This is the good and the bad. Can you transform effectively?

You will likely have similar mixed feelings that I have when you drill down into these McKinsey Global Institute observations earlier this year about getting a big impact from big data.

It’s not just the lost potential and the opportunity costs, it’s also the incredibly narrow deployment of efforts under the corporate umbrella that make us wonder about the quality of a senior C-level team’s decisions. Now that’s scary.

Take two minutes and absorb a few of these salient points . . . and then choose your planning analytics or business intelligence path to greater success.

• MGI’s analysts caught many people’s attention when they estimated that retailers exploiting data analytics at scale across their organizations could increase their operating margins by more than 60 percent and that the US healthcare sector could reduce costs by 8 percent through data-analytics efficiency and quality improvements.
• For most legacy companies, data-analytics success has been limited to a few tests or to narrow slices of the business.
• Very few have achieved what you would call “big impact through big data,” or impact at scale.
• When asked what degree of revenue or cost improvement they had achieved through the use of these techniques, three-quarters said it was less than 1 percent.
• 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 and need 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.

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.

Do you see why you need a strategic partner that is an extension of your team?

We can help you monitor your predictive HR trends, measure progress toward a set of quantitative goals or flag shifts in your markets or financial operations. Call us to start a conversation that can enhance your data management investment while you make savvy asset management decisions. 512 478 3848.