What is a “Business Moment” in your business?
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Posted on March 23, 2015 by Pieter van Schalkwyk
(This article was first published on LinkedIn Posts)
Leading research firm Gartner is talking about “Business Moments” as a key focus point for Digital Business and Operations. Gartner defines a “Business Moment” as a “transient opportunity, exploited dynamically”. So what does this mean?
A transient opportunity means that it is only an opportunity for a limited period of time. A customer in your store (virtual or bricks and mortar) is only an opportunity when the customer is there. Knowing that the customer is there is key to exploiting a “business moment” in this example. We call this Situational Awareness. It can also be seen as real-time Operational Intelligence, rather than Business Intelligence that is retrospective (looking at insights over historical data).
The value of information about a Business Event diminishes over time as mentioned above. If we know about eminent equipment failure within a few minutes, we can respond proactively, whereas knowing about it in a few hours reduces our ability to prevent failure and quite often it is too late to do anything about it. The same way that we can do something when we know there is a “loyal” customer in our store or e-commerce site. The sooner we know, the sooner we can tell someone who cares.
Exploiting these Business Moments dynamically requires that you, firstly, know more about the context of the opportunity and, secondly, know how to respond. This requires Operational Intelligence where real-time event data is combined with other contextual data in your business to create new “intelligence” that improves your situational awareness.
In the example of the customer on an e-commerce store, we can combine event data from web click streams with information in our CRM system to match the customer to our records. Once we know the context (platinum customer) and relevance (in the store now), we can provide a personalized discount offer or have an informed sales agent engage with the customer.
Using technology that is commercially available today, we can even predict the customer’s likelihood to buy using a customer propensity machine learning model. Creating new Operational Intelligence that improves situational awareness and supporting it with intelligent decision support for the appropriate actions to follow, is how smart businesses exploit these Business Moments.
Finding these Business Moments is key to acting on them. Event Stream Processing (ESP) and Complex Event Processing (CEP) provides the mechanisms to actively listen for these events that impact business operations. (read more on Sense > Decide > Act here)
How will you find those Business Moments in your business operations that will have a significant impact on revenue, cost, governance and customer relations if you can find them early enough to exploit the opportunities that they offer?
