Change management for analytics success
In a recent survey conducted by Forbes Insights and EY, 564 executives from around the world were asked about their challenges and successes in implementing and driving value from analytics across their organizations.
One of the key insights was that recognizing the value of analytics at a leadership level is only part of the process. The majority of the best (i.e., the top 10% of analytics-driven organizations identified by the report) all aligned enterprise, departmental and business lines data and analytics groups, while only 13% of the rest (i.e., the remaining 90% of respondents) had set up such governance structures. Three in five leaders from these top organizations also rated change management as “extremely important” in their move to becoming effective analytics-driven organizations – but what does this entail?
Insights derived from analytics alone are only useful if they are actionable and lead to value – how they are consumed, rather than merely produced by the organization.
“There’s virtually no process an organization has that the better use of data and analytics can’t impact in some way,” says Chris Mazzei, EY’s Chief Analytics Officer. “It’s going to touch a lot of people. Because of that, those people need to be better consumers of analytics and have an analytics mindset. They’re not going to be building models, and they don’t have to be data scientists. But they have to be able to leverage analytics into the core business processes and functions that they’re running.”
Analytics consumption takes place at two levels: within the organization, insights can help decision-makers understand their markets, product or service positioning and operations; and, individually, analytics can help employees at all levels and locations throughout the enterprise improve their business processes.
As with any transformative initiative, support for data and analytics initiatives needs to come from the top ranks – but this also is not enough on its own. Sometimes it can be hard to persuade staff that these new tools add value, rather than merely adding complexity by producing more insights that can lead to more confusion than action.
This is why a successful data and analytics environment needs employees at all levels to buy into the effort. Technology will help you to produce data – but it takes human beings to consume it in effective ways to deliver the right insights at the right time.
The ability to address change management is a vital component of data and analytics success because it is essential to driving insights into actions across the organization. If the board sees analytics as important but staff on the ground continue to use the old methods, your technological investment could go to waste.
