The Importance of Analytics Methodology

Organizations realize the tremendous benefits associated with getting data into the hands of everyone who needs it, while moving the data closer to the point of action.  The notion of broadly deploying analytics across business units and locations to realize these benefits has largely been a goal of many organizations. Some have even taken it one step further by delivering these capabilities in the self-serve environment to let business users further analyze the data.

With organizations focused on achieving the value that analytics can offer, why are so many organizations struggling to get it right? 

In my experience, working across a broad set of customers from various industries, their struggles have less to do with technology and more to do with their delivery framework and methodology. Deploying analytics to the enterprise is an exercise that requires both strategic leadership and analytical skills. 

From a strategic leadership perspective, you must establish a collaborative environment while developing and fostering a data-driven culture that is supported by analytics. This collaborative environment will enable organizations to do more with less while increasing user adoption which will maximize their return on investment related to analytics. Successful organizations need a strong leader and business sponsor to drive collaboration across the organization in addition to the necessary partnership between the business users and IT. 

From an analytical approach, you must understand the underlying analytics technologies to architect a solution that will meet the business requirements and build a solid foundation for your analytics platform moving forward. The solution should be able to increase in maturity with each new initiative to drive more capabilities to the business in an incremental way while easily scaling as the business and data volumes continue to grow. Most importantly, this person must have a strong understanding of the business benefits and the value each initiative can deliver to the business.

Success will ultimately require a strong leader with a proven methodology for deploying enterprise analytics. The methodology will have to account for ownership, team responsibilities, governance, architecture, security, change management, and strategy. An established methodology is critical to help an organization achieve success by transforming the organization’s analytics from a low-value departmental approach to a high-value strategic program.