Project management • Scriptcase How to recognize business models and processes from Deep Data Perspective

Listen to the podcast and learn how to recognize business models and processes from Deep Data Perspective and turn into applications with in Scriptcase.

Superior understanding of deep data, demands an understanding of what your fitting Deep Data into. What I mean by that is that you need a deep understanding of your business model and the business processes within your business model in order to see how this might relate to external forces.

Imagine for a second that you discover that a serious competitor of yours has somehow brought to market a product or service similar to the one that you rely on for your main revenue streams, and they’re doing this significantly less expensively than you do.

It would be a standard thought in competitive intelligence to begin to analyse and model from your side what it would take if you were doing the same thing as them. By functional decomposition you could therefore come to an understanding of where they found the means to cut costs.

Does this mean that somehow they are skimping, or have they just found a more efficient means to do the same things you do without sacrificing quality. This can be incredibly significant. If they sacrifice quality, then this indicates that you may still have a superior solution of some sort that can still take the day with your customers. However, if they actually have found a far more efficient means to do the same kind of things that you do and you don’t know what it is that’s a risk factor for your business.

Not knowing how competitor is doing something can at times extremely costly.

Therefore an essential element not simply of Competitive Intelligence, but of business generally is to know what your business processes are.

Today, our guest for the podcast will be Steffi Black. She owns a small business which is a consultancy. And this is an unusual one in that she actually is a life coach and kindness advocate. When you listen to the podcast will explain all of that detail. So I won’t go into that kind of detail here.

You might find this podcast very interesting because beyond what her business does what were going to do in just a few questions and just a very few minutes is some up:

1. How her business functions.
2. Her challenges and opportunities.
3. Where she could use more transparency.
4. And we gain enough information to create a small application in Scriptcase to actually support this.

Along with the podcast, starting this week we will also have a screen share video demo of how to turn this information into a Scriptcase application. That will be posted in the next day or two. For now, we can start with this introduction in the podcast.

If you want to understand the difference between Business Intelligence and Competitive Intelligence is a very cool article in one of the Toolbox blogs that you might find very handy. Toolbox blogs on many different technology subjects can be an extremely handy way to learn things. If you’re not aware of Toolbox and the many blogs within it, and discussion groups then you may find this quite enlightening on a number of different topics. I hope you enjoy that.

Please be aware, that you do have to give them your email address to unlock this. However, this is not pay walled, so I will still recommend it. It’s got some interesting points. Both because of this topic, and other Toolbox blogs, I feel is still worth reading this. You can pick up some good information on this topic. And it’s good introduction to the Toolbox blogs. Anyone who finds Stack Overflow be useful, (in other words anyone technical) should find these blogs be yet another reference point tool in your toolkit.

Further, there is an interesting article on how to deal with Business Process Modelling by  Laura Brandenburg that you also might find interesting. Fortunately, on this one you don’t need to register. She’s the author of How to Start a Business Analyst Career and Professional Development for Business Analysts.

She both gives a pretty good introduction to this form of analysis, is a nice template that you might find to be very useful.

It’s funny, that many laypeople regard these kinds of analyses as some kind of dark art. They’re not. There are skills involved that can be anything from relatively simple to quite complex. But with the right skills, you can functionally decompose, come to terms with and gain mastery over almost any business process. Like much else it starts both with your knowledge base, and how prepared you are deal with that cognitively as the knower of that knowledge base.

In the accompanying video screen share demo in my going to re-create every single thing that she says?

Actually one of the glories of Scriptcase is that you can use it kind of like the equivalent of systems “glue”. Inside of Scriptcase there are definitely calendars, and all the kinds of applications that you use for creating almost anything that would somehow support systems based transparency in a business. You can use it for that purpose. However you can also use it both for that purpose with mash ups.

What many people don’t commonly think of is using Scriptcase as a combination of an applications platform and a mashup platform. I’ll show you what I mean by that inside today’s demo..

I was also quite intrigued at the way Steffi was describing how small business owners think of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. She uses the word “intimidating”. That was no accident. I believe that’s honestly how she felt. I further believe this is probably representative not simply of people in small businesses but many businesses.

I going into some details on what constitutes actually having a CRM in today’s post.

There are essentially two good reasons to have a CRM:

1. To know and make sure that stuff got done for a customer at the right time.
2. To know that the stuff that got done was the right stuff to have gotten done in the first place.

Steffi talked a number of times about being strategic. What she meant by that is being able to know the things that should be dealt with were that these were the correct things in the 1^st place to have have been included in what should be strategic.

Strategic is as strategic does to paraphrase an ancient proverb. It’s always a matter of understanding the context of what you’re doing right now and what you want to do from here on in.

Being able to have a CRM strategy beyond the software itself is really important. Part of that is workflow or in other words the specifics of what you do in specific customer situations campaigns and whatnot. But part of that is doing the A/B style of testing to empirically know what does and doesn’t work as you move along in your markets. As I’ve said on many occasions in many places the Market can be the best teacher about itself.

We just need to have the ability to be able to put that into context, or in other words absorb that information and react to it in an appropriate way. For that, having some decent analysis methodologies can certainly be a particular help.

And since Deep Data is a combination of Big Data, Small Data and Insight from human experts, having knowledge of your business processes can certainly fit within the framework of Deep Data.

The great news is whether it’s a small business a large business or something in between it’s extremely possible to map your processes to your business model and have that be displayed in applications commensurate to what you know and want to know.

After this post in my next post, I’ll be dealing with something called Object Behaviour Analysis (OBA) that can be a really powerful and sophisticated but easy to use means of doing this kind of analysis. However first we needed to have a little background and that’s what our post today should hopefully accomplish.

I would greatly relish any feedback that you might wish to give. And I will be analysing a number of other kinds of businesses for this blog in the future. If you wish to participate, please let me know at: aborts@applieddirectservicescorp.com.

In the meantime please check out the podcast, and as its available the screen share demo for today’s post.

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