Are You Ready to Compete in an Analytics Driven Age?

How do you leverage analytics to build a more competitive organization? I have several questions to start you thinking about the possibilities advanced analytics open for your team.  I’m getting ready to go to IBM’s Think 2018  in Las Vegas! There’s still time for us to meet when I’m there. I’ve already set up several great meetings and always have time for at least one more!

To get ready for the conference, I’ve been discussing with clients why analytics could give them an edge in their crowded and competitive market place. I’ll share several keys to analytics success over the coming weeks.

My younger client executives are much more excited about the future of analytics in their organizations.  My Genx and Millenials are very interested in learning how they can apply analytics to enhance their careers and their organizations’ growth and prestige. They see it as a double, if not triple, win for everyone involved. I would agree! But you know I would.

My boomer clients sometimes wish their jobs would stabilize for even a short time, so they might catch their breaths. But it won’t.  I see it as an incredible high potential development opportunity for entrepreneurial leaders. Analytics can create a great mentoring opportunity for all your teams.

Before we discuss this more completely, let’s take a pop quiz to see if your organization is becoming more data driven. Analytics and data are like peanut butter and jelly, they can make everything better.

• Does your organization use analytics in different parts of the organization? For example, are analytics part of your HR or marketing departments’ capabilities today? How about finance and operations?
• How much of your organization’s current success is attributed to leveraging current customers and partners to increase profitability and market share?
• Does your executive leadership team believe analytics can provide your organization a competitive advantage?
• Are your leaders making fact-based decisions or are they still operating on their own prior experience from the past?
• When you promote people in your organization, are you evaluating their analytics capabilities in any way?
• How do you currently manage your analytics assets? Both people and technologies?
• Does your organization provide analytics training to future leaders of your organization? How does your organization learn about what their competitors and customers are doing?
• Are you recruiting new leaders from outside the organization because they bring analytic or data science capabilities? How are these hires impacting employee morale and engagement?
• How important is decision making in your current executives’ roles? Are they getting the best and most actionable information from the people on their teams?
• How much time do your leaders spend looking for patterns in their roles? How much time do they spend doing non-value creating activities?
• How do your people identify new potential opportunities for growth and profits? Can analytics help create increasing sales and profits?
• Is your organization committed to digital transformation? What tools are they using to enable this change in how they do business?
• Does your organization help high potential leaders get exposure to leading edge management tools and strategies? How many of these leaders left for increasing exposure to leading edge technologies?
• Did these questions create excitement or fear when you discussed them with your team? Did people share what they’ve heard about analytics or looked at you wondering what you were trying to achieve?

Next week, we share more about what it takes to become a data driven manager. How analytics can be used to empower your digital transformation efforts by providing consistent early wins.

See you next week.