Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

DATA DEFINITION AND GOVERNANCE

It’s crucial to have standard definitions, both technical and business, for the data you use for business analytics. Your business analytics work will flow across the organization, and the lack of a consistent and common data definition will undermine the credibility of your team’s work. For example, let’s say your team conducts a well-thought-out and thorough analysis of customer retention by industry segment in an effort to identify industries that needed additional attention, and as part of that analysis, you calculate the average customer retention rate. You give the analysis to executive leaders, and they are thrilled and impressed with the insights. Yet two days later, the findings are being discussed with a junior analyst within the sales operations function, and she indicates that the customer retention rate you provided is wrong, compared to the data that have been reported each month for the last few years. This is not due to an error on your part, because you simply used a slightly different definition than the sales organization did. As a result, however, the executive team now looks at your entire study with skepticism. This is an all-too-common situation of “throwing the baby out with the bath water” that could be avoided if technical and business definitions had been standardized.

Keep in mind that sometimes even the simplest data definition questions will result in your receiving conflicting responses, depending on whether you talk ...