Many companies invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in analytics platforms or programs without getting a return on their investments (ROI). This lack of ROI often tends to categorize analytics projects as expenses and not investments. This perception makes it hard to fund analytics initiatives (acquire a new analytics platform, purchase new data sources, hire new analysts, allocate hours for tracking and measurement projects, etc.). One of the tools you can use to ensure that your analytics initiatives are impacting meaningfully your business is to build a strategic plan for analytics. This plan allows you to align your analytics goals with your business goals so that you can maximize the value of your analytics ecosystem.
Understanding your business and its environment are crucial to build a successful strategic plan. Some of the key components that need to be understood are:
Please bear in mind that some of these components can by themselves be the subject of a strategic plan for analytics or a data strategy. The analytics discipline encompasses many fields: customer analytics, product analytics, marketing analytics, business analytics, people analytics, and competitive intelligence. The point here is that analytics can be applied to any field that collects data.
A realistic plan cannot be built without some clear analytics goals but also an honest assessment of the current state of your analytics program. Some of the questions that need to be answered in this phase are the following ones:
To be able to formulate a plan, a gap analysis is necessary to compare where you are today (current state) with where you want to be tomorrow (future state) and what are the missing components that will enable you to reach your future state. A simple example would be:
Once you have identified the different components that will enable you to reach the future state (results of your gap analysis), it will be important to devise a plan that outlines the different steps required to reach your goals. At this stage, priorities should be defined based on business value. A roadmap should be built to map the sequencing of the different phases of your plan. Budget for each phase should be taken into account. Depending on the scope, the plan can cover multiple components: data, platforms, processes, culture, skills/team.
A strategic plan for analytics requires the involvement of many stakeholders (IT, Product team, Marketing team, Finance team, Executives, etc.) in the organization; ensuring the alignment of these stakeholders is critical to facilitate the adoption of the plan. To deal with the complexity of this process and to ensure an objective assessment of their current analytics program, many organizations rely on external consultants to lead these types of initiatives. Adviso can be your partner to unlock the hidden potential of your analytics program.