Map One Success Metric to Actionable Data

Like the age-old question, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!”, picking a single success metric achievable through a data-driven effort, makes getting underway much easier.

One common metric is eliminating data “silos” – data accessible to only a limited group of users or one function within the organization - which make access to data difficult from areas that do not utilize the application(s) directly producing or consuming the data. By increasing access, you can encourage innovative use of that data by other areas.

One of the highest impact efforts might be to survey the organization regarding their ability to gain a full perspective on your customer, and use that as the driver to determine the first data silo(s) to attack.

Establishing a simple front-end dashboard application for that specific data store, provides a way to support 360o access and encourage innovative use of that data by other areas. This also provides a great opportunity to gain valuable feedback from the organization in a proof-of-concept but live “hands-on” example. With that feedback, additional data stores can be easily added and a more feature-rich front-end established, either purchased based on the feature set defined through this effort, or built out more fully by the internal team. One of the highest impact efforts might be to survey the organization regarding their ability to gain a full perspective on your customer, and use that as the driver to determine the first data silo(s) to attack.

Identify A Specific Data Quality Issue

You can leverage the effort you invest in your first quick win to extend that to a data quality element. Let’s say you picked end-to-end customer view as your actionable data access goal. Along with that, you could determine, though user feedback, validity of the data they are now seeing. This creates a closed loop and that feedback allows you to monitor and manage the quality of the newly visible and available customer data.

It may be that a simple adjustment to one or more applications, each of which use different input selection lists, would improve quality immediately – for example one application might use the full state name “Massachusetts” while another might use “MA” for the state field. These simple changes have a big impact in future analytics usability and overall data quality.

Address Key Management Reporting Accessibility

We also frequently hear the lament “I can only get a report after weeks of waiting, if at all, and then it may not actually provide the analysis I needed.” This quick win is to move the reporting ability into the hands of the users. One key here, of course, is ease of use. The tool provided must be simple to use and intuitive. Including video tutorials, 1-on-1 or other training for the managers as it is rolled out is vital. It might be the same application or tool you used to provide your initial integration effort in the first quick win, which may mean less effort here as you continue to deliver incremental additional function.

This is a powerful quick win, however, due to the spotlight you have now aimed at your data. If management users can now easily see a view of the data from areas previously inaccessible, it pours fuel on the fires of change and speeds you along the DX journey.

Looking for a key quick win that spans several of the elements of the data strategy stack, as you can see, will power up your DX journey and demonstrate value to the organization, which, as we know, is key to motivating the necessary change adoption so vital to success in the transformation to a data-driven model.

You’ve selected your solution, IT and business managers are in alignment, enterprise software implementation begins...the system goes live as planned. But as you talk to staff who are supposed to be using the system, adoption is not what you intended it was supposed to be. Users are rebelling, the old process lingers – except now it is manually managed outside the shiny new system. Rather than productivity gains, things are now taking longer. The board room is awash in argument about how to fix the “failure”. If you’ve experienced this – or if you are in it right now – it may be reassuring to know it is, sadly, a common situation. You know that change is difficult and the fear of change ranks nearly as high as the fear of public speaking or death! Yet all too often the project plan fails to include, consider or budget for specific change management elements, certain to result in project failure, or at the least, lengthy and painful transition.

Those Clouds Have Rocks! When I took flying lessons, my instructor would always warn, “watch out for the rocks in those clouds”. What he meant was you might encounter hidden dangers - dangers that pretty much only occur in the clouds. Similarly, there are a number of hidden dangers when running your business on a cloud-centric IT architecture, whether you are privately developing and managing that infrastructure, utilizing SaaS applications, or cloud-hosted applications. So if your business depends on the cloud, be sure you’re not vulnerable to spinning out of control should you encounter a “rock in the cloud”!