Success Unpacked: Top 5 Principles of Analytics Leaders To Guide You Home
Successful business leaders looking to do more, new research suggests you’re held back by lack of progress towards becoming data and technology-driven. Here is what to do.
As reported in the latest Feb 2020 pre-COVID-19 research from New Vantage Partners and Thomas Davenport, the author of “Competing on Analytics” the analytics expectations of over 90% of surveyed Executives and their respective constituents remain unfulfilled.
“Over 90% report that the challenges to becoming data-driven are in people, process, and culture — not technology”
The talent challenge is a long-standing well-known problem. Another recent (Feb 2020) article from HBR Data-Driven Decisions Start with These 4 Questions opens with the following quote:
Data has become central to how we run our businesses today. In fact, the global market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC) projects spending on data and analytics to reach $274.3 billion by 2022. However, much of that money is not being spent wisely. Gartner analyst Nick Heudecker has estimated that as many as 85% of big data projects fail.
The two most pressing questions facing the analytics industry and analytics consumers are:
- Why is this the case for so long — what hidden state persists that nearly everybody misses when they embark on their analytics journey?
- What can you do about it to leap ahead?
Analytics Success Principles-Series Introduction
For organizations to be investing so much for so long to have continually had this “nothing” result is frankly unacceptable. The Analytics industry — technology vendors and systems integrators alike, are as much part of the problem as the solution.
We are frustrated by the status quo and think it’s time to rethink our approach. The very same survey concludes:
“But continuing in the current vein, or giving up on the objective of data-driven organizations and cultures, isn’t really a viable option. That would mean the eventual demise of legacy organizations in favor of digital native firms — a prospect that many executives have feared in previous surveys. While human change is almost always more difficult to accomplish than technical change, it is hardly impossible. The companies that change the paradigm of data management and exploitation in a more human direction will, we believe, be the leading firms of the future”
Mastering the HOW of analytics is your key to getting it done.
There is a significant knowing-doing gap for the majority of those undertaking analytics transformations. The following checklist — not definitive and living as we uncover new insights, is intended to provide discussion points for any organization — stakeholder, sponsor program or director, analyst, team lead, who:
- is about to start an analytics initiative and wishes to improve their chances of success
- is underway and beginning to feel the pain without the gain and looking for answers
- looking for general education to understand what good looks like to support their future endeavors and careers
Success Principle 1: Don’t Emulate The Digital Native Playbook.
Digital Natives like Amazon or Alibaba do have good next practices to emulate but are from the ground up data and technology-driven. It’s not possible for you like a traditional business to replicate or follow their entire playbook from best or next practices because their constitution — that is, capabilities, culture, ways-of-working, is fundamentally different from yours.
They don’t have to deal with legacy technologies, established cultures, and older ways of working, skill up on new technology advances while defending legacy cash-cow operations as they pioneer new high growth business models. They have a completely different operating model and capability, even though you may be playing on the same field, you cannot emulate them.
They do not see you as a competitor — they are competing heavily among themselves for your business. You cannot play their game by their rules. You must take your game — one you can win to them. To succeed, you will need to become digitally and technologically competent.
You cannot achieve digital success by outsourcing all your capabilities to a systems integrator, as you may have under the old rules. They cannot help you as you need to develop technical autonomy. Their interests in this regard are likely not aligned to yours.
To succeed, you will need to data, technology, and business-aware talent attracting, growing, and retaining talent motivated by personal and societal growth objectives.
You will still partner strategically and tactically to get the job done but in a different way. There is always a role for systems integrators and technology providers. The nature of the relationship and the commercial relationship must adapt to supporting your needs in the digital era. Outsourcing the technology brains in a “done for you model” and lazy thinking around your entire technology system landscape “because you do business, not technology,” is a mistake.
Consideration: Are you following blindly the Digital Native strategies experimenting with advanced analytics but lack the data infrastructure skills and capabilities to embed then exploit and scale your investments? Or, if you are not taking action, as per the linked article, are you confident that Digital innovation does not impact you?
Success Principle 2: Old vs. New Business Is A Difficult Balancing Act
Managing innovation vs. existing business well is a challenge for most when it comes to a supporting analytics strategy. How does this play into your analytics strategy on a continuum perspective? For example, in the context of Analytics, how do you identify new white-space, how do you innovate and experiment, how do you decide what to scale, how do you maximize your current operations, what do you stop doing when to make way for the new?
Maximizing existing operations while creating innovations makes for an entirely different set of conditions. The duality referred to as the ambidextrous leadership challenge can cause tension within the business, with no past business model and technology resolution available, it’s necessary to deal with this emergent transition with new thinking.
The challenge is captured here, on a people data and technology level is by Gartner with a new continuous change paradigm they call the ContinuosNext
How does ContinuousNext play out in practice?
Consideration: Are you challenged maximizing existing operations while introducing new digital business models that keep disrupting your business and technology investments, and frustrated by not making headway? A key point — ensure you ask the right questions to get what it takes to succeed with advanced analytics across the analytics continuum from a dynamic lifecycle perspective.
Success Principle 3: Be Accountable For Your Solution
Many organizations, not knowing any different, take the wrong approach to define procure and deploy advanced analytical capabilities and invite difficulties. The world had moved on from 2010 and the respective commercial models to a world where speed creativity data-driven insights and technology are increasing in cost importance and value. It’s not just the technology vendors, and SI’s who should know better how things have evolved — you as the Sponsor and your organization are always accountable.
Consideration: This could be the knowledge expertise and awareness trap many organizations fall into — handing the reigns and control over to systems integrators. Are you as a business sponsor of the belief you are accountable for maximizing the use of your technology investments? Are you confident you have the right awareness and making the right choices? Have you the right commercial frameworks and alignment in place to secure the outcomes you require? Do you believe technology is holding you back, and your IT function is unsupportive, so you have to go-it-alone?
Success Principle 4: Recognize Post COVID-19 Is Accelerating and Amplifying The Already Existing Technology Trends
At the dawn of this digital decade, we are at an inflection point. We will see more innovation progress in the next 5–10 years that we have seen in the past 150 as major trends converge, causing an amplification cycle we have never seen before.
The gaps between traditional firms struggling with analytics will have further widened and accelerated as a result of COVID-19. The critical line “the eventual demise of legacy organizations in favor of native digital firms,” is a battle cry for every traditional business to seize the opportunity to leap ahead of their competition to take on new digital native competitors on their terms. The Time to act is now.
Consideration: Have you recently been made acutely aware of the shortcomings of your decision support capability — and left taking best guesses on crucial strategic decisions for which there should and cloud be data available?
Success Principle 5: Think Evolution First With Revolution Tech
Many strategic technology initiatives that focus on innovation are failing to scale innovations, a critical problem that is still unresolved. Approaches around how to address this noted below — but the message is still not getting through. They are missing a fundamental principle that can connect you to their inherently good advice. (Especially Geoff Moore — Zone to Win See below).
1.0 Focus your new innovation on solving a problem (job needs doing) the technology consumers value and need resolving today — “help what I need done today better” — but with technology that once embedded can scale to new dimensions by taking users on a journey.
2. Once the innovation has gained traction solving a big today problem, the new technology can scale into addressing tomorrow’s needs.
3. The added benefit of this approach is that new requirements for future innovation address both incremental and disruptive innovation from a position of strength where the organization can both understand and absorb it.
4. The approach has the added advantage of enabling the business continuum. There is an increasing flow of innovations to experiment and scale and older product and service lines that need retiring to make space.
You learn some relevant advice here for context on why technologies don’t scale. The Evolution first approach will address this problem.
Geoffrey Moore has done some fantastic work around the Zone to Win. This body of knowledge addresses the problem from both a current getting to the future base. Your strategy depends on which zone you are in, and lays the foundation for thinking in terms of dynamics as innovations move through Zones.
The slide to the left taken from his presentation in SlideShare and highlights the reasons organizations struggle to scale new performance as they get stuck in Horizon 2 due to contention between innovations and optimizing existing cash-cows. Zone to Win offers an approach and framework to think about this problem.
For an extended fresh take on the famous Mckinsey, Three Horizons model mentioned a few minutes into the above Youtube link, see a post I did earlier here which compliments the Zone to Win.
The attached video is a good primer on Zone to Win.
Key Implications for Decision Support Systems
Below we consider the implications for decision support, Augmentation of Talent, and the expanding role of data and technology to enable your talent teams and environments.
Applying The Analytics Continuum To Resolve Your Analytics Problems
How does this look from the perspective of a business user working the various zones, an executive or CIO responsible for setting strategies and balancing resources within and across the zones to drive sustainable, reliable growth outcomes and analytics leaders accountable for providing analytics support to these constituents?
Along with the Zones — we need an analytics strategy and a data strategy as part of our Enterprise Data Platform to provide a 360-degree customer to operations decision support to the various constituents during the business activity lifecycle. The way to think about that and address this problem is to see the Analytics Continuum as below:
The Future Of Business With Society 5.0 People First Principles
For more on Society 5.0 and why this is very relevant to organizations working through Zones and looking to maximize big data IoT and talent capabilities to gain a competitive edge — see here:
Interested to learn more about how you may capture your Insights advantage, please see the following link.
