This year, resolve to develop your organization’s collective vision for analytics and information management programs by using a business-value blueprint to drive high-ROI candidate initiatives to the top of the priority list.
Broken Data. Broken Processes.
Are your competitors gaining market share by being more agile and successful in differentiating their products and services? Does your sales performance consistently fall short of sales pipeline projections? Does it require a month-long study to determine your least profitable customers? Are your operations reacting to the latest process break-down and escalations? Do you have an army of analysts living in spreadsheet hell, presenting competing and sometimes suspect data with little or no insight? Has the business lost confidence or bypassed IT due to a history of project failures and slow IT throughput?
A Real Financial Impact
If this description fits your organization, your company is likely experiencing the associated pain of low business effectiveness, inefficient business processes and an increased risk profile. Many times such issues have a root cause in poor data management and analytics capabilities. These problems have serious financial implications including missed revenue opportunities, ballooning SG&A budgets, and low or negative ROI on project investments. If you don’t put the right information in the hands of your people at the right time, then they rely on gut feel, intuition or a “do it like I’ve always done it” mentality. This is the opposite of data-driven decision-making and operational intelligence.
As we enter 2017, think about whether your competitors will outperform your company, investing in the right analytics projects that drive ROI, customer loyalty and operational efficiency. How can you close this gap and increase your company’s performance?
Business-Driven Analytics Strategy
Instead of wandering aimlessly through 2017 without a roadmap, mobilize a team to set your strategic plan for analytics and information management. Developing a strategy allows your organization to better anticipate and prepare for change, align key stakeholders, and set a benchmark for you to assess your performance.
"Failing to plan is planning to fail." - B. Franklin
It is imperative to design your strategy to drive the business. Initiatives should enable desired business outcomes that are aligned with strategic objectives. Collect the top priorities and pain points from executives, but then dive deeper within management, down to the analyst level to assess the real pulse of what analytics capabilities exist and what projects are in-flight so you can round out the priorities. Many times you’ll find a very different, but equally important story by talking with the teams on the front-line of producing information.
Ensure that the discussion includes embracing business drivers and key performance indicator frameworks. The focus of the conversations should be on business use cases within the context of analytical business processes. It is also important to have an open dialogue across a variety of data sources including enterprise, mobile, IoT, cloud and social data. This holistic approach will result in the richest context and project list for your analytics roadmap, ensuring alignment with your desired business outcomes.
Keeping in mind that funds are always limited, make certain that measurable value can result from each project. Prioritize your projects using a scorecard across value categories that make sense for your organization like ROI, cost/efficiency, customer experience, risk mitigation and controls. The roadmap should accommodate the urgency level of the business, remaining agile and flexible with business changes, while ultimately unifying the enterprise around the data and analytics program. You’ll likely find yourself killing some existing low-value projects while fast tracking others to accelerate value realization.
"Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow." - W. Pollard
Assess Your Information Management Capabilities
Concurrent with collecting business priorities, your technical team will have much work to do. You will have to take inventory of data and analytic infrastructure, databases, warehouses, tools and applications across domains of enterprise data, big data, analytics, and information governance. A key step in the process is interviewing information management executives and key stakeholders to document the current organizations, processes, architecture, technologies and methodologies. This current state assessment should define the organization’s information management and analytics maturity level, and also help identify the gaps in supporting the immediate and long-term business priorities.
Bridging this gap is an integral part of the process of developing the roadmap, a multi-year blueprint to move the organization to the future state. When designing your reference architecture, leverage industry research from respected sources such as Gartner, and seek out a trusted services partner to guide and accelerate your team into implementation. Your future state technical roadmap should address augmenting traditional, corporate-IT-driven business intelligence with business self-service analytics. It should also enable your data science teams, and define pathways to promote refined content from your business teams into the corporate BI portal.
These new capabilities usually require investments in some form of technology infrastructure such as data warehouses, data lakes, analytics tools, or master data management platforms. A modern analytics platform frequently relies on a mix of mega-vendors (Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft) combined with niche analytics tools (Tableau, Qlik, Alteryx) with a purposeful strategy for each application. The future state should leverage cloud-based platforms like AWS and Microsoft Azure for agility and cost savings. These new capabilities will also require change management across both IT and Business. IT increases its focus as an enabler of the business and curator of quality data assets. The Business must own data governance, adopt self-service platforms, and funnel former shadow IT data projects into the new platform for maximum value to the organization.
Make 2017 A Transforming Year
Driving change is rarely easy, but the new year offers a fresh start. Don’t lose focus of the business benefits you can realize by making this strategic investment now. It is in your best long-term interest to make a real commitment by defining your organization’s vision for its analytics and information management program. With a roadmap in place, you’ll have an important tool to guide you in realizing real and differentiating business value. Start 2017 with a blast and don’t look back.