Bringing in an analytics culture : A few points to consider.

It is for sure that the "new ways of working" have arrived. While we are moving from asset heavy to asset light economies, one cannot refute the importance of digital platforms and algorithms in conducting any business. Everyone wants faster, better, seamless and personalized digital real-time experience; whether you are a producer, consumer or an employee. Virtually every other company has embarked upon the journey of digitization and analytics by resetting and refocusing the agenda of conducting business as mandated by the apex in the organization. (I am hearing less and less of the most famous word of yesteryears nowadays which was “transformation”; I may be wrong though!).

While I speak to my friends and colleagues in different organizations, there seems to be emerging a pattern. A pattern where the direction set towards the journey of platforms and algorithms is right and celebrated but the implementation has been realized with varied degrees of success and I wonder why that would be. This is the force that everyone would reckon with in coming years. This is what will make them more productive and smarter yet I see frustration on getting this done. A lot (dashboards, predictive models, algorithms etc.) gets created but very less gets consumed, implemented and adopted by the last person taking that key decision on the spot.

The answers lies in human behavior and the way we perceive change. I see a majority of the organizations in India getting on this bus where the CEO has commissioned a special task force to drive digitization and analytics. However, the essence of the direction somewhere dissipates down the organization as it gets lost in translation. Contrary to belief, driving change in a hierarchy driven organization should be an easy task. If the top guy wants it done, then come hell or high water it should be done. I am told that the rate of implementation is much faster in a promoter driven organization than a shareholder driven company. Yet the implementation road map fizzles out as it percolates through the layers of bureaucracy and new behaviors are not adopted to the degree it was originally designed for. So what is the magic formula? How do we drive this agenda and come out with flying colors on the other side? There will be some early adopters, some skeptic fence sitters and some very strong nay-sayers. The belief and vision from the top needs to en grained to every employee in the organization. Strategy needs to be contextualized and communicated to drive disciplined and clockwork implementation. Old belief system needs to get challenged and make way to new shared vision without any insecurities and political agenda.

Three areas that I learnt through my experience and found useful as I journey through this transformation myself.

First, don’t try to buy/build a solution first and then go and hunt a problem in the business to force fit it. There seems to be a plethora of tools in the market nowadays by an equal number of small size niche boutique companies offering to solve your specific needs. These micro-service solutions seem very enticing. As the pressure on the IT department starts mounting for buying and implementing these tools and leading the change with super cool technologies of the future we tend to forget the basic question: What is the business problem that we are trying to solve? How will it change the game? Is there a need that we have established or are we solving the wrong problem altogether? What about sustenance? What about adoption and change of behaviors? Do we really understand the business challenges in implementing the same? What is the return on investment? How will be the benefits realized? and above all do we have the discipline and patience to make it a success.

Second, transition this journey with key milestones. Build it to last and to be scalable. Course correction is definitely required as we learn new paradigms, face and overcome the unseen challenges but fickle mindedness and restlessness to hasten the process should be avoided. Celebrate your early wins and re-bounce with every hurdle faced. Analytics needs to work with the businesses and not compete with them to force upon the cool models. The road map should transition from providing a customer service to building a partnership and then towards driving the new ways of working. I find the Gartner’s Hype cycle very interesting which moves from Innovation Trigger to Peak of Inflated Expectations to Trough of Disillusionment to Slope of Enlightenment to finally on Plateau of Productivity in this regard. Just like a great scotch needs to mature slowly, a sustainable analytics culture needs to go beyond the shiny golden objects and solve some real problems with innovation and change management.

Third, invest in a sound Data Architecture team and process. They say that “Data is the new Oil !” Yet, no organization can boast of an excellent clean database which is complete, accurate, exhaustive and well connected. Well, why would that be? Over time, most companies have invested in data warehousing solutions, paid millions of dollars to link their databases, build interfaces, move to cloud base storage and solutions yet all that effort has resulted in creating more structured mess than achieving the original goal. We are now surrounded by more and more data but we struggle to use it effectively as ever before. The answers lies in discipline and not system/technology. All organizations have a data architecture; some are planned, designed, implemented and controlled consciously and others “just happen”. And, that makes all the difference. An organization that is able to achieve a fine balance between the two seemingly opposing forces of long term architectural integrity and meeting the immediate business needs, would be in the extended term have a more coherent future ready technology and data architecture. Simply put, organizations need to consciously design and then implement and not implement a solution and then look for a design pattern. The most important operational aspect, "data integrity" has to be everyone’s responsibility and not just of a central team. It is to be included as a key performance factor of every business leader for sustainability.

As we continue to tread on this journey and lead this in our organizations, it is important to get it right and get it right the first time. We have to do so because time is a rare luxury and the cost of opportunity loss is huge. Have courage and belief in your leadership and take the plunge. Cause if you don’t use the power of technology and analytics now, you will soon cease to exist.