I need to improve my customer experience…oops, I just sent costs through the roof!  I need to be compliant, but now my customer experience is just nasty.  I need to sell more, but my marketing budget is less than last year!  I need to be a magician to balance all these needs and goals!

How can I possibly make it all happen at the same time?

There was a time when you would buy a system and it would have one goal.  It would make the factory churn faster, it would make the widgets cheaper, and it would make the boss happy!  But today, these single goal solution machines just don’t work.

I can’t take a single goal and just attack that, because of what I am now branding the ‘whack a mole’ effect. To be more specific, it’s the inevitable conflict between goals that have very different masters. What I need is a much bigger hammer, really more of an octopus holding lots of different-sized hammers. And I need to hit them all at the same time.

Modern solutions to today’s business problems must be able to attack goals simultaneously on multiple fronts. That means not just blindly churning faster, or making more widgets, but offering cost reductions and compliance, customer experience and revenue enhancements.  Solutions need to be smarter, they need to  apply intelligence to the actions and services we offer, targeting the use of resources, reducing waste and optimizing against a more sophisticated range of outcomes than just ‘make it cheaper, make it faster’.

Only by using flexible, agile solutions that can take a holistic approach to the good health of a company will we can overcome the frustrating game of ‘whack a mole’. Sure, it was fun to play in arcades as a kid, but not anymore.