Delivering Business Analytics: Practical Guidelines for Best Practice

Chapter 7

Analytical Process Management

Acting on insight requires alignment, coordination, and transparency. This requires balancing flexibility with standard processes. Understanding how best to go about managing transparency and standardization isn’t easy. Most organizations struggle with:

• Having too little or too much insight
• Minimizing the time they spend doing non-value-added activities
• Finding ways to continuously improve processes
• Engaging external parties without losing ownership over the resulting processes and outcomes

The solutions described in the next section focus on techniques and approaches to overcome these challenges.

COPING WITH INFORMATION OVERLOAD

CASE STUDY: WHY READ THIS?

When will this help?

Read this if your organization makes decisions on gut-feel or things go wrong because you use too many black-box systems.

How will it help you?

Using this approach will help you leverage experience and analytics.

What are the guiding principles?

• Drive outcomes, not insight
• Automate everything non-value-added
• Minimize custom development
• Function should dictate form

What else should you read?

• Augmenting operational systems
• Breaking bottlenecks
• Keeping everyone aligned
• Allocating responsibilities
• Measuring value
• Linking analytics to value
• Blending rules with models

The Background: Having Too Little Insight Is as Bad as Having Too Much

Most organizations are worried about their lack of insight. Despite having large data repositories, they lose sleep over their ...