Are BI Analytics Changing the Way We Work?

The biggest obstacle to getting employees to use analytics in the workplace seems to be how companies view the changes in practice that involve data and analytics. Data has traditionally been the purview of C-levels and the IT department. However, data visualization tools and the analytics they enable are democratizing access to deep insights across companies, so everyone can use the tools to work better and faster.

In Deloitte’s global CIO survey, respondents identified analytics as both a top investment and the IT investment that would deliver the greatest business impact. Fifty-nine percent of participants either included data and analytics among the top five issues or considered them the single most important way to achieve an advantage.

Easy analytics wins across the company

When implementing BI analytics outside of IT, focus on high-impact projects first. Try one of these:

• HR Recruitment Dashboard: Show HR teams their total recruitment pipeline, including the number of applications that come in, how many candidates are in each stage of the recruiting process, and the overall time to hire. Encourage HR pros to watch these numbers and suggest improvements or identify bottlenecks.

• Sales Dashboards: Map your lead funnels and become better aware of where prospects get caught in the pipeline, whether your sales team is striking out on appointment setting, or whether your negotiation process needs a little work.

• Marketing Dashboard: Visualize your top MQL wins across all your channels, find where your team can pick up some low-hanging fruit for easy wins, and understand where your marketing efforts are working and where you should maybe shift focus.

All sorts of teams should use BI to make sustained, long-term changes in the way they use data to do business. Go beyond raw data to ask how you can improve your outcomes based on what the data tells you. A sample data-run project might look like this:

• Your team builds dashboards showing the sales lead pipeline

• The team identifies 1-2 high-priority places where you’d like to test changes to your sales process, like improving the negotiation process or initial call.

• Build a process for improvement in a project management tool with defined tasks and employees in charge of each of those tasks (find recommendations for the best project management tools here)

• Implement changes in your sales process

• Go back to the data dashboard after a few weeks of testing to see what effect your improvements have made. Update your strategy based on what you’ve learned

BI analytics sound scary, but they’re just another form of test and iterate. Use these tips to get your team going today! To learn more about the power of data visualization tools in business, check this out.