Value Promise of Data & Analytics

Why do data and analytics initiatives fail so frequently and what are the keys to success?

A quick google search (other search engines are available), provides a dearth of articles and data that highlight the significant failings in this space.

I was originally going to create a long list of stats here, but I appreciate you would rather get to the meat of this point quickly! Eyeballing the numbers, we are basically at around an 85% failure rate.

Typically, this would at least lead to some raised eyebrows, but despite this poor showing, there is still appetite for companies to forge ahead and double down.

A report from NewVantage Partners, the Big data and AI Executive survey from 2019, highlights that 87.8% of Executives report a greater urgency to invest in Big Data and AI initiatives.

So, despite the lack of returns, there is a recognition that there is value to be mined and that harnessing this space is key to future business growth and success.

I have long experienced that the core challenge is people and organizational culture. You can have the best data team in the world, but if they are not part of the core organizational culture you are not effective, and the work will not deliver the value that it can.

The usual example is this: “I am not sure if I believe that number, it contradicts what I already know”. I have also lost track of the amount of great work that was compiled and presented but not applied in practice. The reality is that your data team, or 3rd party vendor are not responsible to the application.

This is further highlighted in the NewVantage Report:

​Biggest Challenges to Business Adoption	​2018	2019
Lack of organizational alignment/agility	25.0%	40.3%
Cultural resistance	32.5%	23.6%
Technology solutions	15.2%	5.0%
Understanding data as an asset	30.0%	13.9%
Executive leadership	7.5%	7.0%

As part of my ongoing personal development, I recently started the Marketing Week Mini MBA in Marketing, run by the enigmatic Mark Ritson. If you are not familiar with his work, I suggest head over to YouTube and consume some of his content, it will be enlightening and entertaining.

Connection to the concept of market orientation in marketing

The essence of market orientation is consumer centricity that permeates an organization, breaking into three core components.

Customer orientation – understand and create value for current and potential customers

1. Competitor orientation – watch out for alternatives

2. Interfunctional coordination – cross functional process to increase value for customers

One of the other themes that stuck me was the word “humility” … Great Marketers have the humility to understand that they are not the consumer, so therefore their opinions can be counterproductive.

The greatest example of market orientation is Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

Creating such a culture comes down to two key initiatives:

1. Gain organizational commitment to this new core value

2. Develop the skills, incentives, resources and continuous learning to implement this new core value

In many organizations there are competing groups, such as Sales, Product or Advertising. Its common that organizations have adopted one of these core groups as a dominant part of their culture, which then presents a challenge to market orientation.

The keys to success for data and analytics initiatives

1. Cultural adoption and application, in all facets of the business is the key to data and analytics enablement and more importantly, value

   1. You have to have executive champions and invest in change management for your organization so you can walk the walk

2. The data and analytics leadership have to working in unison with organizational stakeholders

   1. This ensures clarity needed for data and analytics initiatives

3. Adopt an experimentation approach

   1. Your ability to create continuous growth from data and analytics requires more focus on test and learn

   2. Form hypothesizes and test them! This is massively underleveraged in the industry

4. Use finance techniques to help priorities initiatives

   1. There are lots of ways to spend a lot of money in this space

   2. Whether its efficiency or effectiveness focused projects, apply techniques such as NPV, IRR or ROIC to help guide the initiative focus and ensure you can showcase the business impact

#marketinganalytics #marketingdata #dataanalytics