The Impact of Insights
It’s not just about the data…
The Challenge
Let’s imagine you know that there are problems in your business. Imagine you asked yourself the question, ‘How good is my data strategy?’ and you didn’t have a good answer. The next obvious question would be, ‘What can we do to improve?’ This is the hard part for most companies because in many ways they either don’t know the tools available to help them organize their data, or they don’t know the correct way to implement this change while ‘keeping the lights on.’
It's nice to know where you want to go, but it’s just as important to know where you are so that you can correctly identify the next steps to succeed. If you don’t know where you stand with your data, you are much more likely to take the wrong steps. This would be a problem because there would be many hurdles that would keep coming up because you would be trying to work with something that you currently don’t have set up yet. It’s like in the movie Apollo 13, when Jim Lovell, played by Tom Hanks, says, “There’s a thousand things that have to happen in order, we are on number 8. You’re talking about number 692.”
The most important thing I offer is insights and strategies as to how you can do better. I have, not once, seen or worked with a company that could not be improved in some way. There are always going to be processes to be optimized, and once optimized, they will reveal a completely new set of bottlenecks that could be improved.
But, again, how do you know where to start?
The Value
The insights you gain from knowing where your business is, and what you want your business to become is what drives the actions that you take to make a change. Without the insights, you’re just guessing.
This is where the data comes in. If you have the factual data presented properly, the data will tell you why things are the way they are, how things are impacting other things, and what behaviors are on display. These are your insights. With that knowledge, we can manipulate various factors in our favor and enable meaningful and productive change.
With the knowledge of insights into your company, we can decide which strategies make sense, and what technology to implement to give you the most bang for your buck. To do this, you need to analyze where the business is now and know where you want it to go.
The Solution
During my time working in data analytics and strategy, I have come up with (what I like to call) a ‘gap analysis’. Essentially it is a diagnostic strategy designed to find the ‘gaps’ or problems with the way data is organized or used in your business. The gap analysis has three parts: business understanding, data, and communication.
Business Understanding
The first step is identifying how you want your business to operate or what you want your business to look like in an ideal world. What’s your vision? Ideally, how often would you be shown reports? How quickly would you like access to your data?
This is also the time when I get to know your business. You can have a lot of experience in the industry, but every business is different, from the number of employees to the business culture.
Data
The second step is getting the data involved to understand where you are. This involves doing some measurements and establishing benchmarks for your current situation. For example, how long does it take from when the data is collected to when a report is generated for review, to when an action is taken, to when you are actually seeing the impact of the action? These are all things to measure and take into account.
Communication
At every step of the way, it’s important to communicate. The way we do this is by conducting a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. This is like our temperature gauge at every stage of the project to determine if the actions we are taking are still leading us in the right direction. Are we making the right impact? Are there any course corrections that we need to take? Are there any opportunities that we didn’t see before that we want to capitalize on or leverage; if not now, maybe in the future? Communicating what changes have been made, where the problems lie, and what the plan is to fix those problems is all part of the gap analysis.