Go Global, be Local...

Most of the large successful businesses today made a modest start. They started on a small scale catering to limited geography and then extrapolated it to other geographies. Revenue potential in a geography is limited, when the business wants to increase its business beyond these limits, the obvious option is to expand the business model to other geographies. This way the business will have the opportunity to tap the potential in those geographies.

The way Business is carried out varies from region to region. Though these variations are minor, nuances of a geography are best known by people in that geography. In order to do a good business in a geography, it is advisable to recruit locals and give them the responsibilities. This will be paid off in terms of greater business to the company. This is one of success factors of America Insurance Group founded by Cornelius Vander Starr.

IT as a companion to business process flow...

Typical an organization will have many business processes one for each purpose. Some of the main process are sourcing, customer relation management, finance, human resource management etc. Most of the ERPs provide these functionalities as a part of them. Not all vendors are good in all the processes. Some are leaders in some process. For example Oracle is good in CRM, Hyperion is good in Finance Planning etc. Apart from these processes, there are processes in most of the Organizations, that can be automated. It is for this reason we see many custom Java based applications that cater to each of these processes. All business processes follow a certain order. At every point there should be an application that caters to that business process. This application can be a ERP module or custom Java application. Such a seam less solution will allow the company to capture information at each point and leverage the data.

Once we have data in applications, it can be transferred from it to a data warehouse using standard ETL tools. A reporting layer on top of the Data Warehouse can allow users to see trends. For example a report on customer-related-data from a CRM, will show the customer trend. Reports can be a set of standard corporate reports available for all users or adhoc reports of each user. Value of information will reduce with time. To have more valuable information, Data Warehouse needs to be refreshed more frequently.

Mastering the game of BUSINESS

Dictionary.com says a 'game' is  a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators. 

A Champion is a person who has defeated all opponents in a competition or series of competitions, so as to hold first place.

What it takes to become a Business Champion:

An aspiring champion needs to understand the rules of the game well. Then he/she has to define their best strategy (without violating the rules) to defeat the enemy. Rules for the game of BUSINESS are pretty complex. They often vary from one geography to another.

Many times governmets prevent the exploitation of rules by legislating new laws or creating regulatory bodies and vesting them with powers to curb exploitation. One wants to grow their business quickly, one needs to identify such gaps and use them to his/her advantage.