Data is more than just the future; it’s the present too. About 95 percent of businesses responding to a Forbes survey said they have a need to manage unstructured data. But what are you supposed to do with all of it?
Crafting an analytics strategy is essential to successfully using data.
Determine Your Goals
Before building an analytics strategy, you need to determine what you actually want to get from the program in general. Of course, you want your business to run more efficiently. But that’s far too broad to be considered a strategy.
Give your organization an honest look. There are undoubtedly ways in which it can improve. Finding and understanding problems is a lot more difficult — and important — than looking for quick solutions. If you rush toward a fix before you actually know what’s wrong, you’re going to create more problems without fixing the original one.
If you’re just trying to find problems by looking through data, you’re wasting your time and money. Albert Einstein was quoted as saying, “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.” This is the approach you need to bring to your analytics strategy. Once you’ve fully understood the problem, a good BI or analytics tool should make finding the resolution a breeze.
Acknowledge the Importance of Working Together
It’s hard for a business to succeed when departments don’t work together. Just because working with data can be technical and specialized doesn’t mean it should be relegated to a dark corner of your organization.
Your business should have a goal of using data to optimize every possible function to maximum efficiency. This is only going to happen if departments work together. You’ll find some BI tools are much better suited for this task than others. It’s also important, however, to structure your organization in a way that facilitates collaboration.
Get the Right Tools
Not all analytics tools are the same. It’s important to keep this in mind when formulating an analytics strategy. As mentioned in the previous section, collaboration between departments is key to successful deployment. ThoughtSpot is one analytics provider that offers just the right tools for bringing data into your whole organization.
Relational search analytics is an AI-powered technology employing natural language processing to make using data more accessible to non-experts. Essentially, you can input queries in the same way one might search for something in Google. This leads to instant, actionable results.
Don’t Be Afraid of Data Democratization
Some organizations might shy away from data democratization due to safety concerns. While these are certainly valid things about which to think, you still need to find ways to spread data insights throughout your company.
There are some important concerns about letting laypeople have too much access and free reign with data. Some might fear it will lead to improper analysis, or potentially a loss of data. Neither of these should be a concern, however, if you have the right BI tools and permission protocols in place.
Avoid Single-Track Thinking
Data analytics is all about seeing things in new ways. One of the biggest things you can do to totally undermine your analytics work is be overly focused on one way of doing things. Singlemindedness, and an aversion to trying something new, will severely limit what you’re able to do with analytics. While it’s always key to ensure accuracy and purpose when using analytics tools, you run the risk of leaving too much on the table if you don’t look outside the box.
All these concepts can help enterprises put together an effective analytics strategy. It’s important to lay down this initial framework before getting too deep into the specifics of your strategy. Otherwise, you can get lost going down fruitless rabbit holes, while still not solving the real problems.
