High-performing companies view continuous business improvement as a priority. They understand they must be both proactive to meet current challenges and simultaneously spot opportunities to create new business. These companies are rich in data, and know that data analytics provides the key to improve business. Analytics workshops bring together stakeholders to create a roadmap of prioritized analytics opportunities.
Why?
Analytics equips your people to stay ahead of the constant changes emerging from competition, customers, and other external factors. Change precipitates questions like how do we respond to new conditions, new customers, and new products? Unlike applications that are built to ask specific questions and answer them, in analytics, the questions are changing all the time. Workshops help identify the existing questions that challenge your people today and provide a roadmap that prioritizes the analytics capabilities you need to meet the unanticipated questions you will need to meet in the future.
What?
Analytics workshops bring together stakeholders across the spectrum of business users to identify critical uses of analytics. The result is a consensus on the questions that departments struggle to answer, while often revealing entirely new questions where data and analytics can fill the gaps. It will identify analytic accelerators (specific actions involving your existing data) to help you align your data more effectively with your people and processes.
The analytics roadmap will provide a prioritized list of specific ways that data can better meet the needs of your business. For each item on the list, the roadmap will show a consensus estimate of:
The business value to the bottom line
The level of impact on the business (strategic, tactical, departmental, etc.)
A qualitative measure of readiness/ability to execute
When?
You can think of analytics priorities workshops in the same way as you think of a periodic vehicle tune-up. If your organization is a transactions intensive business, it is likely that you have multiple data sources that are providing the raw material for a wide variety of departmental reports, analyses and ad hoc queries. If you have multiple business intelligence tools, or power users that you count on to deliver insights, it is likely that there is wide variability in how effectively these are able to meet the needs of various functional departments. You should consider doing an analytics prioritization exercise whenever:
It has been a year or more since a new application has been implemented
You are considering acquiring new business intelligence tools
People seem to struggle to work across departmental lines
Employees are spending time tackling minor problems while more critical items languish
