Last week, I wrote about the White Book of Big Data – a publication I co-authored last year at Fujitsu.

One of the more interesting (for me) sections of the document was an idea from one of my colleagues, providing a model to determine next steps in forming a strategy for embracing a new approach (in this case to move forward towards gaining value from the use of a big data solution but it can be applied to other scenarios too).

The model starts with a “wheel” diagram and, at the centre is the first decision point. All organisations exist to generate profit (even non-profits work on the same principles, they just don’t return those profits to shareholders).  There are two ways to increase profit: reducing cost; or increasing revenue.

For each of the reduce cost/increase revenue sectors, there are two more options: direct or indirect.

These four selections lead to a number of other opportunities and these may be prioritised to determine which areas to focus on in a particular business scenario.

With those priorities highlighted, a lookup table can be used to suggest appropriate courses of action to take next.

It’s one of those models that’s simple and, I think, quite elegant. I’ll be looking to adopt this in other scenarios in future and I thought that readers of this blog might find it useful too…

Take a look at the book if you want to see this working in practice – “the wheel” is on page 37.