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Consensus Bridging

Personal experience has led me to conclude that the best leadership style in the best possible world comes from building consensus. In the real world, consensus building is a noble pursuit right up to the point when everyone realizes that the terms of "consensus" are just as often terms of circumstance, power and surrender. In a partner setting, "consensus bridging" might be a better term to describe goal-setting that addresses the needs and aims of interdependent parties. In our cover story on scorecards, Chrysler Group shows the benefits of clearly defined terms of success and the use of reliable data to back up those terms. Sharing and analyzing this relevant information separately creates a context for collaboration to address tradeoffs such as sales volume versus customer satisfaction.

It's strictly coincidence that our In the Trenches feature also concerns auto dealers. What we set out to do was to offer an example of some of the newer developments in data visualization technology. What these technologies provide is a way to consider visual data a new semantic language, giving users the ability to consume and understand hundreds or thousands of data points at a single glance. Whatever your business, we think the example offered by ADP Dealer Services will be food for thought for your organization.

Collaborative use of information also lends itself to extending business processes that span multiple data repositories, and more importantly, functional roles in the organization. Our profile of McKesson Pharmaceutical executive Brian Hickie shows how organizational structure is being leveraged to merge IT and business goals across a complex value chain of suppliers and customers. In a company this large, top-down strategy provides direction for incremental wins that increasingly reveal the organizational impact of individual and departmental decision-making.

Tom Davenport returns with his third column for BI Review, a counterpoint to conventional wisdom that states that there is a "single version of the truth" out there for companies to aspire to. Tom argues that business goals ought to be behind any definition of truth, and that it's a topic worth having a few arguments over.

We welcome author and consultant Anthony Politano and his article addressing the merits of a chief performance officer. The author points out that as much as business changes, a constant remains, that performance management requires enterprise attention and visibility across disciplines.

Dan Vesset of IDC has offered industry insight in the past, but his first column for our magazine, on decision process engineering, looks past "traditional" BI to suggest businesses may want to rethink requirements in the modern BI context. Plus, you'll find data points from Gartner and online exclusives from Kerry Gentry and Howard Spielman. As always, feel free to send your comments and suggestions to me at jim.ericson@sourcemedia.com.


Jim Ericson is editorial director of DM Review, a SourceMedia publication. You can reach him at Jim.Ericson@sourcemedia.com.



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