For every asset that supports business critical service, Visible Ops recommends the following questions be answered:

• What does it do?
• What is the hardware platform?
• What is the operating system platform?
• What applications are installed?
• Who is responsible for this asset´s uptime?
• What service(s) does it support?
• Who is authorized to make changes?
• What does this box do for the business?
• What will happen when this box stops working completely?
• What will happen when the

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Subject: IT Questions

• Workforce planning and workforce analysis: Which employees are eligible for retirement in the next two to five years? Do they possess critical skills? Which jobs and skill sets will be impacted? How will you replace these skills once these employees retire? What are the critical skills for the future that will need to be recruited or developed?
• Learning management: Do your current training and learning

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Subject: Human Resources Questions

• What’s our purpose as a company? What’s the promise of our brand?
• What do our customers/consumers feel is the most valuable things that we can do for them? (Consider this as the basis of your brand promise.)
• What is the unique value of our organization…the competitive differentiator in our minds and in the minds of our stakeholders?
• Where is our competition coming from and what are their perceived

… [ Read more ]

Subject: Strategy Questions

Still stuck with bad processes and high-maintenance legacy systems? Here are five questions that will help you determine and sort your priorities.

• Is your company’s infrastructure helping or hindering your company’s …
  M&A options and plans?
  New-product and speed-to-market strategies?
  Efforts to implement new technologies that deliver a more unified, holistic view of your customers?
  Depending on your company’s business strategy in the coming years, a response

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Subject: IT Questions

• What do current customers say that they LOVE about you?
• What specifically do they say you should improve?
• When was the last time you disappointed them?
• What do they value the most about your company?
• Which specific customers recommend you the most?
• What do they say specifically–in their own words–when they recommend you to others?

Source: Top 6 Tips to Understanding Customer Evangelism by … [ Read more ]

Subject: Customer Questions

Ram Charan and Julie Schlosser recommend the best questions every board member and shareholder should ask to get to the heart of what they should know about a company. Ten disarmingly simple questions. “so simple in fact, that we often forget to – or are embarrassed to – ask them.”

1. How does the company make money?
2. Are our customers paying up?
3. What could really hurt

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Subject: Corporate Governance Questions

Revenues and Profitability

• I can identify the products, services, and channels driving my revenue and profit.
• I can rank customers and customer locations by profitability.
• I am automatically alerted when critical costs, such as non-billable overtime rates, fall out of control.
• I know when my sales reps/managers are on target, and I can intervene in time to make a difference.

Customer Relationship Management

• I can identify low-value customers and try to

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Subject: Miscellaneous Questions

Before getting started with a business-continuity plan, CIOs should ask some strategic questions:

Subject: Business Continuity / Crisis Questions

Gallup has been researching top-performing leaders for more than 40 years. One crucial discovery has been that top performance is strongly correlated to seven main leadership activities or “demands.” Those demands are: visioning, maximizing values, challenging experience, mentoring, building a constituency, making sense of experience, and knowing self.

Focusing each leader’s growth on the seven demands can accelerate leadership development. This artcle outlines the seven … [ Read more ]

Subject: Leadership Questions

• How do I know how much to spend on advertising?
• How do I evaluate the effectiveness of my advertising?
• How can I learn more about my target audience?
• How do I evaluate the efficiency of different media?
• How do I make certain that my ad will pull?
• What’s more important: reach or frequency?
• How do I know which medium works best?
• Should I run a big ad once or several smaller ads

… [ Read more ]

Subject: Advertising Questions