BEING CLEAR ON THE PROPOSITION: WAS THIS REALLY ABOUT ANALYTICS?

At one time I had the good fortune to be working with some exceptionally bright and innovative people who had come up with a highly graphical analytic view of an organisation’s risk performance. This had been driven by general feedback in the market that risk systems were unexciting and tended to produce vast amounts of almost unintelligible data that only specialist IT support experts and IT savvy auditors would ever have a hope of understanding. 

​

Clients – including some of the largest companies in the world – loved this and the team was snowed under producing, to my memory, at least 50 variants of this analytic to demonstrate to a client what insight they could get. However sales of this analytic were surprisingly poor, and the statistics later showed that only 2 clients ever paid for any aspect of this exceptionally well-received and award-winning solution.

​

I helped conduct a review and proposition workshop at the time, and what came out took a while for everyone to buy into. The key was defining the value proposition for this solution in reality, based on looking at things from the client’s view (always a good idea!). What we uncovered was that the issue exciting those who saw the analytic was actually more about understanding what risk management was about – in other words, being able to visualise the results of automating aspects of risk management. Sure, the reporting would be seen to be valuable, but the killer value was the visualisation.

Once that became clear – and accepted – then things changed quickly. Instead of disappointment that a client had not signed up for an analytic solution or service, the focus moved to helping the client visualise the end state of a more valuable risk automation programme – which in fact generated far more revenue, wins, and margin than the proposition they thought they had!

This was an unusual example of how getting real clarity of the value proposition nearly always makes a huge difference.