Planning Analytics Blog

Leadership With Less Control

November 5, 2015 by pabadmin

As we move toward the middle of 2015’s Q 4 and setting priorities for 2016, I thought it would be good to share the insights in this short excerpt from a recent interview McKinsey had with Jeff Immelt, GE’s CEO for the past nearly 15 years. Here is a particularly valuable portion.

“You never go through a process of leading anything, particularly in the time period we’ve been in, without learning a lot and changing a little bit. And what I’ve now seen in terms of the job itself, I would say the CEO of a company like GE has to be all about change. It has to be all about picking what’s next, getting the company focused, making the company accountable. I think that was true then, and it’s true today. I would say that’s critical.

The most important thing that happens with tenure is you just become more humble. I’m a better risk manager, a better learner, a better questioner. There’s just no way you can ever enter the job with enough humility. You never lose your sense of optimism, you’re just more reflective on everything that happens.

The world’s just so doggone different today than it was 10, 15, or 20 years ago. I would say no matter what you’re running, you control fewer things. And so you need to be more resilient. Jack was a great CEO, but he really controlled his world. It was a centralized kind of command-and-control company. Those days are over. I’m in the risk-management business. Governments are more active. The world is more difficult. You’re not in the control business today, you’re in the risk-reward business.”

And to put a theme into a simple chart, here are top CEO concerns that cause lost sleep. Please notice that two of the top four transformational trends involve business intelligence and cyber security. Transformational organizational success now evolves from the C-team’s ability to not only look at good relevant data, but to also be wise in making the decisions that follow.

Do you see why you need a strategic partner that is an extension of your team?

We can help you monitor your predictive HR trends, measure progress toward a set of quantitative goals or flag shifts in your markets or financial operations. Call us to start a conversation that can enhance your data management investment while you make savvy asset management decisions. 512 478 3848.

Can You Transform Effectively?

October 27, 2015 by pabadmin

This is the good and the bad. Can you transform effectively?

You will likely have similar mixed feelings that I have when you drill down into these McKinsey Global Institute observations earlier this year about getting a big impact from big data.

It’s not just the lost potential and the opportunity costs, it’s also the incredibly narrow deployment of efforts under the corporate umbrella that make us wonder about the quality of a senior C-level team’s decisions. Now that’s scary.

Take two minutes and absorb a few of these salient points . . . and then choose your planning analytics or business intelligence path to greater success.

MGI’s analysts caught many people’s attention when they estimated that retailers exploiting data analytics at scale across their organizations could increase their operating margins by more than 60 percent and that the US healthcare sector could reduce costs by 8 percent through data-analytics efficiency and quality improvements.
For most legacy companies, data-analytics success has been limited to a few tests or to narrow slices of the business.
Very few have achieved what you would call “big impact through big data,” or impact at scale.
When asked what degree of revenue or cost improvement they had achieved through the use of these techniques, three-quarters said it was less than 1 percent.
Capturing the potential of data analytics requires the building blocks of any good strategic transformation: it starts with a plan, demands the creation of new senior-management capacity to really focus on data, and, perhaps most important, addresses the cultural and skill-building challenges needed for the front line (not just the analytics team) to embrace the change.

We want and need to focus on what to do when you’re in the midst of that transformation and facing the inevitable challenges to realizing large-scale benefits.

For example, management teams frequently don’t see enough immediate financial impact to justify additional investments.

Frontline managers lack understanding and confidence in the analytics and hesitate to employ it.

Existing organizational processes are unable to accommodate advancements in analytics and automation, often because protocols for decision making require multiple levels of approval.

Do you see why you need a strategic partner that is an extension of your team?

Using Planning Analytics to Develop Millennials

October 13, 2015 by pabadmin

One of the aspects of data management that has gotten only rare attention in even our recent past is the need to develop leadership in the millennials who have been brought on the team early in their careers as special skills sets to meet the immediate IT, planning and analysis needs of your team. There’s work to do and most of the time the recruitment process focuses on matching the position requirements with the known abilities this generation of employees bring to the table.

But the importance of succession planning, using analytics and staffing projections, has quickly risen in the daily concerns of corporate leaders. For example;

Earlier this year Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2015 found that developing millennials rated as one of the top challenges by 86% of surveyed HR and business leaders, and it is especially challenging in developing millennial leaders. In the next 5 years, millennials will make up half of the US workforce. Surveys indicate two thirds of this growing talent pool plan to leave their organizations within the next 3 years.

Engaging and retaining high potential millennials in particular is a high priority to ensure a pipeline of leaders to drive future company growth.

Here is a specific healthcare industry example/challenge; Baptist Health System, based in Jacksonville, Florida, is a network of five hospitals, affiliated with 45 primary care offices located throughout Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia. Chief Learning Officer Justin Lombardo explains they look for leadership candidates with “1) consistency in action, values and mission 2) the ability to think critically about situations and contribute thoughtfully to discussions and 3) dedication to the work of the team.” In most industries and healthcare in particular, “leadership in the future is a team sport.” Baptist Health provides challenging stretch assignments emphasizing the importance of collaboration and building strong networks to achieve results.

Millennials represent a growing segment of the workforce. Their distinct preferences, passions and expectations regarding work life and aspirations toward leadership roles appear to differ from previous generations. While Boomers were taught to be patient, persistent, and loyal and in return, receive rewards for their effort over time, high potential millennials highlight other traits.

Each C-level leadership team has a unique and experienced outlook for what mix of talent and skills will shape their future success. So, obviously, the development programs for upwardly mobile employees will be tailored to their culture and marketplace strengths. At the same time, they are recognizing that using god, relevant data about their human assets is crucial to momentum. And that’s where predictive data analytics gives you and edge.

So . . . where to you get the proven help and talent you need to get leadership development to the front of the bus?

Management Information Analysis’ teams help our clients solve problems they were unable to tackle before. Like managing you millennial human assets. We create and deliver solutions tailored to your internal and external data management needs to help cut through the complexity of multiple business unit operations and key market factors to gain insight into value creation at a granular level. And that delivers measurable value.

We can help you monitor your predictive HR trends, measure progress toward a quantitative goal or flag shifts in your labor market or financial operations. Call us to start a conversation that can enhance your data management investment while you make savvy human resource and asset management decisions. 512 478 3848.

Greater Clarity and Confidence in Decision Making

October 12, 2015 by pabadmin

We help clients sift through the complexity of strategic planning to understand where the real uncertainties lie. Uncovering them is a strong step in eliminating mis-direction that comes from looking at the wrong data. The scope of our expertise and the rigor of the processes applied by our planning analytics experts equip leaders to build a clearer and more detailed picture of their world, make better-informed and more robust decisions, and introduce greater transparency into direction setting.

How We Help Clients

Our approach supplies clients with the crucial fact base reports they need to address the big strategic questions. How and where can I grow? What actions can I take to increase value? How is my industry being shaped by global forces?

Management Information Analysis’ teams help clients solve problems they were unable to tackle before. We create and deliver solutions tailored to your internal and external data management needs to help cut through the complexity of multiple business unit operations and key market factors to gain insight into value creation at a granular level.

Validation From One of Our Success Stories

This client came to us with a totally manual process and a system that was designed for another type of business. They started with distribution lists of products from the manufacturers. The sales force would present these products to the retailers, place orders (paper process) which they entered via a log and updated status along the way on each product. Pending sales and delivery reconciliation were falling through the cracks. Can you spell “customer relations, sales blockages and cost management problems?”

The Results – Reduced staff and retailer complaints and dramatically increased sales (confidential).

We can help you monitor trends, measure progress toward a quantitative goal or flag shifts in your market or financial operations. Call us to start a conversation that can enhance your data management investment while you make savvy human resource and asset management decisions. 512 478 3848.

Healthcare Financial Viability and Process Improvement

September 29, 2015 by pabadmin

A main concern for hospital CEOs continues to revolve around the financial position of their organizations. Other concerns include new CMS mandates and rulings, patient satisfaction and quality scores, population health management, and personnel shortages—all of which end up impacting the bottom line if health systems can’t overcome the related challenges.

Because of the significant trials the industry as a whole is facing, three major credit rating agencies (Standard & Poor’s Financial Services, Fitch Ratings, and Moody’s Investors Service) have all given the healthcare and hospital sectors negative outlooks for the 2015 calendar year.

But that can change for the better. It’s a process. And it’s vital to delivering improved care systematically at lower costs.

Performance improvement requires an analytics system that integrates the organization’s data sources (clinical, claims, financial, operational, etc.), and that facilitates quick and easy data sharing. Only with appropriate analytics can an organization identify specific areas of opportunity among strategic areas of focus.

Healthcare data analytics is required for any sustainable performance improvement initiative. It forms the foundation of discussion and informs decisions. Yet while healthcare organizations have mountains of clinical, claims, financial, operational, patient experience and other data, most of it is locked away in point solutions built for a specific purpose.

Performance improvement requires an analytic system that integrates the organization’s data sources, and quickly and easily unlocks data, and enables effective sharing of data and the addition of new data sources. Doing so allows interdisciplinary teams to analyze the data and discover patterns that lead to insights

Take a look at our hospital success story. This case study might qualify for Super Hero status. The client brought us multiple systems with 17 different lists of physicians, including different identifiers, specialties, type of practice, status, and clinic locations. Many of the lists did not agree. Our website tells you the key things we did to make a disconnected process both connected and valuable.

Organizations that effectively use data as part of their decision making process gain a competitive edge in their respective markets. At Management Information Analysis, we provide solutions that allow organizations in various industries make better use of existing data sets and incorporate all relevant information into their strategic planning.

Most quantitative forms of healthcare strategic planning are population-based, where the demand for services is driven by population growth and changing demographics. Additionally, it is important to understand historical and current trends and to be able to anticipate future changes.

Healthcare organizations routinely pursue performance improvement initiatives to improve clinical outcomes and patient experiences and reduce organizational costs. If these efforts are not well executed, however, they can become black holes that suck up time, money, and resources while yielding little in the way of real, sustainable improvements.

You can get your organization healthier with a process for improvements based upon a lean delivery system and the data analytics that support savvy, cost-effective decisions.

Data Tools Lead to Smart Healthcare Expansion

September 17, 2015 by pabadmin

Retailers for many years have used geo-analytics—visualization or mapping tools integrating sophisticated geographical and marketing data—to decide where to open stores and restaurants. Healthcare is starting to go that way, too.

Dr. Este Geraghty, chief medical officer for Redlands, Calif.-based Esri, a mapping technology company, said health organizations generally have similar data needs to those of retailers, including population demographics, population density and market potential.

But they may make very different choices based on that data when siting a clinic for low-income people versus picking a spot for a high-end clothing store, for instance. “The data are much the same, but the perspective is going to be totally different,” she said.

Healthcare organizations need to do their own homework, analyzing their customers from data extracted from electronic health records (EHRs) and health insurance claims data to see what kinds of services potential healthcare customers use, where they live and what types of coverage they have. These data can be combined with market data, traffic pattern information and retail location maps.

Hospitals typically have relied on inpatient data for planning. But the shift to outpatient care has created a gap in the availability of useful data because outpatient facilities often don’t have to report data to state agencies.

Still, the availability of outpatient data is improving as some states and healthcare analytics firms are collecting and analyzing it. The emphasis on data analysis and population health management in the Affordable Care Act is leading to improved data access to plan services and facilities and to help healthcare organizations decide whether to buy existing medical practices or build new ones. The trick is to take information generated by the healthcare system itself and merge that with public data sets such as census statistics on population density and income levels.

Additional data on disease rates, crime statistics or air quality can be added, along with locations of farmers markets, gyms and parks. The healthcare industry is at least 15 years behind the curve set by the retail, logistics and energy industries.

Our custom application development expertise allows our analysts to mix and match data sets as needed. We can blend internal with external data sources to establish historical trends and project need and demand, which are the backbone of any feasibility study.

Additionally, we can help you monitor trends, measure progress toward a quantitative goal or flag shifts in your market or operations. Take a look at one of our healthcare success stories. And then call us to start a conversation that can enhance your data management investment while you make savvy delivery location decisions.

Are Healthcare, and the Planning Function, At A Tipping Point?

August 26, 2015 by pabadmin

In a 2015 trends piece, Strategy& stated that they strongly believe that there is a need for stronger-form healthcare products — procedural, acute, chronic, or long-term care offerings that change the way healthcare is delivered, financed, and consumed. The accountable care organization (ACO) construct, which reimburses participating providers for achieving quality and cost objectives for a defined Medicare population, has not generated sufficient improvements in care transformation or patient engagement.

Indeed, the Pioneer ACO program has lost 40 percent of participating hospitals. Health systems that are continuing with the ACO construct are realizing that changes have to be more than skin-deep. Meanwhile, productized or bundled healthcare — in which a patient pays a single fee for all tests and treatments related to a condition or procedure — is gaining in popularity. A recent Strategy& survey found that about 30 percent of the large health systems and innovative employers are pursuing bundled care and another 50 percent are interested in the concept.

Their article says that we are witnessing the evolution of a new healthcare marketplace, offering a range of solutions that combine care and financing. It will be more competitive and more transparent, and ultimately shaped by the shifting of risk to providers and consumers, and the addition of retail channels for care and financing. This marketplace will deal in population health solutions combined with a range of acute, chronic, and long-term products.

This infers better planning analytics tools and the better decisions that grow out of a planning and investment process built from strong, comprehensive data.

In a blog post late last month, Perficient shared with industry readers the dire need for mapping a process that quickly makes the transition from a fee-for-service model to a value-based care model and that requires healthcare organizations to re-evaluate their technology and in most cases invest in new solutions.

They accurately pointed out that population health management is now a focal point for organizations amidst the changes in the delivery model and payment reform and that hospitals and health systems are learning to rely on technology to transform data into meaningful information that outlines the characteristics of their population and identifies high-risk patients in order to manage chronic diseases and deliver enhanced preventative care.

One of the biggest challenges for healthcare organizations is the shear amount of data they have to manage. Internal and external, disparate data sources that reside in silos make it nearly impossible to generate a complete picture. Bringing this data together to deliver a 360-degree patient view is critical for population health management, operational performance and enhanced patient care.

A centralized data warehouse houses data from across the enterprise and provides healthcare teams with a complete view of all of their patients and allows them to better manage the individuals and populations they serve. When internal and external data, including claims, are located in one repository, key stakeholders can generate meaningful and actionable insights to improve operational performance and enhance patient care.

These industry sources make it clear that we now know the “what” to do. Is there the available talent to take that “what” and turn it into “this is how we do it”? Learn more about what you can do to accelerate your transformational planning analytics decisions.

The Time to Plan For Your Big Data Needs is Today

August 17, 2015 by pabadmin

Companies today want to use big data analytics as a way to discover trends to improve the way they conduct business and bring value to their stakeholders. That is a high-priority objective.

Finding correlations across multiple disparate data sources (48%), predicting customer behavior (46%) and predicting product or services sales (40%) are the three factors driving interest in Big Data analytics. These and other fascinating findings from InformationWeek’s 2015 Analytics & BI Survey provide a glimpse into how enterprises are selecting analytics applications and platforms. Source: Information Week 2015 Analytics & BI Survey.

In data analytics, time is of the essence. Business leaders and decision makers often require real-time or close to real-time information to make informed decisions. However, it is estimated that 80 percent of an analyst’s time is spent on preparing and cleaning data for analysis. This leaves only 20 percent for actual analysis work, and precious time is wasted on preparing the data for analysis.

So what can you do? Repurposing your top analysts to ramp up data transformation is not really productive in the short term. So don’t ask your I T team to do something they have little feel for and that drives down their overall productivity. Ask around. Find one or two external teams that have both the portfolio and the skills sets to review your scope of work and then jump in to deliver results (defined and meaningful data that drives good decisions) in less time, with less waste and with a lot less frustration.

Our ETL Plus* and custom application development expertise allow our analysts to mix and match data sets as needed. We can blend internal with external data sources to establish historical trends and project need and demand, which are the backbone of any feasibility study. Additionally, we can help you monitor trends, measure progress toward a quantitative goal or flag shifts in your market or business operations. Call us to start a conversation that can enhance your data management investment while keeping you ahead of your competition.

Trends in People Analytics

July 31, 2015 by pabadmin

We’re just past mid-year 2015 and this may seem like dated information, but it really begs an important question. Do you get a superior ROI from your data management and reporting investment, including the vial data security component, by slogging ahead and increasing headcount to do work you can cost-effectively outsource?

The recently released PwC Saratoga Human Capital Effectiveness benchmarks represent 2014 calendar year data from the US entities of 435 participating organizations covering a range of industries, company sizes, and revenue. All results shown reflect median benchmark values across participating organizations.

Return on workforce investment is declining.

A critical measure of workforce productivity, Labor Cost Revenue Percent, rose from 28.2% to 29.9%, indicating a decline in return on workforce investment. Though productivity has remained high in post-recession years, it is leveling off after several years of consistent increases; the decline in Labor Cost Revenue Percent 2 was primarily driven by a decrease in Revenue per Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) (From $404,058 to $370,552). Despite a drop in Labor Cost per FTE (from $102,294 to $98,988), companies earned less revenue on their investment. Organizations may be hesitant to continue to invest in talent the way they were as the economy bounced back Several years prior; however, this lack of investment may cause productivity to decline over the long term.

Our ETL Plus* and custom application development skills allow our analysts to mix and match data sets as needed. We can blend internal with external data sources to establish historical trends and project need and demand, which are the backbone of any feasibility study. Additionally, we can help you monitor trends, measure progress toward a quantitative goal or flag shifts in your market or business operations. Call us to start a conversation that can enhance your data management investment while keeping you ahead of your competition.

Where Have You Been and Where Are You Going With Your Planning Analytics Tools?

July 21, 2015 by pabadmin

If you have not seen this InformationWeek article, it delivers a nice, concise set of highlighted findings from the report. You may find it useful to see movements and evolving trends. It might even give you both a compass bearing and the opportunity to look at how you and your team are progressing as you crank up and evaluate the data you choose to access.

Respondent breakdown: 35% have 5,000 or more employees; 25% have more than 10,000. Manufacturing, financial services, government, education, and healthcare are well-represented; and 45% are IT director/manager, IT executive management (C-level/VP) level or non-IT executive managers.

If you would like a friendly and neutral needs analysis of where you can maximize your planning analytics ROI, just shout out and we can be your listening post.