On June 7, FSFP consultant and data management veteran John Ladley and industry leader, speaker and author Anthony Algmin spoke to a group of professionals who were dialed into the Top 5 Priorities for an Analytics Leader DATAVERSITY webinar.
This month’s educational webinar, which was sponsored by Looker and Datawatch, focused on growing the audience’s understanding of the pivotal role and responsibilities of an analytics leader — with John and Anthony addressing the top five priorities.
1. Evangelizing the importance of data-driven decision-making
- Traditional approaches (SDLC/waterfall/agile) may not be well-suited to data-centric projects such as data lakes.
- You need to define what data-driven means to your organization.
- Data capabilities mean nothing without the business achieving something new.
2. Aligning analytics with a business value-driven approach
- Business alignment is a critical success factor to any data-driven initiative.
- Data folks bring knowledge of what’s possible to a business that knows what’s reasonable. Listen to each other!
- Analytics are not a “build it and move on” proposition — they must evolve and respond to change.
3. Developing an analytics competency
- Start by building something, anything, that will add business value.
- Then do it again: keep creating more business value and earn the better tools or the bigger team.
- Iteration and agility builds momentum faster than a big plan.
- When you need others to help your growing analytics team, look to Marketing and Finance. Why? Finance knows the detail and Marketing intuitively understands that data quality is a function of suitability-for-use.
4. Ensuring business insights are delivered and communicated
- Do not get bogged down in talking about data or trying to get a perfect plan in place.
- Your roadmap should be detailed only to your organization’s tactical horizon. After that, it should represent philosophy and principle.
- Delivering insights is 80% of the solution, but the last 20% is getting change to happen. Our job isn’t complete until it does.
5. Identifying and delivering opportunities for data monetization
- Directly monetizing data is based on the hypothesis that whomever is buying the data needs more data. (Chances are they already have plenty of data.)
- Data monetization is really about simplifying the buyers’ journey to data-driven business outcomes. The closer the seller gets them to the ultimate outcomes, the more valuable this service is … and note that this is a service, not a product.
These were just some of the takeaways from this great webinar. For the full audio recording and presentation material, visit DATAVERSITY’s webinar archive.
For additional recaps, like this one, from the Data Insights & Analytics webinar series, visit our webinar archive.
Up Next Month: CDO vs. CAO: What’s the Difference
We hope you can join us for next month’s webinar, Chief Data Officer vs. Chief Analytics Officer: What’s the Difference, on Thursday, July 5. If you can’t attend one of our webinars, you can still register and you’ll receive the audio replay and presentation material the week after the webinar.
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About Guest Speaker Anthony Algmin
Anthony Algmin helps companies improve their competitiveness in a digital world. His experience includes decades of hands-on technology, management consulting and executive experience alongside a passion for leading data-driven change. He’s a popular speaker and the creator of the Data Leadership Framework, which helps organizations balance their efforts across the many areas of data management. His book on Data Leadership will be published in the fall of 2018.
