Refocusing Your Company’s Business Analytics Strategy

As a company, it’s easy to understand that there’s value in data and that’s the point of business analytics. Data collection gives us information, data analysis gives us insights. Or does it?  There is, however, one last step that is often overlooked, and it’s easy to get sidetracked from the purpose of our business analytics strategy: explaining analysis to empower data-driven decision making.

Today’s business analytics strategy relies on an unbalanced data to data-driven decisions workflow. We have data collection (automated) and data analysis (dashboards and conventional analysis tools). Then there’s a bottleneck. Someone, usually an analyst, looks at the data, summarizes it and explains the insights in plain English. This written (or oral) report is presented to the decision maker who quickly reviews, makes decisions, and implements based on the report provided.

This manual process is too slow, too expensive, and lacks consistency.

Fundamentally, we collect and analyze data to empower data-driven decision making to help our businesses succeed. To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous remark, “it is only in our decisions that data is important.”

How could we lose sight of such a fundamental point as we invest in our business analytics strategy? The answer lies in the complexity of data collection, analysis, and governance. Entire divisions of companies have spent much of the last decade trying to build their data infrastructure, so you can’t blame them for losing sight of the ultimate goal.