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.
How can a strategic plan for analytics bring value to your business?
- It will ensure that your data and analytics infrastructure are supporting efficiently the execution of your business and digital strategy;
- It will enable you to improve the contribution of each analytics platform to the success of the business strategy;
- It will allow you to collect the relevant data and develop the right analytics infrastructure (scalability), processes, and resources to bring value to your business through customer satisfaction and loyalty, operational efficiency, and product or service differentiation.
Here are some of the challenges that a strategic plan for analytics aims to solve:
- Multiple data sources (Mobile data, Website data, Point Of Sale data, CRM data, Call Center data) and multiple data formats (structured and unstructured data) in the organization but no 360° view of the customer;
- Lack of actionable insights from the stakeholders perspective;
- Low maturity level in terms of analytics and data culture (Is the company data driven? Is the company leveraging the potential of predictive and prescriptive analytics?);
- Low quality (trustworthiness) and availability of the data collected;
- Lack of skills required to utilize efficiently the analytics platforms.
A strategic plan for analytics plan is composed of four phases:
Phase 1 – Understanding the business context of the organization.
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:
- the mission, vision of your business/organization;
- the business objectives, goals and KPIs of the organization;
- the strategies in place to reach these goals;
- the culture of the organization;
- the competition;
- the customers;
- the products and services;
- the results of a SWOT analysis;
- the trends in the industry (technological trends).
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.
Phase 2 – Assessing the current state of the analytics program and defining analytics goals.
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:
- What is the mission and role of your current analytics program? Is this role clear and understood in your organization?
- What type of data are you collecting? Is this data relevant to your business? Is this data accurate? Is there any data governance in place?
- What are your current analytics platforms? Are they underutilized? Are they easy to use?
- What type of skills do you have in the organization? Are they qualified? Do you need more resources?
- What is the maturity level of your organization in analytics?
- What type of processes are in place to support the analytics program? Could they be optimized?
- Where do you want to be two years from now in terms of analytics and why? How will your analytics goals help bring value to the business or the organization?
Phase 3 – Identifying gaps between current and future state.
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:
- Current state: I currently collect behavioral data on my mobile/website visitors (what they do on my website or mobile app?)
- Future state: I want to know what they do on my digital properties (Website and Mobile app) but also why they do it.
- Gap: I need to collect users’ feedback or opinion on specific online tasks.
Phase 4 – Formulating a plan and a roadmap.
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.
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