During my analytics focused career I have had the fortune of working with multibillion dollar organizations looking to set up an analytics capability. While I served them in different capacities, a full time employee, a third party consultant, an independent consultant and while they all had very different business models, I found that they all had one thing in common – the need for change management as it is accompanied by anything as paradigm changing as Analytics.
Analytics is viewed by most organizations in similar ways – top leadership recognizes this as the competitive advantage, as a tool to survive the ever changing economic realities and as something that has become part of any forward looking company that expects to hold its own in next 5-10 years. The analysts who have been MIS or financial analyses focused all their careers are much closer to reality when it comes to data availability and IT systems and process changes needed to implement analytics on a large scale and hence more than hesitant when they hear CXOs talking about analytics as need of the hour. Middle management is the one worst hit – one side they are under pressure from executive leadership to deliver results and other side they have a team that is worried about how analytics focus will change their lives at work.
While this scenario is true for most large scale changes, the challenge with analytics is that it is not successful unless it becomes part of day to day working style. Unless it’s adopted atall levels of the enterprise, one can never unlock its full potential and deliver returns on the large investments made in data and IT systems. And hence it becomes even more imperative that as organizations gear up to set up an enterprise wide analytics capability, they must recognize the change management needs that would accompany it.
Just to put the need for change management in perspective, I would like to share an example from my experience. A multi-billion dollar MNC that uses innovation in its products as the competitive edge, decided that it needs to adopt analytics in order to stay relevant as newer younger companies were coming up with equally innovative product range. Over last few years, significant investments were done in areas of data infrastructure and BI tools. There were monthly and quarterly reviews presided over by an executive leader with a highly analytical mindset. However, process owners across this business function chain kept saying that they didn’t have enough information to make right decisions at the right time. All this when there was a dedicated team churning and providing numbers to all levels of this business function at a regular frequency. So where exactly was the issue?
The key issue was that no one was converting data into insights, the analysts were not analyzing data to provide information, they were primarily completing a number churning task using latest BI tools and sending across reams of printed excel reports to the process owners. While the organization had spent millions getting the data and tools in place, no one realized that there was no common vision or even common definition of analytics across the organization. And as a result, in spite of all investments and top leadership buy in, the organization was still in its infancy when measured on analytics maturity curve.
In my personal experience, the toughest part has always been convincing the front line managers and existing analysts to not look at analytics as an unknown devil but as something that would make their lives easier and add tremendous value to business. And what it requires is nothing else but lot of dialogue and some patience and some time. As it happens with any new product or idea, there will be early adopters and once they are on board and they adopt analytics and deliver better results, sooner or later rest of the organization will follow suit.
