Planning Analytics Blog

Your analytics thought partner

Use Your Analytics to Drive Collaboration

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CollaborationWe often write here and talk in the hall about the critical purpose of analytics in planning and setting the compass for the organization and its teams. Sorry of it sounds like we’re preaching. It’s just our passion to get clients and colleagues to use their internal data, work processes and external (Big) data effectively to achieve stated objectives.

Employees who are collaborating together are far more likely to come up with innovative ideas, deliver better overall pieces of work, and collectively deliver a competitive advantage against similar organizations without such a strong collaborative ethos.

There is also significant power in networks over individuals.

  • With usage analytics it is possible to understand how much users are already using all of these different categories and use this information to project what they may require in the future.
  • Of course, this needs to be combined with requirements for particular collaborative needs in the business – for example, a need to drive document and file sharing usage across the entire organization.
  • Once the requirements have been set, you can apply analytics to intelligently deploy services and applications by getting a holistic view of any technical pre-requisites.

But usage analytics really comes into its own when the organization wants to rapidly and successfully drive adoption of these collaborative technologies. It is intuitive that collaboration is most effective when all required parties are bought into the benefits.

Using usage analytics makes it a simple task to identify the Champions and to set up a program where Champions can influence the followers to improve their engagement with new technologies. Of course there are also other reasons why individuals may under-utilize certain technologies but having a clear understanding of overall usage makes it far easier for an organization to pinpoint causes and process barriers.

Without such analytics, combined with the increased mobility of employees, IT is at worst blind to overall adoption, and at best has only a highly simplistic binary view of usage (e.g. has used this month / has not used this month)

So applying usage analytics as a method to drive adoption can be extremely effective. It can drive overall usage, leading to greater collaboration and therefore greater employee engagement. It also ensures the best value from new technologies within an organization.

We have some success stories to share that tell you we can help with your analytics and collaboration challenges. Call us to start a neutral and friendly conversation: 512-478-3848.

Watch your efficacy go up and employee disconnect go down!

Get Agile With Your Analytics and Be the Eye of the Tiger!

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Analytics Thought PartnerWe’ve been saying that when Gartner talks about analytics and business (and healthcare) intelligence, we all stop and listen. Not that they are either prescient or infallible, but that they do the research . . . so we don’t have to.

Here is our take on some of the research, comments and implications of the fast-pace and a changing ecosystem of agile analytics from a Gartner summit last month.

According to Alan Duncan, research director at Gartner, “Analytic agility is the ability for business intelligence and analytics to be fast, responsive, flexible and adaptable.”

This capability is in high demand. “One of the biggest challenges businesses face when implementing a digital strategy is ‘faster implementation,’” said Mr. Duncan. In Gartner’s Digital Business Survey, 48% of respondents cited this challenge. Gartner clients report lead times of six weeks or more to develop and generate the business reports that are necessary to make business decisions.

Mr. Duncan advised: “Abandon hierarchical working practices, and build analytics teams with a culture of agility.” Here are his recommendations.

Team Structure

To be agile, analytics teams need to be configured in a way that enables members to dynamically adopt different roles. Factors to consider include:

  • The team may function in a fully centralized manner, or in “virtual” collaboration, depending on the organizational culture and dynamics.
  • Once in place, the team may move toward self-organization, where it will make its own decisions about who will fulfill roles to achieved required project outcomes.
  • Resourcing levels may need to vary according to levels of demand.
  • Other internal resources can be brought in when required.

Leadership

Leaders entrusted with leading agile analytics need to create an environment where self-organizing team members can effectively operate and deliver value to the business. Agile analytics team leaders should be able to:

  • Relate: Share business insights that build team trust
  • Scout: Seek information from other stakeholders
  • Persuade: Engage, support and encourage the team
  • Empower: Delegate, coach and support team members

Mr. Duncan stressed that the term “agile” is used within the IT domain to describe a specific category of software development methodologies. “Agility within the analytics practice refers to a general ability to be responsive, flexible and deliver fast insights,” he explained.

You don’t need to do it all yourself. There are effective ways to get the best of both.

We enhance your BI capabilities. Bring us into your strategic conversations.

As an experienced analytics thought partner, we’ll give you new insights into trends, measure progress toward a set of quantitative goals, flag shifts in your markets or financial operations and even lift your customer experiences to a higher level of satisfaction.

Call us to start a neutral and friendly conversation: 512-478-3848.

We have some success stories to share that tell you we can help with your agile planning analytics! And some related reading if you’re interested.

www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/bring-your-own-app-strategies

In 2016, Gartner Speaks Analytics and We All Listen

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Team MeetingThe business intelligence market is in a serious state of transition, according to the Gartner.

Companies are overwhelmingly choosing a new breed of data-discovery and interactive-analysis platforms. In fact, they’re choosing these platforms even when they’re not the most appropriate tools for the job at hand, says Gartner, and despite lingering concerns about how to govern data across the enterprise.

What’s at stake in this transition is not just the survival of well-known, IT-centric BI platforms. Gartner says companies will inevitably have to reconcile why they have separate system-of-record reporting platforms and data-discovery platforms, because “no single vendor fully addresses both [needs].”

  • What the data-discovery platforms tend to lack is the ability to scale and govern data for a variety of applications across the enterprise, according to Gartner.
  • The conventional IT-centric platforms, meanwhile, are attempting to replicate the business-user-friendly attributes of the data-discovery platforms, but mostly these have been “pale imitations” and thus “have had limited adoption.”

Against this backdrop, and based on more than 2,000 customer interviews over the last year, Gartner says its latest evaluations and expectations on its horizontal “completeness of vision” axis and higher expectations on the vertical “ability to execute” axis are now modified to take both into account. For this reason, the analyst firm cautions that comparing vendor positions from last year to this year is “not particularly useful.”

You don’t need to do it all yourself. There are effective ways to get the best of both.

We enhance your BI capabilities. Bring us into your strategic analytics conversations.

As an experienced analytics thought partner, we’ll give you new insights into trends, measure progress toward a set of quantitative goals, flag shifts in your markets or financial operations and even lift your customer experiences to a higher level of satisfaction.

Call us to start a neutral and friendly conversation at 512-478-3848.

Leverage Your Planning Analytics With a Thought Partner

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Planning AnalyticsOnce largely the domain of back-office functions, analytics has evolved to play a much more strategic role for industrial companies.

Production and all related processes are more data intensive than ever, and so have become rich sources of critical insights. By mining those insights, organizations can improve the performance of their core business—and generate new sources of revenue. Thanks to intelligent software embedded right across the manufacturing value chain, industrial equipment manufacturers, for example, can analyze machine performance in real time to pre-empt potential problems and limit costly downtime.

Similarly, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) can analyze diverse streams of data to develop relevant, location-based customer services and customized offers for individuals.

  • On-demand analytics platforms allow the swift compilation, formatting and cleansing of the heterogeneous data streams—both structured and unstructured—that comprise Big Data.
  • Less time needs to be spent on integrating and reporting, and more can be spent on actually analyzing: winnowing out irrelevancies and focusing on the small but critical amounts of information that can generate true insights about customers, operations or channels.

Analytics solutions are also significantly more sophisticated. Yesterday’s descriptive analytics helped quantify and confirm what has already occurred. Today’s more advanced, predictive analytics help companies understand what will happen in the future. Seeing trends as they develop allows manufacturers to seize new opportunities as they occur, or even to get ahead of them. It also helps keep customers happy—and saves money.

In short, by leveraging analytics as an embedded capability, throughout the value chain, industrial enterprises can improve entire global ecosystems of suppliers, facilities and logistics, as well as respond to shifts in customer needs and behavior, and to emerging trends in market demand and supply.

Reaping the rewards of analytics can be challenging, for sure. And our work with healthcare and industrial companies has identified a number of hurdles that limit widespread adoption. Even so, many C-suite executives are exploring ways to make data flow more easily, quickly and usefully through their enterprises.

According to Accenture, exceptional customer experience is a top 3 priority of 86% of industry executives.

We encourage you to dial up an experienced partner who can see your data and planning analytics priorities and opportunities from a different and wider perspective. If you see you’re getting bogged down and behind your rapid deployment objectives curve, just email or call us at 512-478-3848. We can listen to understand your needs.

And we could very well be a great match to partner with you and catapult you up to the top of your big-data scaling up process, custom applications deployment and your business intelligence wave.

 

Planning Analytics for Your Most Valuable Asset

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Stuck in a useless comfort zone?

WorkforceBetween 40 and 70 percent of most companies’ operating expenses go toward meeting compensation, benefits, and other employee-related expenses. Add together the real estate, information technology, and other expenses consumed by your workforce, and it’s easy to imagine its real impact on operating costs.

But beyond basic cost figures and employee demographics, many senior executives have little or no specific visibility or insight into how these expenses and resources relate to broader corporate issues. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Workforce reporting and planning analytics are capable of delivering greater visibility and deeper insights that pave the way to more effective business decision making on your most complex workforce-related challenges.

For many organizations, workforce planning is still used only once a year or so, or in response to a crisis. Workforce reporting and analytics is a smart way to get a specific project in place to spearhead an analytics culture shift. Get out of the bar ditch and see what you can do!

Create a new culture, shift to workforce analytics

When people start gathering and acting on workforce information, the old rules start giving way to a new analytics-based approach to solving problems:

  1. Consider combining data from internal sources with macroeconomic data coming from outside your organization to make more informed decisions about issues such as talent supply and spending.
  1. People have been talking about data-driven cultures for a long time, but what it takes to create one is changing as a result of the new tools available. Companies have a wider set of options to spur analytics engagement among critical employees. And the new tools, when customized to your needs, are affordable and almost effortless to use.
  1. Be imaginative and resourceful. Evolve your thinking over time. Demonstrate your confidence by staying open to new information. And ways to use a partner’s expertise to sharpen and shape new thinking.

And then engage an analytics thought partner and development team.

Planning Analytics to Big Data Business Intelligence

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You can do it.

Business IntelligenceIf you see your organization struggling with an array of impediments to scaling data-analytics efforts, the first step is to make sure you are doing enough to adopt some of the new tools that are emerging to help deal with such challenges. They actually work.

Have an analytics thought partner on board who can align and guide your processes.

Democratization and the power of new tools can help overcome frontline doubts and unfamiliarity with analytics. However, in addition to gaining confidence, key players need to change their way of making decisions to take advantage of analytics.

This is the heart of the change-management challenge—it is not easy, and it takes time. The implication is that to achieve scale, paradoxically, you need to focus. Trying to orchestrate change in all of a company’s daily decision-making and operating approaches is too overwhelming to be practical.

In our experience, though, it’s possible to drive adoption and behavioral change across the full enterprise in focused areas such as pricing, inventory allocation, or credit management and revenue cycle optimization. Better to pursue scale that’s achievable than to overreach and be disappointed or to scatter plots all over the organization.

People have been talking about data-driven cultures for a long time, but what it takes to create one is changing as a result of the new tools available. Companies have a wider set of options to spur analytics engagement among critical employees.

Be imaginative and resourceful. Evolve your thinking over time. Demonstrate your confidence by staying open to new information. And ways to use a partner’s expertise to sharpen and shape new thinking.

We enhance your BI capabilities. Bring us into your strategic conversations.

As an analytics thought partner, we’ll give you new insights. We’ll clarify your thinking into trends, measure progress toward a set of quantitative goals, flag shifts in your markets or financial operations and even lift your customer experiences to a higher level. Call us to start a neutral and friendly conversation 512-478-3848.

 

Get Big Impact from Planning Analytics and Big Data

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Now.

Planning Analytics MeetingIn previous posts here, we’ve shown how capturing the potential of data analytics requires the building blocks of any good strategic transformation:

  • It starts with a plan,
  • Demands the creation of new senior-management capacity to really focus on data, and,
  • Perhaps most important, addresses the cultural and skill-building challenges needed for the front line (not just the analytics team) to embrace the change.

We want to focus on what to do when you’re in the midst of that transformation and facing the inevitable challenges to realizing large-scale benefits (exhibit). For example, management teams frequently don’t see enough immediate financial impact to justify additional investments.

Frontline managers lack understanding and confidence in the analytics and hesitate to employ it. Existing organizational processes are unable to accommodate advancements in analytics and automation, often because protocols for decision making require multiple levels of approval.

Organizational adaptation is also needed to overcome fear and catalyze change. Management teams need to shift priorities from small-scale exercises to focusing on critical business areas and driving the use of analytics across the organization.

And sometimes, jobs need to be redesigned to embrace advancements in digitization and automation. An organization that quickly adopts new tools and adapts itself to capture their potential is more likely to achieve large-scale benefits from its planning, business intelligence and data-analytics efforts.

Adopting . . . Adapting to Scale

Few areas are experiencing more innovation and investment than big data and analytics. New tools and improved approaches across the data-analytics ecosystem are offering ways to deal with the challenge of achieving scale. From our vantage point, three hold particular promise.

  1. The emergence of targeted solutions from analytics-based software and service providers that are helping their clients achieve a more direct, and at times faster, impact on the bottom line. An emerging class of analytics specialists builds models targeted to specific use cases.
  1. Self-service tools are building business users’ confidence in analytics. One hot term gaining traction in the analytics world is “democratization.” Getting analytics out of the exclusive hands of the statistics gurus, and into the hands of a broad base of frontline users, is seen as a key building block for scale.
  1. Hands-on experience (guided by experts in early go-rounds) helps people grow accustomed to using data. That builds confidence and, over time, can increase the scale and scope of data-informed problem solving and decision support.

Ready, set go!

If you see you’re getting bogged down and behind your rapid deployment objectives curve, just email or call us at 512-478-3848. We can listen to understand your needs. And we could very well be a great match to partner with you and catapult you up to the top of your big-data scaling up process and your business intelligence wave.

 

Strategic Business Partnership – An Introduction

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Strategic Business PartnerYou know you’re overwhelmed! 2015 year-end reporting just ended, along with presentations that bring all of their accompanying stresses. And now you are getting up on top of your promontory to look at where your prospects are going, what your customers and stakeholders want and need and how to leverage on that huge and variable investment you continue to make in human assets.

Fun?

To be explicit about the Strategic Business Partner (SBP) concept, we believe the role must be developed around providing human capital, technology and organization change perspectives embedded into business leadership teams. In order to be effective, your external resources need to work in partnership with the other organizational leaders.

The SBP model is a way to ensure the human system implications and needed change strategies are part of business leadership decisions.

It involves both what was always intended as strategic work in HR and new work in strategic thinking, planning analytics, technology deployment, big data usage, organization design, culture change, human system alignment and change management. The specific context, characteristics, and demands of any industry or organization sector will ultimately drive this role.

In order to put more context around the Strategic Business Partner role, we need to start by working from the outside-in. We live in a hyper-turbulent world. Today we must adapt to numerous unprecedented challenges that change the very nature of what business we are in and how that business gets conducted.

The reality often includes doing business 24/7, globally across numerous cultural boundaries, with new compliance requirements and technologies being invented daily and shifting technology generations yearly; responding to new forms of competition locally and globally; learning to manage an ever-shifting set of demographics; and keeping pace with the speed of change in everything.

All of these realities have significant human capital implications, raising the value of strategic planning. For example, organizations (and their SBPs) increasingly need to plan for the use of social media in communications, technology in working virtually, cultural competence in conducting business and change management for aligning people and systems during continuous change.

When a company becomes so wedded to its own perspectives that it cannot make appropriate changes as events continue to unfold, a corporate mindset–a specific way of considering developments—has taken hold. When companies are so invested in their plans and assumptions that they are unable to make course corrections as circumstances change, there is a lack of healthy variety in the quality of their thinking, which leads to these dysfunctional perspectives, or mindsets, developing within the company.

The result is that the company develops blinders–a tunnel vision of sorts–that limit its peripheral vision and narrows what the company perceives as important.

Bright companies are able to shift gears and change focus in the face of new information or new opportunities. They aren’t wedded to past solutions. They invite rather than fear diverse ideas. They are imaginative and resourceful. Their thinking evolves over time. They demonstrate their confidence by staying open to new information. And ways to use their partner’s experience and experience to sharpen and shape new thinking.

We enhance your business intelligence capabilities. Bring us into your strategic conversations.

As a thought partner, we’ll give you new insights into trends, measure progress toward a set of quantitative goals, flag shifts in your markets or financial operations and even lift your customer experiences to a higher level. Call us to start a neutral and friendly conversation. 512-478-3848.

Let Planning Analytics Become Your Laser Guidance System

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Align IT to Your Core Business

Planning AnalyticsAdvanced planning solutions must not only have the flexibility to support re-forecasting, but also provide accurate analytics to model and assess results. Model-based forecasting gives finance and business units what-if analyses and data-driven insights, and enables these scenarios to be tested against outcomes throughout execution of the plan. This continuous re-forecasting offers answers to critical questions, including:

  • What did we initially predict, and why?
  • How are we performing against our plans, and why?
  • How should we adapt our plans going forward?

An advanced planning analytics solution:

  • can feed updates directly to the finance team, which can then revise marketing and sales projections into net revenue projections and
  • give decision makers the insights they need to adapt the strategic plan within hours or days, instead weeks or months when remedial action to attain objectives may be too late.

While spreadsheets remain useful in daily business practice, spreadsheet-based planning—that is, using spreadsheets as sources of input into the planning process—is not only slow and inefficient but also introduces data inaccuracies sufficient to radically undermine the strategic plan itself. In this context, finance professionals considering an advanced planning solution should determine if their software can streamline and enhance the speed and accuracy of the planning process.

Today, cloud-based technologies are helping finance groups not only address spreadsheet inefficiencies, but also take the entire planning, budgeting and forecasting process to a whole new level.

Previously, to model what-if scenarios, predictive analytics required an in-house deployment; now, current agile planning analytics are available in cost-effective cloud solutions that don’t compromise on power or capabilities.

You can learn more in this IBM white paper about ways to better evaluate planning, budgeting and forecasting software. It includes a detailed matrix relating best practices and product features to help you select the best solution for your organization.

Get Your Hands Dirty

Try and fail. Partner up with a pro. Hands-on experience (guided by experts in early go-rounds) helps people grow accustomed to using data. That builds confidence and, over time, can increase the scale and scope of data-informed problem solving and decision support.

We’re planning analytics, custom data apps development pros and thought partners who help you laser focus on the core data you need to drive your business successfully.

Call us to start a neutral and friendly conversation. 512-478-3848.

Related Content . . . that’s actionable!

www.ibmbigdatahub.com/blog/road-himss-building-foundation-data-analytics

Planning Analytics and Biting Into Big Data

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Planning AnalyticsAdding It Up

The company with the most data doesn’t necessarily win. It’s the one that understands how to use data, and for what purpose. Having a clearly stated objective helps narrow the universe of possibilities into a set of relevant choices that can be explored and refined. Keeping the business goal in mind also helps to keep analyses, and the analysts, on the right track.

Breaking It Down

  • Bottom line; if people truly want to realize big data’s potential, it’s time to start breaking the process down into pieces that the company can adequately manage. There are so many tools available today, and with the right approach and support almost any organization can figure out how to gain from a coherent big data strategy.
  • Unicorns are few and far between, so data teams and business units need to work together to meet business goals. Data scientists represent phenomena using data and models, and they are expected to understand what the business is trying to achieve. Conversely, business leaders should have at least a business-level understanding of what can be achieved with data.
  • Machine learning allows companies to discover patterns, develop new and better models, and improve their predictive capabilities, among other things. The massive scale and speed allow organizations to explore problems in ways that would not otherwise be feasible, which sometimes leads to intriguing new questions.
  • This is particularly true in the reforming and revitalizing the healthcare delivery processes we use in this country. Get to understanding what makes both the patient and the provider are willing to do to change their behaviors and watch how assets are more effectively utilized.

Get your hands dirty. Try and fail. Partner up with a pro. Hands-on experience (guided by experts in early go-rounds) helps people grow accustomed to using data. That builds confidence and, over time, can increase the scale and scope of data-informed problem solving and decision support.

Talk with us about your planning analytics objectives, current processes and needs. We’ll impartially show you how to get on the path to where you want to take your organization.

We’ll give you insights into trends, measure progress toward a set of quantitative goals, flag shifts in your markets or financial operations and even lift your customer experiences to a higher level. Call us to start a neutral and friendly conversation. 512-478-3848.