The Value of Business Analytics: Identifying the Path to Profitability

TRANSFORMING THE ORGANIZATION

Sarah sat back in her chair. It had been a long year, but things were finally looking up. Her second set of models was going into production, she had finally gotten approval for additional headcount, and possibly most importantly, her company’s customer relationship management strategy actually had requirements for analytical integration as an explicit component. She was expecting vendor responses any day now.

Her meeting with Kate had been a watershed moment. She had felt positively broken the first few days afterward, but once she had managed to pick herself up off the ground, she had realized that Kate was right. Until she could demonstrate the value she was bringing to the organization in a way management could relate to, she was only going to be spinning her wheels.

The first thing she had focused on was understanding how her team’s insights were being used. It was somewhat disconcerting when she realized that they were not being used at all; despite the quality of her team’s answers, the other teams they had been working with were not actually using the knowledge her team had been providing. When she had caught up with her counterparts, she had found that this was so for a variety of reasons. For some of them, it was just too hard to change how they were working. For others, it was because they wanted to justify decisions they had already made. And, still others had accepted her team’s results just to demonstrate that they had involved all the ...