The Value of Business Analytics: Identifying the Path to Profitability

FINDING THE PATH TO PROFITABILITY

Unfortunately, navigating this path is rarely easy. There are excellent materials that provide guidance around the role of business analytics as a corporate-level differentiator; however, trying to effect total organizational change without explicit management sanction is often frustrating at best and career limiting at worst. Strategic change at an organizational level can take years—a horizon that is not normally available to the average business analytics manager.

Selling the value of analytics on a tactical basis instead requires focusing on what can be changed. It requires the manager to persuade, influence, and achieve incremental efficiency improvements to a point where the value of business analytics is so well recognized that it gets explicit sanction at the most senior levels of the organization.

Sadly, there is relatively little guiding material for a business analytics manager interested in getting a better understanding of how planning, delivery, and communication frameworks can be optimized to deliver these incremental political and delivery improvements. This relative lack of guidance is especially challenging because managers are often unsure about how to best leverage that first critical step in creating a grassroots-led transformation: a successful project.

Having a plan is an essential part of transformation, and that first step is an even more critical part. Without having successfully convinced the organization of the value ...