Unfortunately, times have changed. Waiting a few days for your reports isslowing down the organization. The Sales team needs to be able to see updatedresults at least daily not only from the CRM, but also financial results andproduct performance. The financial team needs to leverage the sales pipeline toprovide frequent updates to our forecasts. Customer service wants to see webanalytics and sales activity when a customer calls in. You’re just not keepingup with the level of requests and reporting needs.

Bob (the IT guy) has been complaining for years on the number of spreadsheetsbeing created, so I asked him to prove it. He showed me dozens – no wait – morelike hundreds of copies of our customer data some with information I’ve neverseen. He says he thinks he can solve many of our data and reporting challenges,but it will require an investment. I asked him for a plan, and he suggested Iread and learn a out howBig Data technologiesare helping other companies including our competitors.

So I did some poking around. Big Data may be the nextfrontier in health care.Big Data is helping online travel agenciessift through hundreds of millions of records to find the best travel offers.It’s helpinggeneral contractors and manufactures in the construction industry“target and win business where the opportunities are strongest”. Just yesterday,President Obama announced a $200M Big Data investmentto help six government agencies.

So I hope you will join this team. You know a lot about our customers and ourdata and have been a trusted partner for many years. But you have to do thingsdifferently. You’ll have to learn some new tools, and I’m going to havedifferent and and higher expectations on what you deliver. I expect to see selfserving dashboards, daily updates to reports, and fewer duplicates in ourcustomer database. I’m certain that after you learn the new tools, you’ll comeback with other recommendations and innovations.

Are you with me?