Articles

Increasingly, innovation is being applied to the development of new service offerings, business models, pricing plans and management practices.

Credit insurance and debt protection product seller Assurant Solutions ran a classic customer service call center–operationally optimized, “skills-routed,” managerially enlightened. But when it explored analytics-based approaches to rethinking how the center worked, a strange thing happened: The success rate for customer interactions tripled. According to Cameron Hurst, vice president of Targeted Solutions at Assurant, the result surprised them. “We learned that operational efficiency and those traditional metrics of customer experience like abandon rate, service levels and average speed to answer are not the things that keep a customer on the books.” They found instead that technology could assist the company in retaining customers by leveraging the fact that some customer service reps are extremely successful at dealing with certain types of customers. Matching each specific in-calling customer to a specific customer service rep made a huge difference. Science and analytics couldn’t quite establish why a particular rapport would be likely to happen, but they could look at past experience and predict with a lot of accuracy that a rapport would be likely to happen. In this SMR case-study interview, Hurst explains how Assurant Solutions figured out the right questions to ask, used analytics to focus on new ways to match customers with reps and figured out the best ways to solve the problem of conflicting goals.

A quarter-century after the best-known romance and breakup in modern executive history, the partner who vanished (while the other one flourished) has popped up with insights to share--about the "methodology" that separates his now iconic old pal from the competition, what he learned in his ill-fated Apple sojourn and why he shouldn't have been hired by Jobs in the first place.

Too little attention from head office executives can cause problems in global operations.

Six practices can help companies implement licensing as part of an open innovation strategy.

Internal knowledge markets can facilitate information sharing within large organizations.

Jonathan Byrnes offers techniques to improve your organization's profitability.

People with optimistic dispositions get jobs more easily and get promoted more, research suggests.

Early returns are in from the first annual New Intelligent Enterprise Survey. Here are major highlights of what executives and managers said about how they are — or are not — capitalizing on information.

How are organizations attempting to compete on their ability to capture, analyze and act on information? How do you win with data and analytics? MIT Sloan Management Review conducted a global survey of nearly 3,000 executives to learn how they’re turning the data deluge and analytics into competitive advantage–or trying to, anyway. The major comprehensive analysis is still to come, but in these two companion articles (“10 Insights” and “10 Data Points”), readers will find an early snapshot of how managers are answering the most important question organizations face. To answer that question, SMR has teamed with the IBM Institute for Business Value to build a new innovation hub and research program called “The New Intelligent Enterprise.” Through the SMR and IBM IBV collaboration, The New Intelligent Enterprise aims to help managers understand how they can capitalize on the ways that information and analytics are changing the competitive landscape. What threats and opportunities will companies face? What new business models, organizational approaches, competitive strategies, work processes and leadership methods will emerge? How will the best organizations reinvent themselves to use technology and analytics to achieve novel competitive advantage? How will they learn not only to be smarter, but to act smarter? This article reveals preliminary results from the first annual New Intelligent Enterprise Survey. The responding executives told us about their top management goals, their uses (and misuses) of information and analytics as they attacked those goals, and the management practices in play in their organizations. Among the findings discussed: - Innovation is identified by executives as their organizations’ primary business goal–significantly ahead of “growing revenue,” “reducing costs” and “acquiring customers.” - A strong correlation appeared linking an organization’s analytics sophistication and its likelihood of outperforming its industry competitors. - Analytics methods are evolving to include more advanced techniques, and especially more visual presentation and simulation “to bring information alive.” - Far from being a mainly technological phenomenon, The New Intelligent Enterprise requires significant changes to corporate culture and the nurturing of new kinds of talent, if it is to succeed.