McKinsey Recommends Mashups for Managing in a Downturn...Sorta

Like many other business managers, the current economic downturn has me wondering about how my strategy should change to meet new market realities. Because of this I have been reviewing different business periodicals and articles looking for advice. One of the best sources of managerial advice out there is The McKinsey Quarterly. For those who have not heard of McKinsey and co., Wikipedia describes them as  “…widely recognized as a leader and one of the most prestigious firms in the management consulting industry. …”. The goal of their Quarterly is stated as “…to help business people run their organizations more productively, more competitively, and more creatively.”

The people at McKinsey have published a lot of great advice over the years, and understand that many managers are currently looking for reading material about best practices and use of technology during the downturn. They have created a section in their Quarterly titled “Managing in a Downturn” where their most recent article is a great piece that promotes the intelligent use of existing IT assets to create new revenue.

Is one of the most revered business consulting firms referring to the use of Mashups as a way for companies to get themselves in a better competitive position in this economic downturn?

The team who wrote the article mention that an easy to-do is to use and combine existing data assets to gain new insight and business opportunities:

Few companies have successfully capitalized on the explosion of data in recent years. Often this information, residing in separate IT systems or spread across different business units, have never been mined for insights that could add value. Small teams of business and IT staffers can find opportunities by combining a detailed understanding of business processes with straightforward analyses of consolidated data sets……”

Achieving what McKinsey proposes can be a very long and arduous process using old-style integration technologies or for those companies interested in getting results quickly, Mashups are the perfect solution to easily and quickly combine all sorts of data.

The article goes on to mention an example of how a Telecommunications company improved revenue by

“…building high-value but inexpensive links between multiple silos of information. Contracts DB, sales funnels, compensations systems, CRM data warehouses, and other siloed systems… it facilitated analyses that uncovered opportunities to improve revenues…”

Wow! We are also seeing this type of use-case but not only in Telcos. Healthcare and Government arenas are having great results in providing better data by cross-analyzing many distinct data sources.

I know some of you must be thinking “he sees Mashups everywhere” (I do after all work for the leading Enterprise Mashup vendor) but you may only be partially correct in that statement. McKinsey may not be using the term but they are certainly talking about the value proposition of enterprise mashups.