of not having enough information to make the right decisions in your integration business.
“When we work with companies and we begin to pull back some layers of non-transparency, we often see that companies don’t have a lot of good information on which to run the business,” says McNutt.
Navigate calls these metrics.
Having good metrics is really the heart of good decision making. That doesn’t just mean data, it means readily available compiled information that is aligned with the goals of the business and the goals of the managers. Good business information systems are really critical for running a business.
Navigate has found that many integrators use up to 8 pieces of software to run their business.
“In our experience, the real disconnect is that most of these systems don’t talk to each other, or the company has to develop some sort of an Excel farm where data gets dumped, before it is moved somewhere else. And then we don’t know if the data is aligned or accurate, because it’s coming from all over the place.”
The biggest risk is not knowing where the information lies, how to get it, how to report it to the right people and how to make decisions based on that information.
What gets measured gets done.
Navigate talks a lot about alignment – which is when managers know where they’re going, what their performance measures, what their metrics are, and how they are performing against those metrics. “We would describe this as a reasonably mature company,” says McNutt.
Too often, integrators do not have the right information, or they don’t know how to get the information out of their systems they’re using. When it is too hard to extract data, and it takes too much time or labor, usually of a senior executive, to try to make sense of it all – this creates inefficiency inside a business.
How can you circumvent risk in your integration business? What are cascading metrics? And how does consistently measuring the same things help integrators achieve better results?
Listen to the podcast for all this and more!
