ANALYTICS STRATEGY | GETTING BANG FOR THE BUCK

What to expect with a successful analytics-driven transformation?

What's your analytics strategy profile?

Strategy always means planning and allocating resources to the projects, assets or initiatives that will have the biggest ROI or position the firm for a long-term competitive advantage. Analytics strategy is no different but straddles two worlds – the IT and Business World. This is not a new concept but it is more important than ever for the business and technology groups to have a cohesive approach to managing data and delivering insight.

Without wanting to oversimplify the motives of organizations, there are basically two strategic focuses drive organizations to invest time, people and money in the pursuit of advanced analytics – Efficiency and Capability. A focus on efficiency means getting the basics right and the analytics addresses tangible and operational outcomes such as service levels, customer response times, process cycle times, production or sourcing costs. Firms that are focused on capability are usually looking to innovate or create solutions/services/products that can give a more lasting competitive advantage as well as keep customers longer and spending more. Here are four levels of transformation a firm can engage in when adopting and integrating advanced analytics into day to day operations and business processes.

After years of research and experience out in the field, we find it is also true that organizations are pursuing these strategies and technologies from different starting points. The good news is that no matter where you are starting from, there need not be a linear path to the top. Careful business and technology planning with full management commitment can see to that.

Where to start your analytics strategy journey?

Is your analytics project portfolio delivering the intended ROI? If not, lets clean house.

The first step to enhancing your ROI with analytics is to focus and align action and money to on what makes the business go! Our proven approach starts with identifying, costing and forecasting benefits for all your major analytics initiatives, including development costs, licensing, staffing and consultants. The second step is to work with management to understand short, medium and long-term goals to be able to align resources and investment decisions relating to your analytics. Lastly, we develop a Viability/Fit analysis to cut and prune all the less than desirable projects and investments from your current portfolio to free up resources, so you can both double down on winners and have money left over to innovate for the future.

Is your IT investment profile the one a company should have to be an analytics leader in its space?

You are what you spend. If you spend all your money on transactional systems, that’s where you are effective. If you spend all your money on infrastructure, that means you are more agile to implement new systems and applications to respond to rapidly changing market needs. Do you think you are one and really the other? By analyzing your IS/IT investments and strategy profiles to ensure they are delivering the competitive flexibility, we can make recommendations that will accelerate implementation cycle times of all your projects, including your best innovations.

Do your processes and people leverage the insight you produce?

Analytics is not just a computer installation problem. It touches both how you think about problems and how you deploy math and technology-based resources to solve them. Sadly, you can have the best software and computer engineers in the world building your analytics capability, but if no one is aware of or actively using their work, it is as if they have done nothing at all. Using both analytical methods such as Organizational Network Analysis and our Organizational Change Management framework, we address all the questions relating to business culture and internal networking all the way to end-user and skills training. At the end of the day, there will be a shared understanding of how analytics are used in the business as well as how to make better decisions more consistently with them.