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Why Use Heat Maps?
Heat maps empower executives, managers and
front-line personnel by directly addressing the challenges
they face in processing and understanding the data they deal
with daily, challenges that arise from powerful trends that
are transforming how organizations function.
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1. The Explosion of Data
There is an exploding volume of data to be processed: we have more ways
to gather data, more sources to
gather data from, and more ways to combine that data to
generate still more data than ever before. As a result, most organizations
find themselves
buried in information. The challenge is not finding data, it
is learning to extract that which is truly valuable
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2. The Proliferation of Complexity
Complexity is rising just as fast as volume,
reflecting a surge in the complexity of what we seek to
describe. For example, there has been a tremendous proliferation of new
business models - how
businesses interact with their customers or partners or
combine elements of their supply chains - and fundamental
shifts in requirements for marketing, with dramatically
narrower segmentation of customers based on increasing
amounts of information. This
complexity means that traditional measures are often
meaningless. Businesses must learn to dive much deeper into
their data to understand what is going on.
There is an exploding volume of data to be processed: we have more ways
to gather data, more sources to
gather data from, and more ways to combine that data to
generate still more data than ever before. As a result, most organizations
find themselves
buried in information. The challenge is not finding data, it
is learning to extract that which is truly valuable
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3. The Acceleration of Change
Change today means that if you're not ready now, you've already missed
your chance.
Almost everything that a business does is accelerating.
Simply to keep up, businesses must continuously
decrease the time it needs to respond to a supply glitch, or
to a new market opportunity, to develop a new product, or to
counter a competitor's move.
In effect, the time available to leverage the value
of any information is continually shrinking.
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4. The Value of Collaboration
Being connected is central to being effective.
Outsourcing of growing numbers of activities to
external partners, supply chain innovation, and
globalization all lead to increasing collaboration between
groups within an organization, across organizations, across
locations, and across cultures. Collaboration makes good
communication crucial:
if communication is not consistently effective, clear
and timely,
collaboration breaks down and with it a key factor in
business success.
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Summary
To stay ahead of these trends, businesses
need tools that can provide an edge in handling the
increasing volume and complexity of information, in
communicating information and analysis effectively, and to
do all of it quickly. That is precisely the kind of edge that heat maps
provide.
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