By Greg Todd
Organisations want to leverage
analytics as a way to move ahead with less cost. They are not
only doing analytics on their customers and their sales, but are
also turning it around and doing analytics on their internal
operations to try to find places where they can
cut costs and manage their assets better.
Many business executives consider analytics an important but
missing tool to help them predict and influence
customer behaviour, product intake,
supply chains and market behaviour in ways that will impact
their bottom line.
About 70% of UK and US executives at companies with annual
revenues of $500m or more acknowledge that their company needs to
improve its analytical capabilities to remain competitive. Most are
taking steps to do that, an
Accenture survey has found.
Almost three-quarters of these executives believe the leaders of
their company are committed to business analytics and have a
corporate strategy and distinctive capability supported by it.
So, what is stopping this from becoming a reality? Somewhat
surprisingly, it seems to be the technology itself. Nearly half of
all executives (46%) cite IT capability restrictions as the biggest
challenge their organisation faces in getting where they want to
be.
It even edges out non-technical factors as lack of standard
processes across company on analysing business data (39%),
inability to share data across organisations within the company
(35%), insufficient quantitative skills in employees (34%),
resistance to business analytics from the company's culture, and
lack of committed support for business analytics from leadership
(18%).
Restricted IT capability was also the biggest single challenge
in the opinion of 22% of respondents, slightly more than lack of
standard processes across the company.
It is important to understand exactly what is meant by "IT
capabilities restrictions". My assumption, based on the clients I
have worked with, is that it refers to data and software − probably
in a four-to-one ratio.
Most companies have by now the myriad
business intelligence software packages in place that allow
them to do analytics. This investment, after all, has been a focus
of most companies in the past decade, having spent time, money and
effort on improving their analytical capabilities. So, as the tools
are in place, it must be user education and how to use the data
that are the primary challenges.
What can companies do about it? They need to invest time and
effort around their information strategy. This means taking a step
back from any roadmaps or activities around data management or
business intelligence that may have preoccupied them in the past.
It means taking a hard look at answering questions such as: What
are we doing with our information assets? What are the right
information capabilities that we need to provide to the
business?
In order to become more technically proficient, as well as more
people-skilled and process-enabled, this entails taking a broader
look at the overall analytics effort rather than focusing on a
specific tool or data set.
Is this 46% likely to decrease if we survey these same
executives a year from now? I think it will, as research from
Forrester, Gartner and our own internal work seems to show.
Companies are getting to grips with analytics as well as the
technologies that support it. This becomes even more relevant in
light of the business environment we live in today.
Greg Todd is global lead for analytics at
Accenture Information Management Services (AIMS)