Mainstreaming Analytics

Ending disciplinary apartheid

By Thornton May

Analytics (the discipline) and Analyticals (the people who practice said discipline) continue to sit on the financial, operational and strategic sidelines of many enterprises today. This is wrong and has to change. 

The readers of this magazine know how powerful analytics can be. People in the analytical ecosystem can point to an ever-growing body of empirical evidence demonstrating unambiguously that competing on analytics makes sense (and cents) and surfaces the optimal path to achieving greater profitability and more successful missions.

Futurists, trend spotters and forecasters all predict that the environment of tomorrow will mandate the decimal-point precision in product quality, feature relevance and service provision that only informed, innovative and time-compressed application of analytics can provide. Our closest colleagues, or the people in our innermost business networks, typically share our passionate belief that analytics need to be embedded into the core behavioral DNA of each and every enterprise on the planet.

Yet, despite the presence of knowledge, quantitative and qualitative evidence, future-state inevitability and passion, analytics continues to exist on the sidelines of mainstream business practice. Why is this, and what we can do about it?

In a world with no boundaries, how did we end up in a prison cell? 

Social scientists tell us that we are just now entering the as-yet-unnamed fourth wave of human civilization – the first three being agricultural, industrial and informational. Technologists tell us we are simultaneously entering Web 2.0 and IT 3.0. The old Web was about Web sites, clicks and “eyeballs,” while the new Web will be all about communities and collaboration. IT 1.0 and 2.0 were all about machines and networks.

Business Intelligence 3.0 will be all about collecting data from multiple locations – both inside and outside the enterprise – analyzing it and applying it for multiple purposes (both inside and outside the enterprise). The future belongs to us – the Analyticals – if we choose to mobilize. Quite literally, we have to become much more mobile (both movable and visible) in the various domains we operate. Stated simply, we have to get out more. We need to throw off our current org-chart shackles and do a walkabout. No more waiting for the phone to ring. No more waiting for the data to be delivered. We need to de-territorialize our discipline.

Organizational theory emphasizes the significance of the boundary that separates the enterprise from its environment, one division from another and people from the roles they play. C-level executives at hyperperforming companies like Boeing, Unilever and Procter & Gamble repeatedly go on record saying that success in their organizations requires spanning boundaries.

Look at the early-game winners of the Web 2.0 drag race: Flickr, Wikipedia, Blogger, Epinions, Google Maps, MySpace and craigslist. What do they all have in common? They exploded/transcended the boundary between them and the rest of the world. While their now-in-the-dust competitors launched Web sites, the winners launched vibrant communities. Winners connect with their users. Losers build walled gardens. Future career success for analytics and analysts will require boundary spanning and community building, too.

Busting silos is hard. Phil Cowdell, CEO of Group M’s new Ford Media Services, is now attempting to get media, researchers and strategists from three of Ford’s agencies – JWT, Ogilvy (who work with MindShare) and Y&R (Mediaedge: cia) – to work together. In the past, they would have worked independently. “Changing behavior is not so easy,” Cowdell says. He is not attempting to break down those silos alone. He turned to the social sciences for help and airlifted in a behavioral psychologist.

Your next job: cultural architect
Analytics is hard. When I say hard, I am not talking about intellectually hard; I am talking about organizationally hard and culturally hard. One of the paradoxes of the world we will soon live in is that if we – the Analyticals – are to be able to extract full value from our quantitative skills, we will have to do a forklift upgrade on our cultural skills. We will have to create a culture that embraces analytics. 

Culture is one of those words everybody talks about but very few people really understand. I am pretty certain that most of us never took a class in culture building. I am also willing to bet that in most organizations the title “culture maker” sits unclaimed. Search the organizational chart and try to figure out where responsibility for culture lies in the enterprise today. It is up to us to step up to the Dr. Frankenstein-like challenge of culture making.

How do you define culture? A formal definition I frequently use states that culture is “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterizes a company or corporation.” Others define it more creatively:

• Marvin Bower, author of The Will to Manage and former Managing Director at McKinsey, described culture as “the way we do things around here.”  
• A colleague tells me she views culture as “the Maps of Meaning through which the world is made intelligible.” 
• A senior vice president of human resources thinks culture is “the Second Nature – norms that operate in subtle but powerful ways to box us in and restrict our thinking.” 
• A person in the analytics community told me that “culture is really a form of organizational virus – it’s what you catch when you come here.”

However we define it, in many organizations the culture in place today incorrectly positions and underuses analytics – and this is unfortunate.

To help redefine our culture, our new job is to change the enterprise’s perception of analytics and Analyticals. Start, as I said, by getting out and walking around. Next, keep reading sascom. In the next issue, we will examine the culture-making tools and techniques available to us.

Bio: Thornton May, Executive Director and Dean at the IT Leadership Academy is one of the premier visionaries in the IT industry.