EDITOR’ S QUESTION
DOES WORLD-CLASS ANALYTICS REQUIRE CENTRALISATION?
Alan Jacobson, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Alteryx, outlines an evolution he says sets world-class companies apart from the rest.
Global organisations are taking a range of approaches to scale their use of analytics. This isn’ t to say that every approach results in similar successful outcomes and these organisations should be aware of the optimal approach to enabling analytics.
As analytics best practices continue to achieve cut-through with BI practitioners, competitors that haven’ t adapted risk getting left behind.
The most advanced data analytics team found in most organisations is the centralised business intelligence( BI) team. This isn’ t necessarily inferior to having a specialist data science team – but the world’ s most successful BI teams do embrace data science principles. This isn’ t something that we see in all‘ classic BI teams’.
As analytics best practices continue to achieve cutthrough with BI practitioners, competitors that haven’ t adapted risk getting left behind. The charter and organisation of typical BI need to be set up correctly for analytics to address increasingly complicated challenges and drive transformational change across the whole business
Classic BI – no longer fit for purpose?
BI’ s primary focus is descriptive analytics – summarising what has happened and providing visualisation of data to establish trends and patterns. Visualisation is foundational in data analytics. The problem is that BI teams aren’ t working in a set-up that’ s aligned with world-class best practices. It’ s often the case that BI teams are following an IT project model. They build specific reports and visualisations designed to be consumed by requested business departments. That’ s if they’ re consumed at all. It’ s often the case that such teams are mainly judged on how quickly they can produce data visualisation and how‘ nice’ this output looks.
The BI team that follows best practice data science principles has totally different aims. It’ s set up and empowered to explore data to uncover new insights and even change a business outcome.
The world’ s best BI teams have also evolved past following an IT project model. In practice, this means reporting to senior business leads rather than central IT teams and being emboldened with the authority to influence broader business strategy or transformation. The modus operandi of these teams is getting under the skin of the business and driving real change and Return on Investment( ROI). That’ s a stark contrast from‘ traditional BI’ which produces backward-looking work that’ s siloed and disconnected from an organisation’ s core strategic objectives.
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