UNLEASH INNOVATION. CAPTURE THESE TOP 3 BENEFITS WHEN DEPLOYING AN ANALYTICS CENTER OF EXCELLENCE.
A cross-functional Analytics Center of Excellence (ACE), if designed and implemented well, can be a catalyst for finding insights, improving productivity and fostering collaboration across the enterprise. The role of an Analytics Center of Excellence includes:
- Formalizing Business Intelligence program sponsorship and strategy.
- Investing in a dedicated team of resources to drive best practices, standards and coaching.
- Establishing processes to enable the agile adoption and application of analytics.
- Enabling the analytic community by deploying self-service BI and analytics technologies.
Is your Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) or Analytics COE generating these 3 benefits? Read on and share your experience at the end of the post.
BENEFIT #1: A PLATFORM FOR INNOVATION ENABLEMENT
At its foundation, the ACE will enable traditional, descriptive “what happened” self-service reporting in the Information Portal. That’s the baseline. The most value, however, lies in the potentially disruptive use cases that can be revealed through business-led collaboration focused on desired outcomes that are in support of business objectives. This outcome-driven focus resembles an R&D approach enabling the business to explore new analytic hypotheses, rapidly see new information sources, explore relationships and develop analytic models. Their focus is finding competitive advantage, unlocking profitability insights or transforming a business process.
The ACE enables this through a web-based data visualization portal combined with collaborative brainstorming, shared best practices, training, rapid project iterations and a process for promotion of the best business-led, self-service R&D lab-work to production.
The Analytics Center of Excellence platform encourages a culture of agility, innovation and data-driven problem-solving.
Depending on each analytic conclusion, a variety of feedback loops can be taken ranging from influencing strategy, to modifying business tactics, or to integrating analytics into real-time decision-making and transaction processes. As the ACE community gains “wins” (and competency):
- Executives take note and the number and complexity of questions increases,
- Additional lines of business jump on board, and
- The ACE adds new software capabilities in big data analytics, statistical modeling, predictive analytics and machine learning.
By enabling business successes, the ACE becomes the reliable platform that the Business leverages for ongoing innovation analytics.
BENEFIT #2: A FRESH START IN BUSINESS-IT PRODUCTIVITY
In too many companies, Business-IT relations are fractured. On the IT side, the monolithic, centralized “cost effective” BI platform with IT provisioning every report is well-documented in its failure to satisfy business needs. On the Business side, these failures combined with intense business unit pressure for answers have sprouted a proliferation of shadow IT groups and applications. Many of these shadow IT applications contain crucial data transformations, business rules, metric calculations and insights that are ingrained in daily business operations. When each side doubles down on this strategy, the resulting dysfunction causes further distrust, duplicate effort/cost and missed business opportunities.
Use the ACE as a “reset” for Business-IT relations.
A well-run Analytics Center of Excellence should be sponsored and led by the Business. We know from history that if the ACE doesn’t provide the responsiveness and enablement that the business needs, the business will migrate back to answering questions the old way (in a silo, without IT). Putting the business in charge of the ACE, but with a very strong partnership with IT, can provide the spark in Business-IT collaboration once again. Succeeding at this difficult task requires fresh thinking, strong leadership and a laser focus on solving business problems through the ACE. For example, the ACE might endorse, promote and evolve shadow IT systems to become shared data assets. The ACE might waive rigid governance when agility and innovation are required.
It’s informative to reflect on the Business Intelligence and Analytics software market trends. The ongoing success of vendors like Tableau and Qlik, selling directly to the business, have been driving business adoption of data discovery and visualization tools. This trend looks to accelerate as nearly all analytics tools are adding features like self-service data preparation (e.g. light-weight ETL) and smart data discovery (e.g. profiling and automated statistics) in the coming years. Implementing a strong Analytics Center of Excellence to enable the Business now is an investment in getting your company better prepared to handle the evolving capabilities of these tools which will place even more power in the hands of the business user in the near future.
Harness the “power of the many” by localizing analytics. Embrace decentralized development, knowledge sharing and user enablement through pooling ACE resources.
BENEFIT #3: STANDARDS & REPEATABLE ANALYTICS COMPONENTS
Even through agile enablement, deploying an ACE should reap benefits of economies of scale and improving standards. The ACE must play a governing role in the organization to drive alignment across the enterprise in areas including:
- Defining a common metrics framework,
- Ensuring analytic consistency or cohesiveness,
- Supplying shared data sources and business glossary, and
- Offering analytic and dashboard templates.
Setting up the right operational processes, training and ACE coaching should reduce analytical fragmentation, minimize redundancy, and provide a consistent framework for analytics consumption.
Eager to get started?
Getting started requires a good strategy to ensure success. You can begin developing this strategy by identifying your opportunity areas in the business, considering candidate sponsors and planning to obtain seed resources/funding to get going. Look for future posts on building an effective Analytics Center of Excellence.
Is your Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) or Analytics COE generating these 3 benefits?
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