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High-Tech & Technology -
DUN’S
100
|
2016/17
12
Looking for a Growth Accelerator? It’s Right
Under your Nose
By Tzah Berki, Senior VP Data & Research and Chief Economist
I
n the course of my career, I conducted due
diligences to thousands of businesses, and
was amazed to discover, over and over again,
the potential assets businesses own, while being
completely unaware of them. I call this phenome-
non: The Unseen Economy. There are many types
of unseen assets, but in order to understand that
we own an unseen asset, we have to identify it
and try to evaluate it or estimate its contribution
to our business activity. In recent years, one of
the most prominent categories of unseen assets
is the information that businesses hold, and I’m
not referring only to high-tech companies or large
corporations, but to any business whatsoever,
including the floristry shop down the street. To-
day, the fastest growing businesses are those
which collect information and properly arrange
it in a way that enables the drawing of accurate
business conclusions. We can use information
to reach conclusions about all of the aspects
of our business activities, from marketing and
sales to operations and financial management,
and the more conclusions we have on broader
aspects of our activities, the better our chances
to achieve fast growth, safely. Are we sufficiently
familiar with the characteristics of our current and
potential customers? Do we know what drove
them to contact us? Do we know the key points for
closing a deal? Such questions can be answered
on the basis of available information and proper
analysis in order to make business decisions.
The astonishing growth in the amount of informa-
tion and our access to it is changing the face of
the economy as we know it. There isn’t a single
economic sector that remained unaffected by
the way information becomes available to the
consumer, and we may say for certain that ev-
ery sector would continue and be affected by it.
Therefore, there isn’t a business which can ignore
this phenomenon, and as time will pass by, the
survivability of businesses would dependmainly
on the way they use information correctly.
The growth in the amount of information provides
new challenges for businesses and increases the
need for organizing the information to a level
enabling business conclusions. In the past, the
main challenge was collecting the information,
but today the main challenge is organizing the
accumulated information and drawing insights
from it. Most of the information that is being col-
lected today isn’t analyzed. The application of the
information, as a risk-mitigating growth driver, is
negligible, when compared to its potential. The
main reason for this is that we still don’t see an
organizational officer who collects the informa-
tion from the organization’s units and external
sources, and analyses all of the information in
a way that enables a view of the big picture.
Therefore, the most interesting question is how
information management would be integrated
into the business culture of the businesses.
A company’s growth would be determined by the
amount of managerial attention to information
and insights. I predict that in the next few years
we would see the development of a new executive
role, in every medium to large business, called
chief information officer. Discursively, this is the
broadest of all organizational roles – a chief infor-
mation officer requires a cross-organizational per-
spective and deep understanding of all aspects
of the business, in order to better understand
how to manage the collection of information and
proper its organization, as to enable efficient de-
cision making. The information officer would be
responsible for the data collection and cleansing,
and concentrating, managing and analyzing them
for decision-making processes for the existing
operations and growth drivers combined with
risk aspects. Such a position would enable the
development of methodologies for the manag-
ing intra-organizational and extra-organizational
information. Organizations need a senior person
who works to improve this major asset and man-
age it to meet all of the organization’s needs.
Such a position must possess the ability to lo-
cate and map information, act fast, make true
analyses, maintain complete and comprehensive
business knowledge and unlock hidden value
for the owners.
Most businesses consider information to be a
privilege, not a necessity. The world is spinning
faster nowadays, and the businesses who would
survive are those which will make fast and ef-
ficient use of information in order to make the
right decisions.
Photo: Kobby Kantor