Faraway, so close

Before I dart off to my first of our Enterprise Intelligence Summit, let me share some impressions from day one. Having ploughed through a packed agenda, we let the evening wind down at Tempelhof Airport, which was closehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifd in 2008 and has since earned a reputation as an event location. It has been the setting of a number of films like Billy Wilders “A foreign affair”, or Wim Wenders’ ingenious “Faraway, so close” with the famous U2-Song “Stay”. More importantly, it was the centre of the Berlin airlift in 1948/9 when railway and road access to the Western parts of the city were blocked. It was Tempelhof where the so-called “Raisin Bombers” landed and supplied the people of Berlin with food and other essentials for nearly eleven months.

How times have changed! Groceries and consumer goods are abundant – and retailers have to compete for the customer by creating the best shopping experience. Which basically means offering a consistent customer dialogue across sophisticated sales channels, as Dr. Gerd Wolfram, Head of CIO-office, METRO Group, explained. Metro’s future store initiative is following the Zeitgeist by offering customers a mobile shopping assistant (MSA) that creates shopping lists and provides additional product information. As for the relevant data, no one would seriously complain that they have become generally scarce recently; the real question is how to leverage the data as a strategic asset for the organization. With data at your disposal you’re as close as you can be to understanding every aspect and process of your business. But if you’re not able to unearth the treasure, meaning to draw the information from the data – you’re far away from it, maybe even further than if the data didn’t exist at all…Faraway, so close.

Certainly Professor Hans Rosling would agree with that. He impressively demonstrated that decisions based on presumptions are no better than those made by chimpanzees. There is no alternative to considering all the available data out there if you want to understand what is happening out there. Forget about gut decisions.

Trend-spotter Markus Lindkvist is in line with Rosling. He claims that our thinking can be at odds with reality. Do you still feel like twenty, although you’re already past your fifties? A common attitude, according to Lindkvist. This is because we all tend to see things not as they are, instead we see them as we are and call that being focused. Future is about unpredictability and things we’ve never thought about, says Lindkvist. And I would like to add: you’d better take care that you are really aware of what’s going on right now, because it will be challenging your status quo.

Before I’ve got to go, let me quickly call your attention to some of my personal highlights of today, which are the general sessions with Bob Pritchard, Joschka Fischer and Geoff Burch. I definitely won’t miss those.