By Johnson Jafreed
A truly successful data analytics strategy requires buy-in from top to bottom, as well as a data-driven culture supporting and encouraging teams to make the most of the tools available. Hint: If your IT team is almost single handedly trying to make data analytics happen, there’s something important missing from your approach — and that’s endorsement from the executive team.
Here’s more on how C-suite buy-in specifically affects an organization’s data analytics outcomes.
Leaders Shape Company Culture
Giving employees access to data analytics software is simply the first step. Of course, the platform you choose will affect the impact of your overall data analytics strategy. But deploying analytics tools does not necessarily guarantee employees will adopt them — a challenge many organizations experience firsthand in the form of persistently subpar analytics adoption rates.
As InfoWorld outlines, there’s a right way and a wrong way to approach data analytics with the goal of optimizing business outcomes. Wrong: Infusing business intelligence with data analytics algorithms and expecting employees to adopt them automatically. Right: Promoting a culture of data, “so that regular employees from operations to customer service can get comfortable using sophisticated data-driven tools in their everyday workplace interactions…”
Another factor determining how successful an organization is at harnessing data analytics is company culture. What are the prevailing attitudes employees have toward data? How do leaders currently use data? To what degree are data insights incorporated into decision-making? How confident do employees feel using these tools and factoring their findings into their roles?
Free Reports:
Here are a handful of ways leaders contribute directly to a data-driven company culture or lack thereof:
Simply put, executives can preach about the benefits of data until they’re blue in the face at the next all-hands meeting — but it will mean little until employees see leaders using data themselves and helping to make data analysis commonplace for the rest of the company. Creating a data-driven company culture requires a combination of theory and practice.
Leaders must set the tone for the rest of the company.
The Growing Role of the Chief Data Officer
Some organizations are instituting brand new C-suite roles in an attempt to maximize the impact data has on the bottom line. According to one survey, 62.5 percent of financial services firms say their organizations have appointed Chief Data Officers (CDO) as of 2018. This is up from just 12 percent in 2012.
As with any relatively new role, there have been growing pains as companies work to establish the CDO’s exact responsibilities and domain. In general, the executive holding this title oversees all things related to data quality, governance, strategy and adoption. The rise of the CDO role essentially shows companies are grappling with the question, “How can we use data as an asset to create real business value?”
How It Looks When Executives Engage with Data
The director of business intelligence for UCLA health says it’s a sign a healthcare organization has reached analytics maturity when executives are “excited about providing solutions to improve quality measures [and] patient outcomes”.
On the other hand, if C-suite executives are still treating data as unimportant — or are on board in theory, but do little to follow through on insights and ensure they’re translated from analysis into action — organizations will struggle to reap the benefits of an effective data analytics strategy.
By Johnson Jafreed