Goldratt’s book The Goal. Just brilliant. Process. What is your desired effect using analytics? Is it to reduce costs? Gain competitive advantage? Identify inefficiencies? Deciding what business impact you want to reap from your BI program up front and methodically determining what activities you can measure towards that impact will tell you whether or not you are improving or worsening. It’s great to have fancy dashboards up that show every variation of bar chart and graph but unless you focus your effort on what you want to achieve as a business you are wasting your time…more on this when we get to Gluttony. Also, for a great read to provoke thought on what you need to track in your business read Eliyahu M. Rather than training people in skills that would help the business grow his focus was on keeping jobs for the people who already had a certain skill, even to the detriment of the company. Quality people can always be retrained for the good of the business and hiding your head in the sand won’t solve the problem…it’ll lead to you losing 50% of your workforce. People. Early in my IT management career we lost an account that caused our workforce to be reduced by 50% within just a few months. I suddenly needed to make decisions about who to retain and who to let go – never a fun thing to have to go through as a manager. To help me make an educated decision I requested my IT Operations Manager provide me all the data we had on which services were most popular and which were not. With this information we could determine which services to discontinue and which to keep and with that, which people possessed the skills we were going to need to continue to operate the remaining services. When I asked for this data he was hesitant, but his eventual response said it all: “You might not like what you see.” He feared what the data would say. He feared the people who might be let go were not the ones he liked so it would be better off not to even look at what the data said. While Dante was referring to laziness with regards to all things spiritual, the same can be said for putting in the arduous work to gain serious value from your data. It is all too common for an organization to get stuck in a rut doing the same things over and over. Change is difficult, especially in larger organizations. It takes serious and methodical effort. It is not as simple as buying a BI platform, installing it, and instantaneously reaping the benefits of harnessing your data. There are many pitfalls that can lead to an effort like this being mired in mediocrity for years but they all stem from the same old culprits of people, process, or technology. Here are a few I’ve come across: Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work. Paul to be Christ-like, put on the armor of God, and run to finish the race … because God is counting on us.To read the previous article on Greed, click here.Ģ. There may be an issue behind our sloth that needs to be taken to prayer or addressed with a spiritual director or a faithful friend.įinally, sloth is a sin against God and it will harm us spiritually, especially if we are not fulfilling the duties of our vocation. Second, we can look deeper to see what is tempting us to sloth. He knows our needs better than we do and He delights in helping us with even our smallest corporal concerns. Some closing thoughts for staving off sloth:įirst we can pray and ask God for everything, anything, big and small. “I can do all things through Him who gives me strength.” Philippians 4:13. Isn’t it amazing how much we can accomplish when we ask the Holy Spirit to guide us? Haven’t you been amazed at what you can do when you seek God’s will in your daily affairs… especially when you think you don’t have the time, energy or resources you need? In my own life, I see the lure of sloth in unstructured time, so I often ask the Holy Spirit to order my day and set my priorities. Frequenting Mass and the Sacrament of Reconciliation help lead us away from sin and toward God. Acts of love, where we put the needs of others first, can strengthen us. We are nearing the end of Lent, so hopefully we’ve been trying to be faithful to prayer, fasting and almsgiving. So how do we get off the slippery slope of sloth? it is evil in its effect, if it so oppresses man as to draw him away entirely from good deeds.” Thomas Aquinas said, “Sloth is sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good.
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