Moneyball and UC – All About Results!
Moneyball and UC – All About Results! by Marty Parker
By now, the movie "Moneyball" has grossed $72 million at the box office, so at least some of you have seen it. The book "Moneyball" by Michael Lewis was a favorite of mine when it came out, and the movie does it justice. Being a native of the SF Bay area, I’m an Oakland A’s fan, so the message was even more meaningful. The A’s showed that they could give their fans top quartile Division Playoff class results while only spending in the bottom quartile of teams for player salaries.
Of course, as the movie shows, the necessity of a limited budget was the mother of invention. Under pressure to produce a winning team within a tight player salary budget, Billy Beane and his really smart analysts figured out that most baseball teams were paying way too much and paying for the wrong things. Since baseball games are won by scoring runs, they figured out, the most important thing for a player to do is to get on base. If you don’t get on base, you absolutely can’t score a run. They also figured out that the high salaries in baseball were being paid for attributes such as batting average or slugging percentage that contributed to but did not maximize the chance of a player to get on base.
So, the Oakland A’s started looking for players with a high On Base Percentage (OBP). Since Oakland went looking for these players first, they found them in quantity and at bargain prices. As the movie shows, that Oakland approach broke a record for consecutive games won and reached the Division Playoffs in their first year using the new methods. While Oakland has not yet won a World Series with this approach, the Boston Red Sox immediately adopted the same methods and finally broke their World Series curse by beating the New York Yankees in 2004.
How does this relate to UC, i.e. to Unified Communications and Collaboration and Social-for-Business? The similarities are striking (pardon the pun).
- First, there was a budget constraint. Every single one of our UniComm Consulting clients has a budget constraint, so this is exactly the same. The Oakland A’s took the budget constraint as a cause for action, not a reason for inaction. The many UC case studies out there are showing that great results are possible, even while an enterprise is cutting their Telecom and IT budgets.
- Second, the industry (baseball) was overspending because they were spending money for the wrong things. This is often true in enterprise communications, today, too. Many enterprises are needlessly spending large sums to migrate to VoIP; they end up spending roughly $1,000 or more per desktop to install an IP telephone that has the same features (often exactly the same features based on a like-for-like RFP) as the old phone. This is the wrong approach. As we have presented many times at Enterprise Connect, Interop, and here at UCStrategies (web site, UC Summit, etc.), an enterprise can begin applying UC to produce greater benefits at less cost without even touching their legacy PBX.
- Third, it is possible to figure out what matters and how to win the game. By studying the flow of the essential processes within a business or public sector operation, it is possible to find the major "hot spots" where the processes are plagued by communications-based errors, rework, and delays. These communication hot spots can be shown to increase costs, reduce customer service levels, and damage financial performance. In most cases, the new communications methods of UC (i.e. some selection of presence, instant messaging, conferencing, mobility collaborative workspaces, or communications-enabled business processes/CEBP) make it possible to streamline or even eliminate the communication-based process bottlenecks. So, like the Oakland A’s, good analysis can point the way to breakthroughs in results.
Some may say that baseball is not like business. That sounds right, but within any specific vertical market, the similarities are more prevalent than it seems. Each vertical industry is working within a set of "rules" which may not be as clear as baseball rules, but exist in the form of economics, raw material costs, labor costs, industry practices, technologies, laws, regulations, customer expectations, etc. Generally, the lessons of Moneyball are worth considering in any situation.
So, our recommendation is to look at UC as a game-changer just like Billy Beane looked at OBP as a game-changer. Analyze your business to find the communication hot spots, as we do with most clients. Look at UC as the way to eliminate those hot spots while operating within your budget. Don’t fall into the trap of doing what everyone else is doing, if it won’t clearly and certainly produce the results you need. In that way, you will see why we at UCStrategies define UC as “communications integrated to optimize business processes.” As suggested, the growing accumulation of UC case studies from almost every vendor proves these points.
Or, you can just keep spending money the same old way and getting the same old results.
See you on the field. Play ball!