And so, you are tasked to embark on a journey to build your organization’s analytical strategy. What do you do next?
Once a major strategic initiative is assigned the first step anyone should do is to assess what the organization currently has. This is entirely true for any organization or projects, you just can’t jump right into it without a better understanding of how the organization works and how do you define success on your initiative. Though, for some people, they just totally jump-in and focuses on the next big thing without a real understanding of the needs of the business.
I usually see people trying to be innovative by trying to position different technologies to their organization and tell the management that “This is what we need to be on top of the competition” or something like “We need AI to help accelerate our GROWTH.” Well, these phrases may probably be true if you have enough understanding of the needs of your organization. If these proposals can have a positive impact on the company’s bottomline or topline revenue, then it totally makes sense to proceed, but will it really have a positive impact? When?
To help professionals deliver a more sound judgement into their recommendation, understanding the current maturity model of the organization, in this case, in analytics will really help uncover business issues that requires immediate resolution and business opportunities that requires immediate priority.
A typical assessment would have to answer the following questions:
– How many data sources do we have? (POS, Mobile App, Terminals, CRM, CMS, etc.)
– Does the organization have a single data storage or warehouse? (Hadoop, RDBMS, etc.)
– Do we have a dedicated team managing all the organization’s data? (BI, Data Management, etc.)
– Do we have a data governance policy? (Data ownership, steward, etc.)
– What current data management/data storage technologies are in placed? (Teradata, Hadoop, SAS, Talend, etc.)
– Are the reports centralized? Who are the people tasked to build and maintain these reports?
– Who are the key people who requests these reports?
– What does the business wants to achieve with the data that the company have?
The list will just go longer and longer and each question will definitely open up other questions for discussion. Once you are satisfied with the information that you have, that is the time for you to start building a clear picture of the current state of the organization. Once this is layed down, run this thru with your business leads and see how each facets of the organization can come up with viable use cases to support the initiative. Always look for quick-wins but make sure that it is aligned to your roadmap.