Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

BUSINESS CHALLENGES PILLAR

In today’s challenging business environment, professionals across all industries are being tasked with doing more with less, with limited time and resources to allocate toward individual business analytics initiatives. This makes prioritization imperative and means that a crucial step of any business analytics implementation requires clear understanding of organizational objectives, or “business challenges,” to ensure that any solution is aligned with, and addresses, the company’s biggest or most pressing needs. This is why we have the first pillar of the BASP framework as “business challenges.” This concept may sound obvious to some, but it is a deceptively simple concept that is often difficult to follow consistently. Any business analytics initiative must be grounded in “critical” business challenges. When we say critical, we mean challenges or questions for which the answers will lead to the company increasing its revenues or reducing its cost. It’s very easy for the analytics effort within an organization to drift gradually into issues of intellectual curiosity or merely be a support function that answers questions at the whim of senior business leaders. This is how an analytics function can gradually turn into a cost center, rather than a function that adds economic value to the organization.

We cover the best practices for how to establish the critical business questions in detail in Chapter 3: “Aligning Key Business Challenges across the Enterprise.” ...