Hope that my earlier article would have given you a perspective on how you should be thinking about crafting an analytics roadmap for your business and the key facets to be considered before making any analytics assessments. In this article, I would want to take our discussion forward to the next level and bring to limelight some of the best industry practices adopted by analytically mature organizations across the globe. A powerful analytics ecosystem ensures systematic channelization of information and knowledge, and get it to the right people at the right time to help make optimal decisions and deliver economic value. Technology at our disposal is actually way ahead of our ability to use it, no more a barrier to widespread adoption at this point of time.
So, the challenge remains, how do you make Analytics an Integral Part of the Business – Not just an afterthought! How do you identify the right problem to solve? If the problem is just too easy to solve, people may not have faith in what analytics could delivery. Highly complex problems may again defeat the purpose. Hence, making sure that the problem isn’t insurmountable but yet delivers high return is critical. Following steps should help you chart out a meaningful analytics strategy.
This piece is crucial to demystify top organizational priorities and mulling over how analytics can help.
Data is the lifeblood for Analytics and it’s imperative to assess the exisiting data landscape, define current state and target state so that appropriate remedial measures can be taken to fill in the gaps (missing data, disparate data et al). In many cases, the business challenge you intend to address may have inept data infrastructure or even indequate mechanisms to capture that data.
Every industry out there is at a different stage in the analytics maturity curve. Banking and Insurance have always been quoted as industries involving “number crunchers”, the torchbearers of data-driven decision making. Retail industry has been leading from the front in terms of personalization and transformed customer experience.
Based on where your organization stacks up in the Analytics maturity curve, can help determine the partner of choice for supporting your analytics initiative. While charting out the analytics roadmap, it’s important to identify interventions where analytics capabilities don’t reside in-house or there’s dearth of expertise or capability or contemporary tools needed to get the job done. Data assimilation concerns, to a great extent, can be allayed by working with the right partner having big data & data processing capabilities.
Business partnership and sponsorship are key to successful identification of opportunities, adoption, and realizing the true potential of your analytics initiative. Unless you have strong advocates to take something on, a sea change to the way the company does business, it’s not going to happen. Also, the problem at hand should resonate with all majority of the business stakeholders. Positive outcomes relating to a limited audience may restrict organizational buy-in for subsequent roll-outs.
In the upcoming article as part of this 3-part series, I shall shed some more light on the fundamental building blocks of crafting an Analytics roadmap in line with the business priorities, howsoever resilient your organization might be to infusing analytics at the business core. Stay tuned!
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