Data analytics makes staff team players

Data ana­lyt­ics may be root­ed in the work­place, but the inter­nal sto­ry has long been a poor rela­tion in a nar­ra­tive firm­ly skew­ered towards the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence.

Ben­e­fits for end-users tend to offer the most tan­gi­ble evi­dence of the rewards to be reaped when busi­ness­es take a more dis­cern­ing approach to data man­age­ment and foren­si­cal­ly extract intel­li­gence to fuel the ser­vice expe­ri­ence.

Click here for the full info­graph­ic

Reaching the full potential of the digital workplace

Mobile-aware tech­nolo­gies send­ing pro­mo­tion­al offer alerts straight to cus­tomers’ phones from insight based on pur­chase his­to­ry, is just one of many ways a once niche and com­plex prac­tice has come to main­stream promi­nence.

Yet as more busi­ness­es har­ness intel­li­gence to steal a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, the dri­ve to evolve their offer­ing is increas­ing­ly under­pinned by some game-chang­ing trans­for­ma­tion in the work­place. Knowl­edge is pow­er and by putting it at the heart of an organisation’s cul­ture, the reper­cus­sions can cut a swathe through estab­lished cor­po­rate hier­ar­chies and over­haul even the most entrenched cor­po­rate envi­ron­ments.

“Link­ing data and ana­lyt­ics to behav­iour­al and cul­tur­al change is emerg­ing as the next chal­lenge in address­ing the full poten­tial of the dig­i­tal work­place,” says Gartner’s data ana­lyt­ics direc­tor Alan Dun­can. “And it’s a trans­for­ma­tion that requires busi­ness mod­els and work­places that are dynam­ic, oppor­tunis­tic and col­lab­o­ra­tive to keep up with the rapid pace of dis­rup­tion and change.”

The cor­re­la­tion is set to be felt more acute­ly as ana­lyt­ics emerge as a true mar­ket dis­rup­tor. Gartner’s lat­est find­ings bear out the trend with more than half of large organ­i­sa­tions glob­al­ly set to use advanced ana­lyt­ics by 2018, and most busi­ness users and ana­lysts expect­ed to access self-ser­vice tools by next year.

Analytics for a fuller picture

Indeed, this new breed of user-friend­ly solu­tions, which draw analy­ses into one cen­tral dash­board for easy access and col­lab­o­ra­tive deci­sion-mak­ing, has been at the heart of this trac­tion. An anti­dote to the stand­alone, cost­ly and com­plex busi­ness intel­li­gence report­ing tools of old, by weav­ing and embed­ding data ana­lyt­ics inside a host of pop­u­lar appli­ca­tions, intel­li­gence is seam­less­ly inte­grat­ed into most dai­ly busi­ness process­es.

Data sci­ence man­ag­er Heleen Snelt­ing at TIBCO Soft­ware, a Sil­i­con Val­ley-based ana­lyt­ics and enter­prise soft­ware leader, behind data visu­al­i­sa­tion and ana­lyt­ics plat­form Spot­fire, has seen the impact first hand across both the tra­di­tion­al ana­lyt­ics main­stay of finan­cial ser­vices, man­u­fac­tur­ing and ener­gy, as well as new mar­kets such as telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, retail, edu­ca­tion and health­care. By dis­play­ing data visu­al­ly and mor­ph­ing sta­tis­tics into graph­ics to pro­vide an instant snap­shot of the sto­ries that could oth­er­wise be buried in the num­bers and spread­sheets, the approach is trans­form­ing how peo­ple work.

“We have a num­ber of cus­tomers using self-ser­vice ana­lyt­ics for per­son­nel-relat­ed top­ics, for exam­ple where a human resources depart­ment takes a data-dri­ven approach to iden­ti­fy whether employ­ees are allo­cat­ed to tasks for which they have the appro­pri­ate skills and train­ing,” she says.

“More broad­ly though, when­ev­er you start to track and share key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors through a visu­al ana­lyt­ics plat­form, change will come to an organ­i­sa­tion. You begin to see sur­prise con­tri­bu­tions from peo­ple with spe­cif­ic exper­tise, who you would not have expect­ed to get involved. Thanks to the use of visu­al data, they can more eas­i­ly jus­ti­fy and con­vince oth­ers that some­thing is worth improv­ing, an idea they may have been try­ing to high­light for years.”

Fostering proactiveness

Indeed, by chang­ing the way that busi­ness intel­li­gence tools are accessed, the prac­tice is no longer the exclu­sive domain of data sci­en­tists or IT spe­cial­ists, as ana­lyt­ics become cheap­er and more acces­si­ble with major impli­ca­tions for small­er busi­ness­es where cost and com­plex­i­ty would have been pro­hib­i­tive in the past.

In bring­ing insight­ful data to everyone’s fin­ger tips, the impli­ca­tions run deep, with the poten­tial to shape a cul­ture where indi­vid­u­als gen­er­ate find­ings and make the deci­sions them­selves rather than await­ing instruc­tion. As pas­siv­i­ty shifts to proac­tiv­i­ty to cre­ate a more lev­el play­ing field, it’s a move that has earned the rather grandiose title of data democ­ra­ti­sa­tion.

It’s an approach in evi­dence at retail titan Marks & Spencer, where Spotfire’s self-ser­vice ana­lyt­ics has brought dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and an open data cul­ture to a 130-year-old British high street insti­tu­tion.

With peo­ple equipped to answer key busi­ness ques­tions, their capa­bil­i­ties improve and the result is a more self-suf­fi­cient and informed work­force

Intro­duced to enhance pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and bring greater cohe­sion to the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, both his­toric data and fore­cast­ing capa­bil­i­ties have com­bined to dri­ve ser­vice deliv­ery improve­ments which span the breadth of the busi­ness. Drilling down into cus­tomer and sup­pli­er data has led to a more tai­lored offer­ing, from bet­ter align­ing the choice of ready meal with a par­tic­u­lar branch demo­graph­ic to a deep­er under­stand­ing of the impact of sea­son­al­i­ty on pur­chas­es. And for the busi­ness­es’ employ­ees, the inter­nal impact has been just as game-chang­ing from head office right through to the front line.

“A shift in the depen­den­cy from IT to dri­ve all the key data­base deci­sions has result­ed in a major change to how we work which has brought data into the heart of every busi­ness deci­sion,” says Pete Williams, head of enter­prise ana­lyt­ics at M&S.

“Quite sim­ply, ana­lyt­ics has become everyone’s respon­si­bil­i­ty. With peo­ple equipped to answer key busi­ness ques­tions and make deci­sions far more quick­ly to solve their own issues, their capa­bil­i­ties improve and the result is a more self-suf­fi­cient and informed work­force.”

Of course, how­ev­er con­vinc­ing the ben­e­fits may be once in place, any cul­tur­al shift and change man­age­ment is reliant on an organ­i­sa­tion-wide buy-in to flour­ish, which usu­al­ly means over­com­ing some lev­el of resis­tance. And for the unini­ti­at­ed, who may assume a data cul­ture is lit­tle more than num­bers and spread­sheets, estab­lish­ing the case for data gov­er­nance hasn’t always been the eas­i­est sell.

Drip-feeding technology

“Busi­ness intel­li­gence pro­fes­sion­als are typ­i­cal­ly com­fort­able with the tech­ni­cal aspects of infor­ma­tion deliv­ery, but can strug­gle to influ­ence busi­ness adop­tion and dri­ve cul­tur­al change,” says Gartner’s Mr Dun­can. “This is why we are see­ing an increas­ing num­ber of chief data offi­cers and chief ana­lyt­ics offi­cers charged with cham­pi­oning the trans­for­ma­tion­al val­ue of data and busi­ness ana­lyt­ics.”

It’s a tack that under­pinned the approach at M&S, where Mr Williams became a vis­i­ble and vocal pro­po­nent, focus­ing on the oppor­tu­ni­ties as opposed to posi­tion­ing data as a solu­tion to address any short­falls.

A drip-feed approach to the tech­nol­o­gy gave employ­ees the chance to see the ben­e­fits first hand and encour­aged exper­i­men­ta­tion. By gen­er­at­ing enthu­si­asm and allow­ing the new cul­ture to devel­op organ­i­cal­ly, as opposed to the for­mal imple­men­ta­tion of an IT roll-out, take up snow­balled from ten ini­tial users to two hun­dred.

Mr Williams adds: “Most com­pelling is the trans­paren­cy brought to so many areas of the busi­ness. Ana­lyt­ics has lift­ed the lid on the role of col­leagues and depart­ments that may have not been so wide­ly known or under­stood. With infor­ma­tion shared, the silos that had devel­oped as employ­ees worked on their own data­bas­es have made way for inte­grat­ed com­mu­ni­ties which share intel­li­gence as dif­fer­ent depart­ments work more close­ly togeth­er.”

With an eye to the future, the tech­nol­o­gy is also set to strength­en the retailer’s posi­tion to appeal to the kind of spe­cial­ist tech­nol­o­gy tal­ent need­ed to secure ongo­ing com­pet­i­tive­ness which usu­al­ly swarm to the tech hubs of East Lon­don and may not have con­sid­ered retail as a sec­tor.

And this bear­ing on recruit­ment and reten­tion rein­forces the inex­tri­ca­ble link between ana­lyt­ics and peo­ple. While tech­nol­o­gy in the work­place can often find itself lazi­ly cast in a dia­tribe that pits man against machine, here the reliance on human insight to extrap­o­late the insight col­lat­ed has estab­lished an endur­ing and sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship rather than an “either/or”.

TIBCO’s Ms Snelt­ing con­cludes: “Human exper­tise is absolute­ly need­ed and can be used much more effec­tive­ly as repet­i­tive tasks are auto­mat­ed, free­ing up the per­son to focus on some­thing far more sat­is­fy­ing and impact­ful. Ana­lyt­ics is nev­er a threat, just an oppor­tu­ni­ty.”