By leading efforts to create an analytics culture throughout the enterprise, CIOs can help maximize analytics ROI and operationalize fact-based decision-making.
With data-driven insights informing more and more strategic decisions, companies across sectors are investing heavily in analytics, artificial intelligence-powered tools like cognitive computing and machine learning, and data-mining capabilities. Indeed, in a business climate where data has become the new currency, analytics tools are helping companies extract value from this currency. Likewise, cognitive computing and machine learning are serving as disruptive forces driving business model and data management transformations.
A recent survey of enterprise, medium-sized, and small companies found that in 2016, organizations are expected to spend an average of $7.4 million on big data initiatives, with analytics accounting for roughly 58 percent of that outlay.
The business goal driving these investments? Sixty-one percent of respondents cited “better quality decision-making.”
Unfortunately, many of these respondents may never realize that goal. Why? Because simply deploying analytics, visualization dashboards, and other data management tools and then dabbling with them haphazardly around the edges of an organization rarely delivers the kind of sustained, data-driven insights that can support fact-based decision-making.
Indeed, realizing analytics’ full potential—and maximizing ROI on analytics investments—requires nothing short of an orchestrated cultural shift across the enterprise in which all stakeholders begin focusing relentlessly on data, insight generation, and the critical role both play in achieving an insight-driven advantage (IDA). Simply put, IDA is the systematic use of analytics throughout an organization to deliver a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
As overseers of data management and analytics tools—and as the strategic and operational partners of business leaders—CIOs are an obvious choice to lead the IDA journey. By assuming this mantle, CIOs can not only play an integral role in helping their companies become more competitive, but they can also further cement their own status within the C-suite as indispensable business partners and drivers of strategy.
The market has yet to decide who should own analytics in the organization. Right now, analytics capabilities and oversight are typically shared among lines of business, CIOs, CFOs, CMOs, and COOs.
As CIOs develop plans to extend these capabilities and formalize their usage, they can take the following steps to help maintain this “share and share alike” approach, while at the same time enlisting business support for creating the comprehensive analytics culture needed to achieve a lasting IDA:
Understand the business’s analytics agenda and priorities. In pursuing IDA, building a massive data warehouse and simply assuming everyone will use it in a uniform way can be a recipe for disaster. To increase analytics adoption across the enterprise, CIOs can collaborate closely with individual business units and organizational functions to understand the analytics agendas and priorities of each.
