To hell with analytics?

CEOs often talk about the need to use data while taking key decisions. But Marketers still seem to operate more from the gut . Why is that?

 

According to some research from Accenture, nearly half (40 percent) of major corporate decisions are based on  intuition or the “gut”. Accenture surveyed more than 250 executives in July 2008 about their companies' use of and investment in business analytics to remain competitive.

Thomas Wailgum in News captures the reasons why the gut still reigns supreme . Here is what he says: “So why is the gut still so in vogue? Of those respondents who said their companies still make decisions based on judgment rather than business analytics, 61 percent said it was because good data was not available, and just over half (55 percent) said their decisions relied on qualitative and subjective factors. Other reasons related to workforce challenges: 23 percent of respondents said "insufficient quantitative skills in employees" were a main impediment at their company, and 36 percent said their company "faces a shortage of analytical talent." That 61 percent of respondents said "no good data was available on which to make decisions" is striking, given the terabytes of internal and customer-related data available at most organizations today. It's also, of course, indicative of the sad state of data management inside organizations.”

I also came across this very interesting blog by Business Intelligence expert Steve Bennett

 

http://analytics.typepad.com/oz-analytics/2009/07/10-signs-that-you-need-analytics.html

 

According to Steve, here are the top 10 signs that you need to improve your organisation's analytic capability:

1. You have to wait longer than a day for either IT or your business intelligence department to make/change a report for you.
2. Across the organisation there are more than 100 requests pending for reporting /dashboard /scorecard changes waiting for a specialist to deliver them.  
3. When you attend meetings, there are multiple numbers being quoted for the same thing - and you don't know which of them is correct. 
4. When you talk about fundamental things like transaction, account, balance or available stock - and you discover that the person you are talking to is using the same words but means something different to what you mean. 
5. You can't get an instantly understanding when glancing at a report/dashboard/scorecard and what it is telling you. 
6. The commentary is larger than the automatically generated report. 
7. The report is not generated automatically but is a handcrafted labour of love by either yourself or one of your staff, or you spend hours trying to locate the right data and then have to consolidate it manually into Excel. 
8. It takes longer than 5 minutes to view a new report. 
9. You can't access the report when and where you most need it. 
10. There are hundreds of reports available to you but you don't trust them and you spend time trying to manually validate key numbers.  

My view :

The key to making analytics matter from a business context is to embed it into your day to day business processes. Till you do that Analytics will be a nice luxury, used more to justify decisions that the “gut” seems to support! How do you embed it into business processes- we will talk about that another time!