Are you constantly having to justify your businesses analytics program to business leaders? Or are you working at a corporation that recognizes the business intelligence ROI that an Analytics program delivers, and is constantly demanding more?
For the majority of program managers the former is true and that means continuously promoting analytics to ensure that business users are leveraging the insights that the data provides. By leveraging analytics, the business can better meet customers’ needs and wants while remaining current and relevant in the marketplace.
The problem, however, is that certain integral IT roles, that provide critical data insight and analysis, are not leveraged by the business. Their importance in day to day processes often goes unrealized. As a result, it becomes hard for the business and in particular program managers, to justify certain strategies and tactics. Furthermore, if you as a program manager have difficulty justifying your program to your business leaders, they can prevent the proper funding and resources from being allocated to keep the program running smoothly, and thus impede critical business operations from moving forward.
In order to create more awareness on the importance of analytics, program managers and IT need to promote the analytics program internally so that every employee is aware of why and how it is being used as well as the benefits it can offer to their individual team and the business as a whole.
The first step in promoting an analytics program is to understand your business. That means you need to identify the needs and wants of your company’s customers; evaluate the products, services, and programs that your company offers to those customers; and determine which target markets the organization can serve best. In other words, understand what is guiding your organization.
Secondly, it is important to remember that you manage a product with supporting services that are of value to the organization. Those services also need to be managed over time (like any standalone business function would). You need to work closely with users to understand how they are using the system according to their different roles, and what features they wish they had to better support their work. Even if the new Analytics functionality you produce seems really cool to you, if it’s not what users want (and thus won’t use it), then it was pointless to create it in the first place.
Here are some additional key tactics that your analytics program management team can implement in order to better infuse analytics into everyday business processes:
Generate Awareness: Do people in your organization know who you are or how to access the Analytics service? Following a consistent communication schedule will help people more quickly recognize your name, and what help and support you can provide them.
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