I dubbed this measurement technique 3XEI (in order) : educate, illustrate, elaborate, integrate, extrapolate, iterate. The follow down process is as defined as follows:
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Seek first to understand, then to be understood; EDUCATE yourself on the pain points from the eyes of the customer (“Voice of the Customer”),
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ILLUSTRATE to prior adopters, detractors and neutralities the benefits of BI by mapping out or illustrating a visualization map of their current process circling all pain points in the process.
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In order your dependence on IT to support business-driven application acquisitions, you should continue to interview candidates, walk the process and mine as much as you can in order to ELABORATE on the process map until you’ve captured all process metrics.
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INTEGRATE your approach to educating, illustrating and elaborating on your BI program, you will gain end-to-end insights previously obscured by not factoring in the multi co-linearity of inputs on each other as well as the intended output.
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EXTRAPOLATE to pain points and use information to drive decisions or changes to the process at large.
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ITERATE on the illustrated processes as extrapolation exercise dictates or requires in order to remain vital and relevant to the organization.
These phases have no definitive start/stop points. They are as mutable as the changing technology landscape in corporations today. They are tightly embedded within for the life of the process at the broad organizational level. Very few companies understand the power of mapping all efforts to the core business process supported, nor can they visualize the power of the optimized, end-to-end process on driving the bottom line. Those that do, reap the rewards; and those that don’t, well, they need not be mentioned.