Self-Service Data Analytics and Governance for Managers

CHAPTER 7Process Discovery: Identify Opportunities, Evaluate Feasibility, and Prioritize

In Chapter 6, we demonstrated Alteryx as a prominent vendor tool in the analytics suite. It was important to concretely show analytics in action and to reframe this book as a practical guide, rather than a work exploring only theories and hypotheticals. We tried to center our case studies on the most common use cases – ones that you are likely to encounter with only a superficial survey of your organization, rather than the more complex advanced analytics applications that are highly specialized, and may be more obscure and difficult to uncover. Now that you have seen at least one highly subscribed data analytics tool in action, you are likely excited to return focus to your own organizations and to begin deployment straight away. Well then, simply pull up your spreadsheet containing your groomed, ranked, scored, and prioritized backlog pipeline. You know the one – with valid opportunities neatly captured, with man-days of development effort estimated and resource costs assigned, showing which organizational, divisional, or department objectives are supported, and finally sorted descending by the dollar value of the benefits case. We will wait right here to lift our glasses, in a toast to your success and upcoming promotion.

You may be thinking that we have missed a step somewhere. From where exactly does this rich backlog pipeline come? Where are all of these promising opportunities to ...