In the fourth part of our series on data and analytics pain points, I talk about user adoption and ROI is a pain along with some solutions that can make this biggest pain easier to manage. For more insights on other common challenges, I encourage you to download the full white paper.
The Problem
One of the questions I get asked a lot from leaders is the best way to measure their return on data and analytics? It’s hard to quantify the value of a data culture in a traditional accounting sense. We paid X and we received Y. Some of the most valuable aspects of data investment are a bit intangible.
My number one answer is user adoption. Are your end users using the tools? Are they interrogating your data to solve business problems? Are you embracing self-service?
In my mind, it’s the penultimate metric on data ROI. I believe this because the most valuable thing you can accomplish is empowering every person in your organisation to think like an analyst. Rather than four people in your IT department crafting data solutions, you’ve recruited four hundred. It is hard to get there and harder still to stay there, but embedding a self-service culture in your organisation is one of the very best investments you can make.
In a study from the “Harvard Business Review,” 53% of executives ranked empowering users with self-service analytics as the most important. Unfortunately, Forbes reports that on average only 20% of users adopt the enterprise BI platform.
A tool without users is a useless tool.
Solving the user adoption problem is complex. Just like the proverbial tree falling in the proverbial forest, if we build a self-service platform and no one shows up, do we have a data culture? One of the biggest fallacies in self-service analytics is something I coined as the “Field of Dreams” fallacy.
This is true for dashboard developers. This is true for your CoE leadership. If you build the platform to facilitate end users’ data needs, won’t they just show up and start using it? No. Not a chance. And quite frankly, you should be terrified if they do.
Imagine handing the keys of a brand-new sports car to your fourteen-year-old with no driver’s education, no learner’s permit, no license and saying, “best of luck!” You’d never do that. Nor should you hope to do the same with the most important asset your company owns: your data. Building an effective self-service culture – the rocket fuel to user adoption – requires skill building, governance training, community empowerment, change management and more.
Self-service is scary, I get it. IT has nightmares of the Wild West. Procurement buys tools and high fives a job well done. Twelve months later, you’ve got 4,000 dashboards, 2,000 extracts, data everywhere and vendors telling you to double your license spend to keep the smoking platform from nosediving. While this outcome is possible, the most likely scenario is a clash of symbols and … nothing happens.
Building user adoption through a community of practice and self-service analytics is a major initiative and must be planned, executed and measured like any other project.
The Solution
Self-service doesn’t mean the solution stops at data feeds pointing towards an analytics platform. It means diligently crafting the message and curating the relationships different user cohorts are going to have with your platform once you have accessible data.
And when you start to think of building user adoption as a specific initiative, it becomes far more tangible and achievable vs. the “wait and hope” approach that most organisations unfortunately adopt.
The keys to empowering users to solve problems with data include:
Accessibility: This is vital, both in terms of being able to find and use the data. Just as important, however, is understanding what the data means within the context of business definitions.
Community of Practice (CoP): Every group of people has early adopters and late arrivals. Build your community of practice to give a platform for those early adopters to show-and-tell their data solutions and to evangelise to those late arrivals. Eventually, you’ll make true believers of the whole.
Enablement: The greatest enthusiasm is smothered without capability. Define your user cohorts and develop minimum competency requirements for each. Allocate a budget for each of your users to invest in training, whether it’s a financial budget or a measure of time. A data literate workforce is an asset.
Measurement: Tie training and skill development into your organisation’s annual assessments. Be prepared for an explosion of interest. Also, look for usage statistics within your tools for logins, usage activity, published items, popularity of their dashboards, participation in community events, etc.
Centre of Excellence (CoE): Develop best practices and governance polices as well as the communication strategy back to the community. Any CoE should be composed of a cross-functional team of SMEs that represent the full breadth of stakeholders and technical domains required for data to be successful.
You might have noticed that there are a lot of strategy elements here, which ties strongly with data challenge #3: data strategy. Your enablement strategy is central to building and sustaining user adoption and thereby achieving great ROI. And like data strategy above, a good consultant can get you to the finish line in defining that strategy for user adoption in days or weeks.
Summary
User adoption doesn’t happen on its own. At least not the scale that will truly validate your technical investment and pave the way for increasing innovation you’ll need for future endeavours. See generative AI.
The two most critical achievements you can target is building a data culture and empowering your users for self-service analytics. Like a conductor leading an orchestra, excellence across several different domains must intersect to create the necessary harmony. Once it does, it’s one of the most valuable assets your company can possess.
As we move into a future where AI makes every business user into a potential data champion, a robust, self-sustaining data culture becomes a treasure trove of opportunity
Want to Learn More?
Find this information helpful? There are more blogs to come with more information on other pain points and the best solutions to ease the pain. We’ve covered data governance, people resourcing, strategy, and user adoption and ROI. We only have one more big challenge to cover, which will hit the blog soon. Alternatively, you can read more right now in the full white paper.
Know your challenges but don’t know where to start in solving them? Reach out to our team, and we can help you figure out the best solutions for your needs.
