Why isn't your team playing moneyball?

With a tip of the hat to Michael Lewis and his bestselling biopics on baseball, collateralized mortgage failures and bias, why isn’t your team playing moneyball?

In today’s artificially intelligent, cloudy, internet of things, rough and tumble business, data is king; yet relatively few organizations architect for it, analyze it and optimize from it.  There are still enterprise marketing teams who don’t have a data architect on staff, yet they’ve got analysts and stacks of reports that don’t translate into revenue.  Customer Relationship Management software has been around for three decades and thousands of organizations collect customer data, yet relatively few can calculate customer lifetime value or propensity to buy.   Programmable controllers that generate log files have been embedded in products and devices for decades, yet few product companies can define the user experience and asset lifecycle from the data generated. 

People tend to be keenly aware of the value of even slight informational advantages, and open to the idea of using data to gain those advantages. So why is so much conventional wisdom false? Not only in sports but across the whole of society. Why have so many industries been ripe for disruption?

The challenge is, the larger your organization is, the longer you've been in business, the harder it may be to play moneyball; organizing and capitalizing on a data model that creates competitive advantage.  Smaller organizations, even individuals, can set themselves apart today.  Setting the stage for disruption of incumbents.

Just like baseball, not all players are of equal value; likewise for prospects and customers.  There are discrete factors exposed in the data by insightful analysis.  Similarly, there is inherent bias that needs to be discarded; often before the data is gathered, analyzed and optimized. 

One of the interesting keys to Lewis’s financial biopics is, the real-life protagonists don’t come from the classic mold. They are outsiders who found the outliers, people with unique backgrounds and insatiable curiosity, who are capable of identifying discrete factors and discerning the value.   

The Oakland A’s did it and a single protagonist managed to identify the subprime mortgage meltdown. There are no shortage of tools to accomplish what you need to optimize outcomes based on data, so why isn’t everyone doing it?  Improve your chances of success, accelerate growth, Ascendiosa can help your team play moneyball.

Author:  Mark Miller is Ascendiosa's Chief Commercial Officer

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