Continuing on with Part 5 of this year’s Profiles in Analytics – Does Web Governance Drive Analytics…or get the whole analysis, survey data and digital analytics profiles at Semphonic.
Has Digital Analytics Made it into the Digital Production Lifecycle?
For all of the aspirations on how to create digital cultures and data driven organizations, when it gets down to basics, simply making sure that data collection occurs is a back burner issue. While Web governance oriented organizations may have processes in place and top down commitment to ensure that analytics is part of the development cycle, that it is only at around 60 percent says that there is room for improvement.
While non-governance organizations have roughly the same compliance, that there is such a high level of dissatisfaction with the process of implementing code changes, tells you something about an underlying issue that can sabotage whether accurate data is available when senior leadership wants to use it for appraising the role of the digital channel.
The Details
It stands to reason that organizations with established Web governance have more formalized processes around production of new content and applications for the digital channel, than organizations that don’t have strong governance.
Web development process. Nearly twice the number of organizations with governance includes digital analytics in the process “all the time” versus those that don’t, as seen in the chart below. Still, at 25 percent, there is clearly more work that needs to be done in this area. Interestingly, once you combine “all” and “most” of the time responses, you get roughly 60 percent in all organizations.
The research shows that there is still a great deal of work that needs to be done in the area of integrating analytics to the digital development process. While there is an increasing amount of project management best practices aligned with enabling analytics, analytics itself is often implemented after a project has launched. With the advent of mobile applications and social media initiatives, there are new opportunities for using analytics, and at the same time a repeat of the poor practices that have left analytics out of the fixed Web development process.
Implementing data collection code changes. The research showed the biggest difference between governance and non-governance when dealing with the process for implementing changes to data collection code, as seen in the chart below.
Anecdotal research tell us that the application of data collection code, considered to be the least glamorous element of analytics, to be a universal and significant hold up in the analytics process. Because there are often other projects in the queue ahead of analytics, or analytics is considered expendable if content or applications need to meet a deadline for launch, data collection coding may be held up for weeks and even months in certain organizations.
The “not acceptable” level of satisfaction among organizations without governance is a situation that if addressed, could show immediate improvements to the availability of analytics and potential value of metrics created with the data.
Next week: So, will Web governance make your digital analytics program run faster, jump higher and make you smarter?
Get the entire research at Semphonic.
