Author:
Meng Choon TanJuly 26, 2012
Author:
Meng Choon Tan
Commentary
While this was pure fiction in the year 1956 when the story was conceived, this possibility is becoming very real in today’s age of hyper-connectivity, where anything and everything around human and organizational behavior can be electronically captured, analyzed and even be forecasted.
The ability to predict business – the holy grail of all business consultants – has always been the top priority of all business owners, CEOs, Chairman or Presidents of Sales and Marketing. For a typical executive in the volatile corporate environment, It’s is undoubtedly the number one key performance metric for one’s survival in a dog-eat-dog organization.
Indeed, the ability to forecast accurately and ensure business happens by driving the organization to achieve the committed forecast is seen as the real ability of today’s corporate leader. To ensure nothing is left to chances, every business activity from business planning, market development, sales engagement, operations and customer services are tracked, analyzed and “dashboarded” to allow senior management to have a complete view of the business – from idea inception to actual return on investments. Predictability means less risk, a hallmark of shareholder value preservation.
The globalization effect has inadvertently increased competition and complexity in all businesses. Multi-national companies are now exposed to unpredictable business cycles as events that happen in one region quickly escalate and impact subsidiaries in other regions. As such, speed, adaptability and agility has become the key ingredients for ensuring business viability as companies tries to outmaneuver competition by constantly trying to understand their customer’s buying behavior, identify trends and quickly attempt to monetizethem by directing investments into the identified opportunities.To further ensure business sustainability and to protect shareholders interest, there is also a greater scrutiny for transparency and adherence to compliant practices and processes within the organization and while constantly balancing creativity in driving the right incentives and compensation to keep the human capital focused and motivated.
Hence, these constant orchestrations within the organization have led to the evolution of the next intelligent business management system – analytical and enterprise performance management systems that allow senior management a coherent grasp on the business initiatives from cradle-to-grave:business planning, marketing campaign management, leads generation and distributions, sales pipeline management and forecasting, customer relationship management and satisfaction evaluation, incentives and compensation management.According to Gartner2, the leading information technology research and advisory firm, in the next 2 years, SPM or Sales Performance Management – will be delivering most benefit all SaaS-based sales management applications. Visionary tech giants such as IBM have also jumped on this band wagon with their Smarter Planet initiatives and their strategic acquisition of key analytics assets3.
It is hence not imaginable that in the near future, one would see such intelligent analytical systems – which now have the ability to identify market trends, redirecting marketing budgets and influencing sales force behaviors through “Just-in-Time” compensations plans – take one more step further:
To create desire and perceived demands in the minds of targeted consumers – even when there is none.
Since it’s often been said that sci-fi movies provide us a window to the future -if dream architect Dominick Cobb could infiltrate a person’s mind to plant an idea in the movie Inception4 – what’s stopping technology today from doing so? Perhaps HP Autonomy’s latest augmented reality invention5 has just gave us a sneak preview of that very near future.
Appendix
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_(film)
3. http://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/business-intelligence/ibm-varicent-sales-data-analytics.html