While the application of analytics and data-driven decision making continues to make inroads within a large number of organizations and enterprises, the concept often faces a number of hurdles once it gets there. A new study conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value and the MIT Sloan Management Review shows that executives introducing analytics and analytical tools often encounter cultural adoption challenges within their organizations. The study listed the top 5 analytical adoption hurdles executives were encountering. These include:
1) Lack of understanding of how to use analytics to improve business processes (39%)
2) Lack of management bandwidth due to competing priorities (34%)
3) Lack of skills internally within the line of business (28%)
4) Existing culture does not encourage sharing of information (24%)
5) Ownership of data is unclear/governance is ineffective (23%) – CIO Insight
The report states “The single greatest opportunity — and challenge— to speed adoption of analytics is to embed them into daily operations”. The report offers a number of recommended approaches to addressing this issue (not going to list them out in this blog post but the report can be found at Analytics: New Path To Value). What I found most interesting about the article is that, while companies continue to recognize the need to leverage their data to drive key strategic decisions, there continues to be a reluctance to expand this approach to their day to day operations. If analytics and data-driven decision making is recognized as a necessity for the “big” decisions, why do so many smart organizations neglect to recognize the value of analytics with the “not so big” decisions? Perhaps the expansion of dashboards and the adoption of knowledge sharing sites such as Sharepoint or Wiki’s utilized more effectively within organizations can help to overcome this challenge. Ultimately, the biggest take-away I had from the report was that the whole-scale embrace of analytics and data-driven decision making continues to be a challenge even within organizations that “get it”.
