Almost every business is trying to capitalise on the promise of data and analytics, but it seems many may still be falling short. In fact, according to a recent survey published in Harvard Business Review a large majority of leaders don’t feel like their organisations are hitting the mark. In fact, only 39% of executives believe their organisations manage data as an asset, and even fewer (24%) view their companies as being data-driven. So, while most businesses want to be more data driven and have started along this journey, many challenges remain.
1. Cultural Alignment
Does the organisation have widespread consensus on the value of analytics and data as a strategic asset? Does the business support a culture that asks the right kinds of analytics questions that solve business problems, giving particular thought as to whether analytics is being applied to key business issues by the organisation as a whole and if analytics has changed the way you actually conduct business.
2. Leadership Commitment
Is your data and analytics program supported wholeheartedly by senior leaders? Senior management support of any data and analytics initiative is critical. This means senior management are committed to seeing analytics succeed, they “walk the talk” and use analytics to transform how the business operates and serves its customers.
3. Operations & Structure
Does the organisation have the right structure and policies in place to support access to data to those that need it when they need it? To assess your level of competency in this area pay attention as to whether data is easily shared and encourages collaboration across functional groups and business units or is it contained in silos. Has analytics changed the way your business shares information across departments or are you relying on old processes and technologies that no longer fit the business.
4. Skills & Competencies
Does the organisation have sufficient skilled data and analytics specialists inhouse or leverage specialist external partners to support the businesses’ data and analytics needs? This can be an issue as we know there’s a shortage of good data & analytics people out there. Firstly, is your organisation competent in analysing information and disseminating data insights. Do individual managers or decision makers feel adequately prepared to use the organisation’s data to address business issues? The second component here is to assess how well your data foundation is constructed to support the business short and long term and the skills of the people you have to support and develop this to best practice on an ongoing basis. Is there one single version of the truth for your data and is data integration, data preparation, data storage, data modelling and serving up data insights in the right format for users relatively painless, or is it manual, costly and complex.
5. Strategic Alignment
The key here is to understand if the data and analytics program complements both short-term and long-term strategies of the business. Quite simply, is data strategy aligned with business strategy. Do analytical insights guide future strategy and is there an infusion of information management and analytics into strategy.
6. Proactive & Competitive Advantage
Does your data and analytics capabilities allow the organisation to keep pace with evolving customer needs? Are you using analytics to better understand how to serve customers and anticipate current and future needs. Are you then using this insight to feed back into your product and service offerings to provide competitive advantage.
7. Employee Empowerment
Do you empower employees to make better business decisions using data? This is about understanding if you provide your employees who need access to critical information the ability to easily access that information in a way that gives them the freedom to explore the data as they choose, or do they have to rely on the IT department. Do you offer self-serve dashboards or static reports for example and is the information as current as it can be.
When assessing data and analytics capability across these 7 areas, businesses will typically find they have a mix of strengths and weaknesses. For those more advanced in their analytics journey, attention should be focussed on optimising those dimensions that are essential to providing superior and sustainable business performance while addressing vulnerabilities, while for others it may mean just fixing fundamental areas of weakness. In our next post we’ll provide some tips on how to improve capability across these 7 areas to get you started.
