How can Organizations Improve their Analytics ROI

Analytics is an ongoing core business capability, not just a one time IT project.

Although analytics is at the top project agenda in any forward  thinking businesses today. However, in most of organizations, there is a lacuna in identifying business problems where analytics could be applied, so very few companies get big rewards from their big data investment. How can organizations improve their analytics ROI and build a truly digital business with high “IQ”?

Executive sponsorship: One of the key metrics to the success of any Analytics implementation is the support from key organizational stakeholders and senior business executives. Business leaders first need to understand the role of Analytics in competitive positioning.....once this is in place, it becomes easy for IT and analytics teams to deploy an end to end solutions that are bound to maximize ROI.

Frame the right questions. Big Data is the means to end, not the end, start to ask the big WHY of business issues need to be solved. The successful ROI is achieved when business and IT work closely to manage data life cycle and drive business oriented analytics solutions. ALL team members need to be engaged: those who contribute to, or benefit from the modeling effort. Then, after checking for political / environmental / mechanical / adoption conflicts, see if the data even supports the objectives. Otherwise, you'll be like all the other technically proficient 'data scientists' who wrongly believe that analytics metrics = business metrics.

- Prepare a detailed project definition (if not, you're building a house without blue prints) 
- To improve your analytics ROI, spend the time upfront organizing and unifying the data you collect across systems and services, so you can build common analytics tools that allow your analysts and data scientists to spend their time investigating data instead of wrestling with it across formats.

Build CoE – A Center of Excellence: A center of excellence is a continuous and scientific approach towards people skills development; but it will go a long way in enhancing organization's analytical maturity.

- Pull head out of tactical sandbox and start thinking strategically. 
- Conduct a comprehensive assessment, not just data exploration, but thorough interviews of data talent professionals
- Monitor and challenge the analytical models and mapping with returns is important 
- Enhance the perception of better ROI, visualization of insights & graphical data representation of analytical results to stakeholders is key

To sum it up - 
1) A top down approach should be used to implement Analytics across organization 
2) Identify the needs of analytics across different functions and map out to understand how it would benefit them. 
3) Get your hands dirty. Build a very robust Master Data management across systems and services 
4) Improve the adoption of analytics by creating a COE (Center of Excellence) who would work with business through the entire analytics journey. 

Analytics is one of the core digital capabilities for business, it is a continuous improvement journey, not a one time project, hence, focus on long term business result, but manage a few quick wins.