Organizational Goals (OG) measure the progress of various organizational KPIs or objectives over a period of time. The sales target of a product division could be categorized as a goal. The target to reduce flight delays in an airline (may be shown by a %) is an (operational) goal. OGs’ purpose is to give the essential directions to the employees and the organization. Often goals are assigned for a period of one year but different organizations may differ in timelines in their assignment of goals. OGs are managerially defined as “strategically set objectives that outline expected results and guide employees’ efforts.”
Three types of OGs are mentioned; strategic, tactical, and operational goals. Strategic goals are set by and for top management and focus on objectives for the organization ‘as a whole.’ Tactical goals set by and for middle managers and focus on actions needed to achieve strategic goals. Operational goals are set by and for first-line managers and are concerned with short-term matters associated with ‘realizing tactical goals.’
Info from MI are a key input to OG formulation. The key four steps in MI -Collect, Analyse, Visualise and Execute- are used to form OGs.
Strategic goals such as entering a new market (by a given date), increasing the number of regional markets to xx by a given date and a % market share in each new market (by a given date), adding digital platforms to achieve goals, cannot to be mapped out without MI inputs. For examples, a key strategy of Walmart Inc. is to “provide quality merchandise at an affordable low cost to consumers” adding to it “Be THE destination for customers to save money, no matter how they want to shop.” The main intensive growth strategy that follows is market penetration and (more recently), selling more goods to American consumers who shop online –these were filtered down thereafter to tactical and operational goals for MI to start gathering the needed info. Walmart Inc. is world’s largest publicly traded retailer in 2019/’20 (followed by Amazon and Alibaba). Walmart went into big data in 2012, way before big data became and industry. Acquiring “Inkiru” a startup in big data, for its analytics, Walmart swiftly moved to use two technologies ‘Hadoop’ and ‘NOSQL’ to provide internal customers real-time data collected from different sources in a centralized use case. Walmart leverages social media data to find trending products to introduce them to Walmart stores ‘across the world’ and to predict ‘Black Friday’ buyer trends.
This does not mean that Walmart is only about social media platforms and ‘analytic dashboards’ to collect its MI.
Product Intelligence (PI) is a key part of MI (PI focuses on the product-why consumers want the company’s product and what attributes ‘sell’. PI aims to understand an important relationship-how customers interact with its products and what the company needs to do to its products to retain the customers continuously. In short, what is the experience that the customers are reporting about the product?). To test which toys are most likely to sell, Walmart assembled a focus group of 1,000 children to try out new toys from manufacturers and rate over 80 toys from big manufacturers. According to Bloomberg, “from there Walmart took the feedback and ratings and compiled the data into a top-20 list to be used by its buyers as a guide for their holiday season toy purchases.”
Customer Understanding (CU) tries to find what can be offered to customers; customer knowledge and possibilities and what they want are important decision for product developers where CU assists in. McDonald’s had a goal of entering to serve pizza in 1990s but its CU studies based on restaurant feedback showed that customers do not want sit and ‘wait’ in a restaurant ‘fast food’ fame for their pizza to arrive. In 2000 the company shut its pizza venture entirely.
Competitor Intelligence (CI) is essentially collection, describing, analyzing and sharing of intelligence about competitors, their products, pricing and offers made by the them. This largely works at Business to Business levels. The ‘Crayon 2020 State of Competitive Intelligence Report’ published in US finds almost all businesses-except 6% of them- Investing in Competitive Intelligence! It shows a ‘a whopping 94% of businesses are investing in CI.” Then what are the sources of CI? 98% of them access competitor websites for CI, 97% get their CI from word of mouth of competitors’ customers, 97% get their CI from word of mouth of competitors’ employees, 97% get their CI from competitors’ social media, 89% get their CI from third party review websites. This high usage also implies that CI likely used in companies on all types of goal settings-strategic, tactical and operational.
MI and its components are used widely today-if not mandatorily- across businesses in their goal setting activities. MI is also a key determinant in the strategic goal of identifying new business opportunities. The plight of businesses if ‘MI is not available to them’ is disastrous and could result in ‘faster’ business failure. Whether goals have been ‘set’ or ‘not’, MI is not such a tranquil goalpost that organizations can ignore and go on to play the game.
