HOW TO LEAPFROG YOUR ORGANISATION TO BI MATURITY. A focus on people

Has your company made large investments in software only to discover a lack of utilisation in those investments?

Here’s why.

“People are your greatest asset.” ... Research shows that companies that view employees as valuable assets, and not cost centres, outperform companies that don't. When you know what to look for, there are clear signals that prove that a company is serious about investing in its people.

Did the decision to make an investment in software ever consider the capabilities of the employees to effectively use the software? What were those considerations?

We have a saying in our office that states, “software doesn’t solve problems”. The people working with software solve the problems. To us, it is a combination of both skilled employees and the software tools that turns software investments into value. So, when looking at your organisations business intelligence (BI) maturity, the impact of your employees on the maturity scale is worth noting.

It is well documented in research by Gartner (Gartner’s Third Chief Data Officer (CDO) Survey), and other analyst firms, that in many cases CDO’s claim that up to 70% of Data and BI project investments fail due to a lack of skills in the business.

In our local South African business context, a contributing factor to this failure rate is a reluctance to change. People in their comfort zones are hesitant to change. “We have been doing it this way for years, why should we change the way we are doing it now?”, is a response we often hear from corporate teams. This reluctance to change is often overlooked by senior executives when making serious investments into solutions that they know can change their business for the good.

When considering how to drive a real return on investment from your Data and BI investments, there are typically two groups of people in the business to consider. Your own team of BI professionals and the wider community of people who are expected to consume the information that the BI department produces. More and more, we are seeing people, who traditionally work in roles that did not require them to interact with data, being asked to provide information and data in connection with their job functions.

This new demand for insights is driving a requirement to upskill these people in the areas of data literacy, enabling them to read, work with, investigate and communicate with data in ways that they traditionally never had to.

BI PROFESSIONALS:

Do you believe that your BI offering is widely adopted across your user base?

Does your BI team have capacity to support your users and systems?

There are a broad range of skill sets that are employed in professional BI departments. These include Data Analysts, Business Analysts, ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) specialists, Data modellers, Data Warehouse developers, Data Base Administrators, BI developers, BI Managers, Data Scientists and more. Typically, these are people who have invested in these skills as a career choice. Here we would expect high skill levels and a deep understanding of how data flows through an organisation. They are able to identify opportunities in the data and present these back to the business to support decision making.

However, when making large investment decisions, do you consider what technologies your professional BI departments skill sets are based on? Are you about to make a decision that will introduce different software into the business that will require further investments in upskilling your current employees in order for you to fully extrapolate value from these new tools?

If the decision is a fundamental change in direction of technology, what impact will this have on your current employees? What risk is there of staff churn due to this new approach? Or would this investment provide an opportunity for your employees to further expand their current skill set and add more value to them individually and to your organisation?

Will this decision be a motivating factor for change, or further push the reluctance factor and prevent you from achieving the anticipated ROI?

SENIOR MANAGEMENT

Do you have any Business Users that are experts in business KPI's, the data that drives them and are proficient with BI Technologies?

We have recently met many highly qualified people who are subject matter experts in their field, yet who have had no exposure to data and analytics solutions. They do not have the fundamental base knowledge of how data is ingested into business, transformed, contextualised or how to read a basic dashboard. Never mind the skills required to interact with an advanced Business Intelligence software tool.

It is this group of people that presents the best opportunity to attain higher levels of return on data and BI investments. Many years ago in a Sales Management training session, we were asked what we thought motivates salespeople? 95% of the management in the room responded with the answer that commissions, or monetary reward motivates salespeople. The trainer argued, and presented fact based, data driven proof that what really motivates salespeople was training. The more skills and knowledge a salesperson had, the more meaningful their conversations with their clients became. This led to more successful solution driven encounters and increased sales.

Again, considering the worlds move to data driven organisations, will training your employees to understand the language of corporate data, and how to more effectively interact with your internal data and business intelligence department, motivate them to be more effective in their specific job functions? I believe so.

With the introduction of Self-Service Analytics, a number of years ago, BI Software vendors made significant changes to their software to simplify the user interface, with the hope of making the tools more accessible to users to help them navigate their own way to insights across their businesses. The uptake of self-service analytics has, in my opinion, still not realised its full potential due to the fear factor. ?Just by increasing the number of users of self-service analytics an organisations BI maturity could be quickly progressed. Yet despite the efforts of the vendors, many people are still reluctant to embrace the technology and use it to their advantage.

There are many tactical approaches one can make when attempting to drive self-service analytics. Helping end users overcome the fear that they have of ‘breaking the system’ because they don’t know how to use the tool can be assisted with training. Teaching users on the basics and fundamentals of how data flows through the organisation will further help reduce the fear factor and entrench skill sets that will go beyond the self-service requirements, again assisting further development of people on the BI Maturity scale.

EXECUTIVES:

Does your data and BI drive your business objectives and performance management strategies?

Executives are by no means exempt from requiring upskilling to deepen their understanding of data while leveraging BI systems to assist in more accurate decision making. In a 2020 report by Splunk, in collaboration with Censuswide, in Europe, of the CEO’s surveyed, more than half (53%) stated that they were pressured to make critical decisions at least once a day. The time pressure to make these decisions is diverting them away from making fact-based data driven decisions. Further they stated, nearly half, or 47% of the business decisions were being made based on gutfeel, and less than 1% of the business leaders stated their decisions were always ‘data-led’.

By evaluating data skills across your entire organisation, you can truly deliver on the promise of digital transformation and move your organisation successfully into the future. Technology is adapting and changing at a rapid pace, with more and more data being generated now than ever before. Your team needs to be fully motivated and skilled so they can realise the investment potential it promises.

Expeditus is leading data and analytics consulting company.

Let’s make you a data driven business.