Now.
In 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.