Competing on Analytics Symposium: A Field Report
I should've posted this a while back, but forgot. Hey, I'm human. That said, let's explore what all the fuss was about...
Trendpointe's Roger Meyer reports on the recent Competing on Analytics Symposium presented by Harvard Business School Press. He says that BI is evolving- from technology to strategy to brand attribute!
"The net takeaway of the symposium - aside from the lesson that if you can afford to hold an affair at the Metropolitan Club, you should - is that analytics can make a difference. The big remaining question is this: How far into the organization can you reasonably expect an analytics strategy to penetrate before running into a wall of resistance from people who just don't get it?"
The "Quick Takes" sidebar of Meyer's article contains a gem from Irving "Bubba" Tyler, the former CIO of Quaker Chemical: "I do have a problem with companies that miss the opportunity to use BI as part of their everyday process," he said. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to contribute small but important incremental improvements. Every individual in a company is already making decisions."
Jim Davis, the chief marketing officer of SAS tells Meyer not to expect "analytics to march "out of the backroom and into the boardroom" in the next couple of months. "But the strategic power of business intelligence is more and more in the forefront of executive thinking -- even if they don't fully understand it."
Davis' view is that "we need to push out information to the greatest number of users in an organization and create a culture that bases strategy on fact-based decisioning." He suggests the creation of Business Intelligence Competency Centers which function as a central location and collective memory for driving and supporting an enterprise-wide information strategy, coordinating current efforts, and ensuring that information and best practices are shared throughout the organization.
Like any initiative requiring behavioral change, BI "implementations" are going to succeed or fail based on the human factor. As Laurence Haughton might say, you gotta get around the CAVE people.
BTW, another report on the symposium comes to us from the good people at BI Review. Read all about how P&G got analytics!