5 Keys to Business Analytics Program Success - Softcover

Boyer, John; Frank, Bill; Green, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1583473432 ISBN 13: 9781583473436

Verlag: MC PR LLC, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

With business analytics is becoming increasingly strategic to all types of organizations and with many companies struggling to create a meaningful impact with this emerging technology, this book&;based on the combined experience of 10 organizations that display excellence and expertise on the subject&;shares the best practices, discusses the management aspects and sociology that drives success, and uncovers the five key aspects behind the success of some of the top business analytics programs in the industry. Readers will learn about numerous topics, including how to create and manage a changing business analytics strategy; align business priorities to technological innovation; quantify and demonstrate tangible business value; implement program processes that balance agility, empowerment, and control; and architecting a business analytics technology solution with future innovation in mind. This is the ideal resource for any organization that wants to learn how a business analytics program can help manage value, employees, and technology to translate strategies into actionable insight and achievement.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Boyer is the director of business intelligence and data warehousing at RCG Global Services. He is the former leader of the business intelligence advisory team at the Nielsen Company. He lives in Lisle, Illinois. Bill Frank has more than 25 years of experience in decision support and business intelligence and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP). He lives in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Brian Green is manager of business intelligence and performance management at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee. He lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Tracy Harris is senior manager in business intelligence excellence at IBM and is responsible for chairing the BA Excellence Advisory board and managing the Business Analytics Excellence Program and Champion initiative at IBM. She lives in Ottawa, Ontario. Kay Van De Vanter is the enterprise BI architect and business intelligence competency center lead at the Boeing Company. She lives in Seattle. They are the coauthors of Business Intelligence Strategy.

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5 Keys to Business Analytics Program Success

By John Boyer, Bill Frank, Brian Green, Tracy Harris, Kay Van De Vanter

MC Press

Copyright © 2012 IBM Corporation
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-58347-343-6

Contents

Introduction - The Business Analytics Program and Keys to Success, 
Chapter 1 - Key #1: Strategy, 
Chapter 2 - Key #2: Value, 
Chapter 3 - Key #3: People, 
Chapter 4 - Key #4: Process, 
Chapter 5 - Key #5: Technology, 
Conclusion, 

CHAPTER 1

Key #1: Strategy

The first key to a successful Business Analytics Program that we will discuss is the strategy. In a Business Analytics Program, we mentioned that one of the most critical, yet commonly overlooked, essential elements of focus is around the changing strategy. Not only does an initial vision need to be developed for an organization, but a way to review the strategy, the changing needs throughout the organization, and the program processes developed along the way is also necessary as an ongoing and core element of the program.

Many organizations begin analytic initiatives with grassroots efforts — and sometimes it may not be the lack of strategy but rather too many silos of strategy that create the initial difficulty in managing the program. As an organization matures in its analytic capability or Business Analytics technologies, it often later surfaces that a cohesive strategy is required to increase collaboration and decision making, reduce costs, and steer the ship in the same direction to achieve corporate goals.

It is also one of the top reasons a Business Analytics Program often doesn't show expected value. Without defined direction, goals, outcomes, and a way to execute that is a shared vision with the key stakeholders, siloed initiatives occur that produce only small, tactical, and incremental gains. It is often a process of analytic maturity that helps organizations realize the opportunities and gains that can be made by strategically planning their Business Analytics programs in their organizations.

Our organizations were among the various pioneers of the early Business Intelligence Programs that evolved to Business Analytics. We experienced growing pains throughout the process, but we blazed a trail to analytic maturity where we can share practical tips for moving a program at a more rapid pace. How quickly you rise beyond the silos of analytics into a more collaborative approach can depend on how the program is managed — but the pressures of a constantly changing environment always need to be recognized and continually planned for. We will identify some key forward-looking elements that will help you shortcut some common challenges.

It doesn't mean that silo deployments aren't valuable as a starting point, or as a way to realize value. Quite the contrary: Analytics silos are often a starting point to short-term tactical gains that develop the appetite — and provide an initial training ground — for more strategic analytics. However, the longer-term benefits are frequently driven by cross-functional collaboration — which can often take more time and require more planning due to the politics and complexity of the task. Therefore, we recommend putting a program in place that supports the people, process, and technology elements that will deliver the long-term benefits as a highly successful best practice.

A successful Business Analytics Program starts with a well-defined, coordinated business and IT strategy. This will require a continual focus on the strategy itself and constant adjustments to ensure the organization understands the goals and expected outcomes, prioritizes, and connects the analytics strategy to the corporate strategy. The strategy should have both a long-term vision and a pragmatic series of steps and a roadmap on how you plan to get there. It should also address the many factors at play — factors that move beyond the technology itself and encompass the people, processes, and business drivers that create the need for a Business Analytics Program. Most important, it will recognize that it will change over time.

The Strategy Framework

In our first book, we introduced what we called the "Strategy Framework." This framework consists of three distinct parts (depicted in Figure 3):

• A business alignment strategy: Understanding the overall business strategy and then tying corporate objectives to functional objectives so that the application of the Business Analytics Strategy is of high value, understood, and aligned. Identifying what the business strategy is behind the information is absolutely the most critical step in the strategy. Technologies are not implemented for the sake of technology — there are business goals that teams need to be working toward to realize value.

• An organizational and behavioral strategy: Creating the right culture that drives performance and an organizational strategy that will tie business strategy to execution. This is the glue that will help the people in the organization clearly realize the use of technology and modify behaviors that will ensure the right processes are implemented and a data-driven culture can be embraced.

• A technology strategy: Identifying the technology infrastructure and capabilities that will enable the business to achieve excellence: Do we have the right capabilities for the right individuals to be able to monitor, analyze, predict, and develop a plan of action to support the strategy? How are we implementing these technologies to ensure we are achieving the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) while enabling the business to be successful? How are we including newer innovation, whether it's mobile strategy, big data, self-service, cloud, or other technologies?

Under each of these aspects, several areas need to be addressed and considered when preparing a strategy. The Strategy Framework is a practical guide that organizations in any industry can use to help create a strategy. It is the foundation for creating the Business Analytics Program.

However, there are times when creation of the Business Analytics Strategy has also run awry — when teams prepare a strategy in a silo without consulting the broader organizational stakeholders that need to embrace the strategy. These deviations may occur intentionally or unintentionally — unintentionally when teams attempt to boil the ocean, or intentionally when they become too focused on technology, risking loss of confidence and support of critical key stakeholders. So let's take a moment to look at what a strategy should and should not be:

• A Business Analytics Strategy is not:

* A single destination or one-time project

* A siloed effort of one department (it may start in one area, and there may be tactical strategies in that department, but it should not remain a siloed initiative if analytic maturity is the goal)

* A requirements document for reports or a dashboard

* Just about information technology and the IT department (e.g., a document the IT team prepares about technology selection)

* A 400-page document that is circulated to all the teams

* An architecture design or vision

• A Business Analytics Strategy is:

* A roadmap that demonstrates and includes a long-term vision, created as a roadmap of smaller wins and iterations supported by key stakeholders that supports business strategies (e.g., gaining market share, increasing revenues, reducing costs, discovering...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MC PR LLC
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1583473432
• ISBN 13: 9781583473436
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 154
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar