Data driven ready step 8 – Utilization and enablement

This phase is all about getting the result out of your work and to be able to deliver on business goals and objectives. This is where your work will be put to the test and whether it will deliver on its promises, or not. All the work you have previously done has been preparations to create the platform, input, methodology and foundation for the conclusions you expect to make from the work performed and data gathered.

This phase includes work by analysts and other data success roles. In this blog post we will dig a bit deeper into what these kind of roles and analysis can do for your business.

The first category of roles that will be involved in these phase of the data-driven initiative are the Analysts. These roles often has a focus area within a certain business domain, such as ”Product”, ”Finance” or ”Marketing”. These roles combine business acumen with data skills, which basically means that they can combine their insights into the business specifics and relate to data that has been collected, structured and made available through your initiative.

This makes it possible for these roles to utilize data to provide business insights and to help the business answer to important, but sometimes complex, questions like ”actual customer acquisition cost for various marketing activities”, ”customer retention rate based on marketing activities” or other KPIs that includes calculations of several different variables.

Based on their varying skill set and experience from various areas, analysts can often also act as a liaison between data engineers and the business as they understand both perspectives. Analysts further often act as a ”Super Users” of data products (refer to previous steps of the model).

These roles often have different names in different organisations, but some of the ones we have come across are Data/Business/Product/Marketing/Web/Risk Analysts, depending on their primary responsibilities. With the help of well established and maintained data platform, analysts can ensure that your decision making becomes truly data-driven. 

The second category of roles that we will touch upon in the Utilization and enablement phase of a data-driven initiative are the Data Success roles. The requirement and scope of for these roles are varying depending on your organization or business. A few example of roles that can be categorized into this category are Data project managers, Data product owners, Data owners (often distributed into the organisation into what can be categorised as a ”data mesh”) and lastly Data evangelists. 

The last role fits with persons that conduct activities to spread knowledge and use of the Data analytics platform. This can be activities like training, workshops or teaching. The Data success roles are important for a positive introduction and implementation of your data-driven initiative, but also for the long term maintenance and further development of the capabilities. As with all technology driven business development projects, change management is equally important to the success as the technical capabilities.

This is equally true (maybe even more) for your data-driven readiness initiative. Success will not be measured upon how many bytes of data you can gather or how many fancy reports you can generate, unless it can be turned into real business value and insights that will improve your business. Defining data success roles can assist you with this. Furthermore, if you are able to deliver a platform, structure and methodology that can turn decision making in your organisation into being truly data-driven and fact based instead of ”best guessing”, you will be able to deliver real value to the organisation and become the ”Hero of today”.

We don’t know if that matches your ambitions, but we hope that with the support of the Redpill Linpro Data-driven ready model, you have gained valuable insights and shared some of our experience from what is required to be successful with this kind of initiative. It is our strong belief that this will contribute to the success of your business, improve decision accuracy and help you fulfill the overarching business vision.

Redpill Linpro is launching our Data driven ready model in a viral way by releasing a series of blog posts to introduce each step in the model. This is the nineth and last post in this series. Below you will find an image that covers all the different steps of the model.

Check previous blog posts for full insights into the model and don’t hesitate to contact us at Redpill Linpro for more information on how this model can be used to assist with your data-driven initiative, if you need assistance in getting off in the right direction or specific support with any of the steps in the model.