USE DATA TO ANSWER YOUR KEY BUSINESS QUESTIONS

By Kevin Troyanos, Head Of Analytics, Publicis Health

Excerpted from Harvard Business Review:

According to Gartner, the global analytics and business intelligence software market reached $21.6 billion in 2018. The firm has also predicted that, “through 2022, only 20% of analytic insights will deliver business outcomes.” That means that organizations are investing billions of dollars in analytics with minimal return — hardly a recipe for success.

Oftentimes, this disconnect stems not from faulty data science, but from an organization’s failure to consider the activation-readiness of their approaches to real-world applications of analytics. For many organizations, activation, or the art of leveraging data to do something meaningfully different in the market, is the missing piece that bridges the divide between insight and business value.

While most mature organizations understand how to leverage analytics for knowledge discovery, far too few are able to consistently aim this discovery in the right direction. This results in undeniably impressive analytics that are functionally useless.

To avoid this trap of analytics for analytics’ sake, organizations should take the following steps when designing and evolving their analytics processes: Prioritize high-value Key Business Questions (KBQs) over pipe dreams; build cross-functional teams capable of translating insight into action, and use process formalization as a stand-in for someone who can translate analytics.

Read the entirety of Kevins’s article in Harvard Business Review and follow our Kevin Troyanos, our Head of Analytics, on LinkedIn.