Many of us are on the same journey. The world of data and analytics grows exponentially as do the limitless opportunities and associated complexities. As leaders in this space, we continue to need to get more from the people and data investments we have made. Over the years, significant amounts of effort and capital have been spent on the ecosystems we have built and continue to evolve; cloud, data, software, ML/AI, you name it and absolutely these are critical components in delivering value for our organizations but we cannot lose sight of the fact there is a significant human/person interaction necessary to bring these opportunities to life.
What my career of leading Analytics and CRM teams through transformational change has taught me is time and time again simply replacing or implementing new technology or capabilities will not generate the expected benefits . It’s only by understanding and building the interface between the technology and people that you truly unlock the value of the investment.
There are three tried and tested behaviours that have been incredibly helpful in my journey. The key is building a proactive strategy bringing together your people and process with your data and analytics investments and finding the right opportunities to implement them.
Remove Fear of the Unknown, The recent surge in awareness of Big Data, ML/AI, cloud has created awareness and huge expectations, and there remains a high level of uncertainty throughout organizations in how these capabilities are going to be fruitful. This disconnect creates friction ultimately reducing the impact you plan to make.
Check out my recent post out where you can find a simple to use template to start to collect value generating use cases. Customize it as you need to: at the core it’s about spending time up front building consensus on how to prioritize and maximize your teams time and resources.
Through this process, the key is developing a playbook that helps to provide context on how these capabilities work and integrates the necessary cross functional support to deliver the use case.
Build Your Coalition: Real exponential value comes from discovering new opportunities with your colleagues throughout your organization. Bring it to life by building interconnects with your cross functional peers.
Start with a small agenda to simply share and understand how your counterparts are creating value in their part of the organization. Over time work to deepen the discussion and start to envision joint use cases and outcomes. As they say there is strength in numbers and being able to show collaboration and a unified plan to achieve the outcome will drive both alignment in the organization as well as secure the necessary resources to execute.
Own the Outcome: Accountability is king and more and more it’s becoming critical that the Analytics and Data teams lead in the execution of a quantified outcome. By clarifying how a use case or new capability will be forward integrated into delivering improved product, customer experience, marketing capabilities, etc and how it will generate a quantified outcome in revenue or cost, trust will be created providing new levels of support to overcome issues as they arise.
Here are the top 5 things that you need to be consider as you quantify the value of your use case
What KPIs and by how much are you impacting them?
What is the timeline for delivering the benefit?
What are the risks you see to unlocking this value?
What is the investment needed to generate the benefit, hard and soft, time and money, your team and other stakeholders?
Key milestones and updates to show progress and build trust.
The volume and complexity of what it takes to be data driven will continue to rise. Now more than ever, it’s critical to invest time in building relationships and process within your organization to help you accelerate delivering new uses and value.
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