Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

For the last 25 years, IT systems - be it COTS (Commercial Off the shelf) or custom built - are started with trying to understand how they can accomplish a business process. However, it ends up with business stake-holders having to make compromises to the business process to use an IT system. For some time now, the focus has shifted on the users - finding their pain points and trying to design with the users in mind. This change has done a lot of good. However, that is not enough

Definition The practice of using advanced statistical approaches to allocate proportional credit to marketing communications and media activity across all channels, which ultimately leads to the desired customer action. This is the definition from "The Forrester Wave: Cross-Channel Attribution Providers, Q4 2014 report" that can be accessed here .

For long e-commerce players were pure play online players that concentrated on centralized warehouses and always had optimizing costs as their key goal. However, the e-commerce has changed much since Amazon shaped some of the practices.

Apple is credited for a lot of things - the least of which is managing retail operations. However, that seems to be a key element of product launches with apple these days.

Policy Making is a very good instrument that any organization can use to communicate to its participants and help further the organization's goals. Policy - in a nutshell - is the course of principle of action proposed by the organization or entity. Why do we care Consulting, in a lot of ways, has to deal with processes. There are processes that as consultants, we need to be aware of and respect in our client organizations. There are processes that we have to work around and eventually suggest replacing or retiring. All of these are a lot simpler if we understand policy making better. Under what constraints or conditions was a specific policy made? Why is it still relevant? There are many more questions that we need to ask as consultants. Organizational structure and Policy Making