{"id":18194,"date":"2020-03-10T18:42:23","date_gmt":"2020-03-10T17:42:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?page_id=18194"},"modified":"2020-03-10T18:48:46","modified_gmt":"2020-03-10T17:48:46","slug":"how-analytics","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/about\/an-executive-guide-to-enterprise-analytics-strategy\/how-analytics","title":{"rendered":"How Analytics?"},"content":{"rendered":"

[under construction — sorry about the mess!]<\/h2>\n

<\/a>Don\u2019t think about the data, think about the decisions<\/h2>\n

[illustration \u2014 skeptical executive, crossed arms\u2026 ]<\/p>\n

<\/a>It\u2019s all relative<\/h2>\n

A lot of business analytics, naturally are based on the data you have available in the information. But this isn\u2019t typically the information that executives need to run the business.<\/p>\n

For example, if a company\u2019s sales are down 15%, should the executives get their bonuses? Doesn\u2019t sound like it, does it?<\/p>\n

But what if I told you that the overall market is down 30%, and the closest competitor is down 40%? Now do you think they should get the bonus?<\/p>\n

The important numbers in your business are always relative, not absolute.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to include appropriate comparison data in any analytics \u2013 across divisions, across time, or across companies.<\/p>\n

[Beyond budgeting for a most more rigorous discussion]<\/p>\n

<\/a>What\u2019s the Value of Analytics?<\/h2>\n

This is THE big question. The problem is that you don\u2019t know what you don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the value of ignorance?<\/p>\n

How do calculate the value of what you don\u2019t know?<\/p>\n

Post-implementation vs. pre-implementation. If systematically say that you got more value than expected, then<\/p>\n

Remember not to compare to zero benchmark \u2013 in fast-moving world, bound to be worse off after.<\/p>\n

Go for customers, not internal staff\u2026<\/p>\n

Risks<\/p>\n

<\/a>How do I know if I have enough analytics?<\/h2>\n

Strong ROI means you should probably have more<\/p>\n

Who should be in charge?<\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>The importance of Rethinking<\/h2>\n

Design thinking\u2026. Don\u2019t know what they don\u2019t know\u2026<\/p>\n

<\/a>The holy grail of \u201cself-service\u201d<\/h2>\n

Everybody<\/em> has always wanted \u201cself-service\u201d analytics.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no truly self-service analytics solution. Somebody has always done some work in advance. The data has to be brought together at some point in a way that makes sense, and this has to be done by somebody with expertise in data and technology.<\/p>\n

What has changed is the technology used, the data available, and the culture\/expertise of information use.<\/p>\n

There is now a lot more data available for business analysis, and a smaller proportion of that data come from internal corporate processes. While analytics has been around since the 1990s, the default assumption was that most of it would come from your own corporate systems.<\/p>\n

The underlying data was too complicated for users to access in \u201craw\u201d form, and a \u201csemantic layer\u201d of some kind was required that gave a business-friendly view of the information.<\/p>\n

Increased analytic maturity (i.e. people are more used to manipulating data) and better underlying technology platforms (simpler, faster, iterative interactions with data are now possible) have reduced this need (but not eliminated it \u2014 indeed, it\u2019s one of the biggest challenges of \u201cgoverned data discovery\u201d)<\/p>\n

Although the tools were designed for self-service, many deployments of these solutions ended up being \u201creport factories\u201d where the semantic layer was used by IT\/business experts to create reports for others. This often reintroduced the bottlenecks and frustrations that self-service BI was supposed to get rid of.<\/p>\n

The ability to have fast, interactive feedback to new questions means that the user interface can be improved. Instead of forcing users to ask a question, get a result, and then use that result to make a chart, you can do much more of the interaction on the chart itself. It\u2019s more appropriate for iterative discovery than reporting. It\u2019s also easier and more appealing to use, which is an important consideration in a technology that is still, sadly, seen as a \u201cnice to have\u201d in more organizations \u2014 i.e. people are rarely forced to use BI as part of their job.<\/p>\n

<\/a>The Role of Governance<\/h2>\n

Data governance is \u201cstopping people from doing stupid things with data\u201d. And, sadly, human stupidity when it comes to data is a vast subject.<\/p>\n

Data governance includes security, having people agree on common definitions (it\u2019s amazingly hard to define something like \u201chow many employees does the company have?\u201d \u2014 and the answer will vary considerably depending on why you are asking the question\/what you\u2019re going to do with the data), bad analysis, wasteful recreation of the same analyses, etc.<\/p>\n

Self-service BI can exacerbate all these problems by removing the checks and balances on data preparation and use. Without governance you are likely to end up with lots of silos of information, bad analysis, and extra costs.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s some nice literature on the problems of spreadsheet governance that is similar to the problems unsupervised self-service BI can lead to.<\/p>\n

First define \u201csuccess\u201d!<\/p>\n

Self-service tools can be very popular with business people that have been frustrated with the red tape and lack of agility associated with traditional IT organizations. To the extent that they can now make better business decisions faster, it\u2019s clearly \u201csuccessful\u201d \u2014 but there can be tradeoffs in terms of long-term costs and complexity.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to take \u201cgovernance\u201d to mean processes and procedures in general.<\/p>\n

The cultural aspects of information use are extremely important for BI\u2014 whether people are incented to use information, whether information is hoarded as \u201cpower,\u201d who is responsible for information, how it impacts people\u2019s bonuses, how the people involved in providing information to the business are organized, etc.<\/p>\n

All of this is vastly more important than the technology itself. Frank Buytendijk has written a series of books that cover many of these people and culture issues in more detail.<\/p>\n

De facto \u201cgovernance\u201d always exists, even if it\u2019s not codified. The underlying principles around information culture are more important than having documented procedures, etc. And as noted above \u201csuccess\u201d depends on what is being measured, but I believe that the benefits of governance policies and procedures clearly outweigh the costs.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Success factors for Self-Service BI<\/h2>\n

Are there any factors that you would consider as critical when developing and implementing a self-service BI strategy?<\/p>\n

One of the most interesting things about BI is that it\u2019s ultimately indistinguishable from whatever we mean by \u201cmanagement.\u201d I\u2019m not sure there are any \u201ccritical\u201d factors, but there\u2019s a long, long list of best practice.<\/p>\n

What do organizations have to change to take advantage of empowering their users to gain new insights through self-service BI?<\/p>\n

Change the information culture<\/p>\n

<\/a>Components of traditional BI usable for self service<\/h2>\n

Self-service BI typically builds on \u201ctraditional BI\u201d \u2014 i.e. the trusted data sources (finance, etc.) available through the enterprise data warehouse are a key part of the data analysis done in the \u201cself-service\u201d tools.<\/p>\n

What types of components of traditional BI strategies would you consider for using with self-service BI?<\/p>\n

There are many benefits to traditional BI. In particular, successful analytics requires at least some key information to be reliable, consistent, and secured. This often-painful process is one of the key areas of success of traditional BI implementations.<\/p>\n

<\/a>First, fix the people!<\/h2>\n

Poor Analysis Skills. Studies show that business people are not very good at analyzing data \u2014 more data can actually lead to worse decisions. A BICC with analysts on staff can help avoid problems, as can greater collaboration.<\/p>\n

Bad analytics<\/h3>\n

Did you know that 99% of teenage suicides had listened to rock music in the week before their death?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[under construction — sorry about the mess!] Don\u2019t think about the data, think about the decisions [illustration \u2014 skeptical executive, crossed arms\u2026 ] It\u2019s all relative A lot of business analytics, naturally are based on the data you have available in the information. But this isn\u2019t typically the information that executives need to run the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":18014,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-18194","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P3X9RF-4Js","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18194\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}