Picture this. You push back in your office seat at the end of a long hard week. You take a deep breath as you reflect on the journey your team took in the successful technical implementation of your new CRM system. It comes at the end of your 2-year IT roadmap that includes the deployment of an automated marketing platform and a state-of-the-art data management platform that consolidates all digital customer touchpoint data. In the next coming months your organisation will have access to customer data that you’ve never had before, so what now?
DATA, DATA EVERYWHERE…
Your organisation is one of many worldwide experiencing the pressures of operating in a data-driven era where the sheer quantum and velocity of data will send ripples throughout the whole organisation. The options for your organisation are simple, ignore the newfound access to information and continue to work the same way as you have been (obviously more efficiently with all the hardware you’ve installed) or adopt the new way of working.
The latter would mean a root and branch review of how information is consumed across the organisation. Build your data-driven organisation around the customer experience and be prepared to break down the traditional business silos. Here are some factors you should consider to understand your organisation’s data and analytics maturity level.
INFORMATION IS KING BUT USE IT WISELY…
Start with understanding your current information usage, and rationalise your reports. Be brutal, the best way to approach this is to stop sending out the reports and wait for the screams. Stay focused as this exercise shouldn’t take more than a month and as a rule of thumb strategic reporting shouldn’t be more than 5 reports. Also consider other methods of displaying data. There are lots of off-the-shelf plug-and-play products out there.
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE NEED TO REPOSITION YOUR ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE…
Changing your organisation’s culture will probably be your biggest challenge. Analytics shouldn’t be only accessible to the selected few and neither should it be only applied for large business initiatives. Integrate analytics into the daily business cadence. Start from applying analytics to basic reports (scenario building) moving to more complex propensity models. You know you’ve matured when analytics contributes to the overall business planning and strategic development process.
TALENT IS IMPORTANT…
“90% of today’s data was created in the last 2 years is”, an often-used quote in the Big Data world. So how much have you invested or evolved your data and analytics talents in the last 2 years? When it comes to your analytics people, you need to break away from the traditional data scientists plotting world domination in the corner of the office. Today’s successful analytics teams are business objective aligned and is a mix of capabilities and skills; typically consisting of 4 characteristics the data junkie, the storyteller, the data scientist and the commercial-minded.
LASTLY, GOVERN NOT POLICE…
Lastly, ignore data governance at your peril. Organisations that haven’t grasped the importance of understanding data lineage often get caught in discussions relating to “which data is right” as oppose to what is the best use of our data. Appoint a data steward that maintains data integrity, validity and quality including ownership of the end-to-end data process. Remember the role is to govern and not to police!
