by Jonathan Dale, Fiberlink

An article I recently read by Gary Smith in the May 3rd issue of InformationWeek got me thinking.  The author wrote a nice piece about 7 steps to better decisions, entitled “How to Successfully Implement an Analytics Methodology.”  Although I’m not a fan of all 7 steps, I recommend folks reading this blog check out his article, as it is an easy read and has good advice.

There are a few areas I want to comment on—Gary’s introduction, Step 3, and the survey posted with the article.

Introduction:
Gary mentions that “Decisions made based solely on intuition, gut feelings, and years of valuable experience, while valuable, tend to be less effective.” I’m not debating what Gary is saying. What I find in my personal experience is that decisions presented bottom-to-top (manager-to-director, manager-to-executive) must contain published statistics and facts to gain momentum and, ultimately, implementation. Bringing ideas or changes without factual support usually results in a failed mission, regardless of how passionate you are regarding the subject. On the other hand, for top-to-bottom communication, statistics are optional, and more often are only available after the communication or implementation of the solution. In the case of the latter, gut instinct is more often accepted. Being aware of this concept will likely make you better prepared and produce the results you are looking for, rather than walking out of an office saying, “It’s perfect! How can they not see that?”

Step 3:
Gary’s Step 3 is entitled “Focus on Data Collection and Preparation.” Gary does very well here in explaining the importance, as well as the complexities, of this step.  Good business intelligence platform should take most of the hard and tedious work out of this step—systems that automate the collection and organization process. Since this is arguably the hardest part of the process, outside of implementation, it’s critical. Why would this be left to any type of time-consuming and expensive effort? Workers have other core business functions to do. There are systems today that will gather pretty much anything you would ever want to know about inventory, user behavior, and cost from a device like a PC, Blackberry or mobile data card. Let technology gather the data and turn it into information. Heck, the better business intelligence tools even tell you what you should be spending time changing!

Survey “ How Will You Develop Advanced Analytics Expertise?”:
The article posts a survey from an InformationWeek Analytics/Intelligent Enterprise Business Intelligence Survey of 534 business technology professionals, July 2009.

I like this survey a lot. However, I think companies may want to think differently about their choices.  As you can see from the survey, 11% of the companies plan on hiring resources specifically for analytics.  My experience is that in 2009 and in 2010, most companies are not hiring for “new” analytics positions unless they had them previously or are replacing current staff.  If you are hiring employees (for any position) and they are not savvy enough to make sense of business critical information presented in today’s wonderfully-automated BI platforms…then you may be hiring the wrong employees.

Even more staggering to me are the 24% of companies that are planning to hire consultants to fill their current perceived gap of analytics. The money spend on these contractors or consultants would likely be better spent buying a cloud-based BI platform which would provide year-round productivity gains for your whole company. Not just a one-time assessment, which will likely lead to no real change or improvement. BI solutions start as little as $1 per device per month in the cloud-based world. That’s dirt cheap for the type of automated data collection they do.

Lastly, for the 48% who plan to train in-house BI experts and power users on analytic tools—good luck! Some of the available tools are large and complex. I’m sure there is a easy way to provide training at a cost. The end result will likely be a chosen few who get it, and are from that day forward the go-to people for pulling reports for everyone else. Taking time to train and creating training materials is not cheap when considering the time and planning involved, but it could be cheaper than the other alternatives!

OH, I almost forgot the 22% who will employ pre-built analytics apps or models that can be handled by the current staff. I’m in your camp. I think it is the best bang for the buck. Invest in the right tool for the job. Not just one that benefits a few people, but one that benefits everyone in the organization.  Most of these tools will require minimal training since the user interfaces are straightforward, and the information presented calls out the critical pieces to carefully review or even take immediate action on. So, everyone gets to have access to important information directly, in real-time, and with the least cost! Increased productivity for the entire company. These 22% get it in my opinion. They really get it!