From my experience there are three main sources of insights that can deliver huge value and are mostly untapped in a lot of companies. They all start with a C and although I have a background in this industry – Consultants are not included in the list. 😃
Colleagues
In most of my consulting projects in the past I took the first 2-3 days of a project just talking to people from my client’s organization. Usually these were around 20 interviews with people from across the entire organization: From the CEO over country managers, IT developers to the guy operating the forklift in the warehouse.
When I was running the first interviews of this kind I always had a lengthy interview guide but a lot of times a simple question like “what do you think is working well and what could be improved in how your company uses technology” triggered a long list of improvement opportunities from the interviewee. Especially the co-workers that worked in a different company before often provided very helpful observations such as that a process that in their old company took 2 days takes 2 weeks.
Now you might argue that you are talking to your colleagues every day at the coffee machine or over lunch. In these situations your colleagues will try to be polite, often they are not only colleagues but also your friends – in short you will get a softened version of their point of view. The situation is different when talking to colleagues you don’t know – in particular if you assure them that their opinion will only be shared in an anonymized way.
An alternative is to run a small survey and collect all the improvement ideas on a poster that can then be discussed in a workshop setting. No matter how you ask your colleagues for their point of view you will be surprised not only by the level of insights but even more so by the buy-in you get when really listening to them.
Customers
Customers are in the center of everything – and many companies even talk to them on a regular basis. There are often two flaws in the customer dialogue: On the one hand side often companies tend to talk to the same key customers over and over again – as they are the most innovative or the largest customer and on the other hand side the dialogue is quite often focused on the core features of the product or service.
We can generate more insights by talking to overlooked customers, that are not in the focus of the main product but still have their unique challenges. And we can talk to them about their entire experience – not only about the main product but also about how they pay, get information and other processes where IT often plays an important role.
Another great way to get better insights from customers is to use a more structured approach, such as a conjoint analysis to attach a monetary value to their choices – which makes it easier to justify the necessary investments.
Competitors or other Companies
It is very seldom that you invent something completely new in the technology space. Others most likely have already implemented an ERP system of a similar size, they might have restructured their organization to become totally aligned with platforms or they have experience with a specific provider. A big value of consultants is that they have been involved in several of these endeavors and can contribute to the project.
Collecting these insights yourself is a bit more time consuming but might also provide some unexpected insights as a side effect. This might be the most under-leveraged source of insight in most companies and can provide a massive acceleration. There are three categories of companies you can learn from:
- Companies outside your industry
- Companies in your industry with little or no market overlap
- Direct Competitors
If you are a car manufacturer and want to introduce a new ERP system the challenges you are going to face are not going to be that different from the ones an ice cream manufacturer has been facing. Getting access to the right person is often quite easy. Vendors that offer software or services are often happy to provide reference customers and might help with the contact. Personal networks or social networks like LinkedIn could also help and even if you don’t have any connect just reach out to your counterpart via a cold call and you will find out that more often than not people are happy to talk about their journey.
If you are looking for experience with an underwriting system as an insurance company or with a point of sales system as a retailer you have to talk to someone in your industry. What often works well is to look for a company in the same industry but with little or no market overlap. This could either be by geography or by the target segment (such as being focused on food vs. non-food or B2C vs. B2B). In this case co-workers that worked with that company before might be able to either provide some insights themselves or direct you to a contact.
Last but not least there are the direct competitors. While policies and fair play usually prevent you from talking to active employees directly there is an entire industry of expert networks that help you to connect with former employees or experts that can provide profound insights into other companies. Companies like GLG or AlphaSights have a business model that is entirely focused on generating these kind of insights. While the services tend to be expensive the value they provide is often very high. The value comes on the one hand side from the insights but often even more so from the fact that you can assure your decision makers that a variation of the plan has been successfully executed elsewhere.