Democratizing Analytics

Chapter 4. Best Practices for Analytics Democratization

The journey to democratizing analytics and advancing your organization’s analytics maturity is both challenging and rewarding. You may encounter one or more of the following trials along the way:¹

Data quality

Many organizations have an overwhelming amount of data. That data is typically decentralized, low in quality, and prohibitive to connect to. As such, when blending in additional data sets or producing insights, some doubt may be cast on the accuracy of the results.

Enterprise adoption

Analytics democratization aims to drive adoption throughout the organization. This means that buy-in is needed from analysts, managers, leaders, employees, customers, shareholders, and more. It’s challenging to create a shared desire across so many constituencies to understand and utilize data and analytics to make analytics-informed decisions in the business.

Leadership support

For a democratization effort to gain traction, the leadership of the company must understand the benefits and be supportive of the initiative. It needs to understand that analytics democratization is not opening the organization to vulnerability but rather providing valuable insights into—and improving—organizational processes. The involvement of leaders ensures that the move toward democratization is strategic and, importantly, funded.

Technology

Shifting to an analytically-driven organization requires the right technology. When democratizing analytics, it’s not complex analytical software that you need, but rather an easy-to-use, easy-to-repeat, and easy-to-share method for providing analytics capabilities and data access to those with fewer technical skills. This approach also requires that data be stored in a responsive, easy-to-access location and made accessible to those who need insights from it.

Analysts and trainers

Disseminating new skills and knowledge to the workforce requires support from technical experts and trainers. Their roles will be not only to understand the analytics solutions provided but also support the rest of the company as employees learn to use new analytics capabilities to generate insights.

Let’s look at how a leading global organization navigated these bumps in the road.

Case Study: Phillips 66

Phillips 66, an energy company, faced all of these challenges as it worked to build a data-driven culture. Phillips had a dedicated analytics team that reached out to employees across the company to understand their analytics use cases and skill levels. What the team discovered was that many users were looking for a way to automate analytics processes managed in spreadsheets. The analytics team determined that a new approach would be beneficial.

As Phillips 66 already leveraged Alteryx within the analytics team, it decided to expand usage of the platform beyond the analytics team environment. It hoped that by providing analytics tools directly to frontline workers (rather than making them rely on the analytics team and wait to receive information), the organization would realize the benefits of analytics democratization.

The analytics team started small, with a group that was already somewhat fluent in analytics. The strategy was to leverage word of mouth to encourage other employees to get involved in the analytics process. The training was successful, and soon many employees outside the initial group started asking to be involved in analytics. This led to a new complication for the analytics team: personally training everyone was no longer a viable option. Instead, the team would need to develop a self-sustaining culture to nourish this newfound appetite for data analytics.

The analytics team at Phillips 66 approached these training and data challenges by cleverly solving two problems at once. To encourage frontline workers to adopt analytics processes and improve understanding of how the organization functioned, the analytics team began requiring prospective trainees to do two things to gain admittance to training courses: 1) share their own data obstacles; and 2) get an Alteryx license. This strategy ensured that the training would solve real data problems that trainees faced while providing hands-on experience with the new analytics software.

The analytics team continued to provide training for new analytics users, building relationships with those interested in learning more about their data. This ongoing practice not only introduced the new analytics users to analytics experts but also provided the analytics team with insights into who, how, and where analytics was being applied at Phillips 66. At the same time, the analytics team fostered a broader analytics community across the organization. This community supported itself through knowledge sharing, innovation, and documented, repeatable analytical techniques. As such, the analytics support model organically evolved from relying exclusively on technical experts to being community driven.

These organizational shifts created another opportunity for the analytics team. By illustrating the benefit of providing analytics capabilities to employees throughout the organization, the analytics team demonstrated the value of a data-driven approach to Phillips 66’s senior leadership. The grassroots model quickly and effectively convinced executive leadership that a data-driven culture was not only beneficial but also required to move forward in the industry.

Phillips 66 has evolved into a data- and analytics-driven organization. It now utilizes analytics at all levels of the business and relies on analytics insights to drive the company. The analytics team within Phillips 66 still holds regular training sessions on how to use data and analytics as well as the software; however, the community-based support structure that the analytics team established allows it to spend more of its time focusing on Phillips 66’s most challenging data questions.

How does Phillips 66’s experience in data democratization help you in your own company’s transformation? Let’s look at some of the steps that Phillips 66 took.

Engage Experts for Guidance

The democratization of analytics often starts with those most familiar with data analysis: the analytics team. The individuals in your organization who deal with data and analytics questions understand the benefits of their skills and the insights they provide. The challenge for those experts lies either in finding a method to quickly distribute actionable insights across the business or in developing a solution to help more employees generate their own insights. Engage with your analytics team, and they may illuminate a path forward for your business.

Gain Executive Support

A data-driven culture encourages growth, efficiency, high performance, and innovation-driving product and service improvements as well as cost savings for the company. Identify and measure those relevant KPIs in your organization, and estimate both where quick improvements can be made and where the most ROI is expected. Analytics democratization increases analytics maturity, and third-party research shows that analytics maturity impacts an organization’s bottom line and competitive position in its industry.

The broader organization will need to understand the benefit of investing time and resources in analytics initiatives. One way to do this is to encourage executives to model the new analytics-driven behaviors desired by leveraging data and analytics as part of their leadership process. Encouraging leadership to adopt analytics into its workflow not only provides it with valuable decision-making insights but also demonstrates for the rest of the organization the benefits and outcomes desired from the analytics democratization process.

Start Small

Analytics democratization doesn’t happen overnight. You must first demonstrate value and build from there. This can be done with a proof-of-concept trial within the organization. Engage candidate “power users” or a small, motivated group within the company and provide them with new analytics software capabilities and training. Aim to help them solve a well-known or long-standing problem with analytics. As more and more members of the organization see their workloads simplified thanks to analytics, they become advocates for the transformation.

Demonstrate Benefit

It’s common for individual contributors, mid-level managers, and senior leaders to resist change. So, you must make clear the benefits of analytics democratization to each constituent—from the frontline worker who will need to learn new tools and techniques to the busy executive who will need to consume insights in a new way. You may want to consider constructing incentives to encourage behavior change. Phillips 66 did this by requiring employees to bring problems to solve in order to get an analytics automation software license and training. By solving a localized problem for an individual or a team using automated analytics, trainers provide not only a solution to the problem but also an incentive to utilize the new analytics capabilities further.

Train the Trainers

The goal of analytics democratization is to deliver analytics capabilities to anyone and everyone who would benefit from them. For larger organizations, this can be a challenge. The team responsible for training in the use of analytics software may quickly become inundated with requests for support. In this case, find in-house power users to enable and empower to train others in analytics software as well as best practices.

Create a center of excellence by pulling together the analytics expertise within your organization and providing them with the tools to distribute support and training of analytics across the organization. Enable them to explore technologies that manage, store, and deliver clean, consistent data that supports multiple departments, end-user questions, and diverse use cases. Encourage them to build a community around data analytics by leveraging tools such as blogs, hackathons, and social media within the organization. Teaching employees to support one another eases the burden on dedicated analytics and technical teams, so they can focus on delivering not just training but also other value-add work.

Make Analysts the Foundation

Your analysts can catalyze increased analytics maturity for your business as they provide the hands-on training, demonstrations, social content, and reference materials needed to support your analytics democratization initiative. Ensure that they want to stay and keep the company moving in the right direction. As your company develops an analytics culture, these dedicated analytics experts act as internal thought leaders. They form the foundation from which a self-supporting community can grow, fostering the exchange of ideas and practices. Confirm that these analysts are empowered to leverage and experiment with new data.

Establish an Analytics Council

Create a cross-functional group of leaders that maintains oversight of analytics resources and activities across the business to ensure engagement in analytics, enable data governance, and identify and address issues. Establish agreement among teams regarding data security, quality, and auditing as well as analytics provisioning and user management. The analytics council should also establish mechanisms for cross-team collaboration and the sharing of best practices across the organization.

Keep the Process Moving

Democratizing analytics generates returns quickly. Be sure to highlight the benefits to leadership, shareholders, customers, and employees. Use your initial analytics democratization victories to generate the momentum needed to drive the program forward and advance the organization’s overall analytics maturity.

When obstacles appear along the way, break them into their constituent parts and prioritize those issues that appear to be quickly addressable. Use tangible examples of your success in one business area to promote analytics democratization to those who are more reluctant to change. When you create tangible localized improvements, you spark analytics democratization to spread further through your company. We have provided a checklist in Appendix A to help you get started on your journey.

Empowering your whole organization with analytics creates multiplying positive impacts. The ability to make ground-level data-driven decisions without delay helps ensure your business will withstand global, economic, and industry change.

Withstand global, economic, and industry change with data-driven decisions.

Analytics democratization provides you and your team with insights into how the company is performing and where gaps in your processes can be filled. Although there can be challenges in implementing a new approach to analytics in the business, you can surmount them by strategically building and embracing a supportive, adaptive, and data-minded community within your organization. With these strategies, you can lead your organization to greater analytics maturity and a position of industry leadership.

¹ David Alles, Research Brief: “Competing on Analytics by Industry”, International Institute for Analytics, 2020.