From Capability to Competency

I left all y’all (for those not in the know that’s the proper plural from of y’all used in Southern Illinois in my youth) hanging for longer then intended!  Seems like I need to pay closer attention to my own rants about sustainability!!!  So the sustainability cycle – projects, enabling, execution and process are things near and dear to my heart.  Here’s how I think about it:

 

What’s it?  It’s a new capability that you want to turn into a competancy that is maintained and grown.  It is something valuable that you don’t do today, but want/need to in order to stay ahead of the competition or turn the crank on earnings.

What I said in last post (with too many words) is that my experience is that most folks operate in the bottom two quadrants – “build it” and “deliver it’.  These translate to a project the enables a new capability.  The top two are where the value lies.  It is where some folk somewhere do something with the new thing and good things happen.  Its an important thing thing.  Until the thing is put to use it isn’t anything.  In the software world they call the thing that no one uses shelfware.  I think of it as I’ve-built-it-and-they-do-not-come syndrome.  In the new-to-me-but-really-is-not-so-new-news language of innovation there is an emphasis on understanding relevance, ownership and vision so the next it has a home and delivers results.

So how does this relate to business intelligence?  In an environment where information is used to support competative advantage this is the continuous cycle that goes on in order to mature the practice of data assisted decision making.  (Uh-oh, I’m going all wordy again!)  The elements of the BI equation which are data, analysis and action all need to be continually experiencing this cycle of developing new capabilities while using and growing exisitng capabilities simultaneously.  So what’s that mean?  Well hopefully next week I’ll explain!