Data driven decisions and predictive analytics - how do we make it a reality?

You wouldn’t be alone if you admitted to spending far too much time mucking around in an Excel spreadsheet. In fact, Mark Tossell,?CIO and Principal Consultant at Visioneer360, tells me that he has encountered numerous businesses where employees work from their own spreadsheet rather than the premium software their business invests in.?

Listen to the episode here.

A self-proclaimed data nerd, Mark’s role at Salesforce and Tableau partner Visioneer360 is the Practice Lead.?

“We specialise in helping customers get value from their data, which is a huge challenge,” Mark tells me.?

Data driven decision making is a fundamental consideration for any business. Yet in my experience, I have found that customers don’t know what to ask their partner for, or do not comprehensively understand the problem they are experiencing. I don’t even play in the data space, however these issues pop up in any strategy conversation.

“I hear ‘predictive insights’ in almost every conversation with clients,” Mark tells me. “But when you pull the layers of the onion away and get to the heart of the matter, what they're looking for is one source of truth for decision making.”

Simple enough it seems. With an abundance of analytics programs and software that can produce visualisations, using data analytics to make business decisions may seem relatively straightforward. Surprise, Surprise - this is not the case.

“In a recent report by Gartner in the United States, a key statistic revealed that 80% of the analytics that businesses had invested in were not used,” Mark tells me. “The reasoning I hear a fair bit is?‘we've got all these dashboards but they’re mostly BS’, or ‘there's all these problems with them, so I can't trust them.’?This is when we find employees relying on their own spreadsheets.”?

While individual spreadsheets may be okay in some instances, these private documents lead to siloed information that hinders the effective functioning of business.?

“When we talk about siloed information, we're often talking about that in a technology context. I find in business, one of the great struggles around information is information that's siloed with individuals with people.”?

Who knew data analytics could lead into a discussion surrounding organisational politics and change management! However, Mark presents this as a core issue in the effectiveness of data usage in business.

“People are focusing on technology - and yes, that's a critical factor - but you could have the greatest platform, the best integrations, the most robust architecture, and it will be worthless if the business process is not driving sound data governance.”

Alongside the business process, a key component of success is the system configuration that is aligned with this.

“It amazes me how people invest so heavily in platforms and yet everything is still incredibly manual. They're not using process automation and they're not using templates.”

Mark thinks that this may be his engineering background speaking, but it makes sense. He also thinks that often it is leadership that undermines the determination to implement such automation.

If you're not careful, you build a dashboard to suit a particular persona (which is often someone in leadership), but actually doesn't align with what the team needs.?

Mark shares a great example with me when he worked with a smaller business. You could go into Salesforce and look at the login time and it was once a week, on Friday afternoon. They just were not using the software.?

“It's not enough that the leadership can get the dashboards they need to run the business. As architects, we have to bake in some functionality for the users.”

I describe this concept in the?Platform Owner’s Guidebook?as ‘push and pull’. If you don't design something that's usable, friendly, and simple, it's not going to give value to the people who use it day in and day out. But I have also been in the situation where the executive stakeholder says, ‘I'm not going to make my employees use it, you need to make them’. As I told Mark in this week’s episode, I'm not Facebook. Senior Executives are accountable to drive change by asking the tough questions and motivating their team. You need to use a blend of both tactics.?

Is your team relying on their personal spreadsheets to complete their work? Or are your data analytics tools being neglected because your team doesn’t find them useful? As an architect, it is up to you to provide dashboards and tools that satisfy the needs of leadership, but also are functional and useful for users. However, this does not let leadership off the hook.

Defining your goals and motivating your team to use these tools is a vital task for execs.?Data driven decisions and predictive analytics - how do we make it a reality?

About the author:

I am a technology strategy advisor and advocate to leaders of high-growth businesses (scaleup’s). I specialise in leveraging software platforms to enable your business to scale. I am the author of the best-selling?The Platform Owner’s Guidebook: How industry experts unlock value from enterprise software?and creator and host of the "Platform Diaries” Podcast, a fortnightly conversation with entrepreneurs, founders, investors and thought leaders on what it takes to sustainably scale a business.?

When not in front of a client or a screen, you'll find me riding motorbikes, brewing beer, or camping with my kids.?