Tuesday, September 16, 2014

CIO as Chief Insight Officer - How to Manage Data Analytics Well?

The CIOs have three analytics-based views: The rear, descriptive and predictive views.
Analytics project is one of the top priorities for the forward-looking organizations nowadays, IT also plays the pivotal role in managing the full information life cycle effectively. CIOs as IT leader, how shall they take the adventure and deliver the business value from deploying analytics?





CIO’s multiple views (rear, descriptive and predictive) from analytics: CIOs must invest in and leverage appropriate analytics solutions and technologies to generate valuable insights to help their businesses open up new channels of revenue and monetization within the enterprise, their ecosystem, and the industry. Many CIOs apply analytics to understand what has happened (the "descriptive" view, or the "rear-view" mirror), and to learn from it, then understanding what can happen (the "predictive" view). Some CIOs have even gone a step further and looked at how it should be (the "prescriptive" view), and aligned appropriate technology solutions to support and enable business goals and objectives.

Availability of information needed from an operational perspective is the key to empowering the team. The needs of application analytics are very different from organizational/operational analytics. So now IT has integrated the application onboarding software with widely used analytics products. Enterprise CIOs who want to help their customers (employees, partners, external customers) must be able to take action from their analytics by connecting and collaborating with their customers.  In order to do this effectively, SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) applications enabling the staff on the shop floor to be effective is going to be key to customer –centric business in differentiating/personalizing the customer experience – and success.

Strengthen operational efficiency. The other key aspect stands out as 'optimize operational efficiency' or even better 'strengthen operational efficiency'. Efficiency is about optimizing the use of resource and elimination of waste so the CIO has a' magic wand' to optimize resources to achieve maximum throughput, keeping optimum customer service, eliminating waste to make things more efficient and reduce expenses.

A key requirement for CIOs is to find problems that analytic can solve; rather than show up with a solution and then find a problem. It is the CIOs responsibility to understand the business problem and opportunity. Analytics by themselves are useful, but it is a hard sale when you don't understand the business problem. So that's always the challenge: How can IT get close enough to the business? You need to understand enough to be able to not just ask "what's a problem we can help you with", but to be able to say "we see this problem based on our prior discussions and think we can work closely to solve it with you." 

CIOs should work hand in hand with other business leaders to identify opportunities, problems, & solutions. A good CIO came up through IT, he/she has the business savvy to work with the business to determine what IT can do to help or to determine what IT will need to be able to help the business. The CIO is one of the leaders of the organization, he/she should be working hand in hand with the other leaders within the business to identify what the opportunities are to help the different departments work more efficiently. How can IT get the information to the business departments faster and cleaner in order to make better and faster business decisions? It is not the CIO's responsibility to create the solution, but rather make sure that the proper resources are made available to design, develop and deploy the solution in a reasonable time frame.

The CIO was the facilitator and enabler for managing data and driving analytics effort. Analytics is required by all C executives and not only CIOs. Each and every member of the C team needs analytics and is required to deploy it to improve the business. The more the team members share the knowledge the better the results. Each member of the C team was asked to present his/her prospected use of analytics and the data sources. The board then mapped the input over the strategies and decided on the initiatives to pursue. How to get the C-executives to know, understand, and use analytics.

“Real-Time" analytics are about to transform many customer-centric industries. The time has arrived for cloud-based in-store applications that offer digital customer experience in bricks and mortar. Analytics in real-time coupled with a powerful rules engine poses a challenge to the market with the prize being customer loyalty.

CIOs as Chief Analytics Officer are extensively involved with their businesses, and are full business partners to their enterprises, the return on IT investment is in driving and deriving business value from analytics, and the key to it is being proactively involved in the business and understanding changing industry dynamics. Analytics is means to the end, not the end, the end is to identify both business opportunities and risks and manage them with agility.







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