Democratizing Analytics

Chapter 2. How Democratizing Analytics Improves Business Outcomes

We’ve seen that democratizing analytics can improve your business performance, but what does that look like in a real-life example? How can enabling employees with access to analytics tools provide a business with success—and, more important—what types of success is it able to achieve? Let’s take a look at a company that democratized analytics to see how enabling employees with analytics allowed them to overcome challenges and achieve success.

Case Study: Chick-fil-A

Chick-fil-A is an $11.3-billion quick-service restaurant company that operates close to three thousand stores across the United States. It has grown significantly over seven-plus decades, and this growth has affected Chick-fil-A’s relationship to its data. Chick-fil-A wanted to better understand its customers and personalize offers via a loyalty application, but the company’s expansion generated pockets of siloed data, and collecting data to report holistically became challenging. Chick-fil-A’s analysts struggled to get access to data and relied on IT support. Even when analysts did get the access they needed, the data was often so immense that it was prohibitive to query. Additionally, many of the analysts were familiar with reporting tools but lacked the technical skills to access, retrieve, and analyze the data effectively.

The hardships Chick-fil-A faced were hardly unusual: large amounts of data were available from which to derive insights, but ...