We are drowning in data but thirsty for insights. The answer is simple, right? Hire more data scientists. Never mind that there’s a huge shortage in skilled data scientists. Never mind that good ones demand high salaries and are at risk of being lured away by even better offers. If you want to turn all of that data into value, you just need more data scientists, right? Maybe not. Maybe there’s something better you can do that will create even more value with less cost and less risk.
The floodgates have opened and companies are overflowing with data. It comes from every corner of the business, as well as a thousand external sources. Hiding in all of that data are insights that can change your business, and value that can make the difference between runaway success and bare survival.
Most organizations concentrate responsibility for analyzing data and finding insights within a Data, Research or Business Intelligence team. This is where the data analysts and data scientists reside, fielding requests from business units and sending back reports and data sets. It’s also completely unfair to the Data/BI team and the data scientists on it.
Typically, if you need to scale up a function, you add resources where that function lives. Need more finance capability? Scale up the Finance department. Need more IT support? Scale up the IT department. If that’s the case, then if you need more data insights, you would scale up the Data/BI team, right?
There’s a better way. The assumption that all of the data insights should come from the data/BI team is flawed. It’s also unfair to the data/BI team to expect them to have a deep understanding of all of the other parts of the business. The truth is that all of your teams should be capable of uncovering their own data insights. The Marketing team should have this capability. The Finance team should have it. The Product, Customer Service, Sales and even HR teams should have it. They have the domain expertise to understand what is valuable if they know how to look for it.
These departments are familiar with the intimate details of their business function, along with all of the internal and external factors that affect it. If you give them the knowledge about what data is available to the business, and the skills to use that data to find, validate and quantify actionable insights, you’ll unlock tremendous incremental value.
This shift puts your data/BI team in a much better position as well. They will find themselves fielding better, more focused questions and applying their significant skills to the right activities. This will let them have a greater impact and it will let you get much more mileage out of the data scientists you have.
Even without adding more data scientists, you can dramatically increase the value you get from your data. You just have to let everyone else lend a hand.
If you want to see how to give your teams the knowledge and skills to find actionable insights, contact us.
