Delivering Business Analytics: Practical Guidelines for Best Practice

Part Four

Practical Solutions: Systems and Assets

A business analytics team without the right tools is a like a carpenter without a saw. It can still get the job done; it will just take a lot longer than it should.

Getting appropriate tools isn’t hard. It just requires investment. Rather than make the required investment, many teams are willing to compromise and do what’s easy rather than what’s right. Not only does this hinder their efforts to scale, it creates an upper limit on the level of sophistication they can apply.

Driving higher-quality outcomes requires organizations to take a structured and appropriate approach to platform architecture and asset management. Without this, they run the risk of creating too much or too little structure. The following chapters focus on how best to leverage purpose-built tools, how to manage the resulting assets, and how to establish a measurement framework that covers value, performance, and effort.