The Importance of Strategic Alignment for Successful Analytics Initiatives

If you have ever found that your company has engaged with Analytics initiatives that have not generated the level of success that was envisaged – despite appearing to provide good insights, or that your attempts to start Analytics in your business are falling on deaf ears, then, quite likely, your Analytics initiatives are not properly aligned with your company’s Strategy.

The objective of any Analytics initiative must be to answer business critical questions that help implement the company Strategy.  When this is the case, company management pays attention to the Analytical Insights produced and are more likely to follow through on the suggested actions from the Analytics outputs.

Sounds so simple, doesn’t it?  However, this simple alignment is something that is regularly missing as organisations strive to implement Analytics.

Analytical initiatives can be established for many and varied uses within a company, and many company processes are complex and cross various departments. A good Analytical project team produce Actionable Insights and suggest supporting actions which regularly require adoption across various departments.  If all impacted departments, together with the Analytical Team are not aligned with the Strategy, the insights and actions produced will not be prioritised for implementation thence leading to a sense that the expected outcomes were not achieved.

How to ensure that your Analytics initiatives are successful:

In my experience, aligning the objectives of Analytics initiatives with company Strategy ensures that you address this key support to the successful implementation of Analytics in your organisation.  To plan for the successful integration of Analytics into your organisation I recommend the following:

• Ensure that your Analytics team knows your company Strategy so that they understand the relevance of the initiatives
• Ensure that the Analytics initiatives answer business questions that support your Strategy
• Engage with all the relevant stakeholders to ensure that they will action any recommendations that drive towards the strategic goals

Strategy – the essential prop for the successful implementation of Analytics projects.

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