Your organization may already be using data and analytics to better target marketing offers or improve the accuracy of financial forecasting. But there are many other potential use cases – supply chain analytics, plant/asset utilization analysis, and workforce analytics to model and manage attrition, to name just a few.

Data and analytics can be combined with smart automation, including robotic process automation (RPA), to create continuous improvement and enable value capture throughout the life cycle of automated processes.

As your organization extends its use of analytics, you will want to ensure executive-level support, define priorities, and establish success criteria for data and analytics projects. During this phase, our unparalleled benchmarking tools can help your company in doing this. We can help assess your technology maturity, show you what companies of a similar size in your industry have done, and describe steps your company could take to benefit from data and analytics.

We can also help you evaluate the talent needed to plan, deploy and use analytical tools. This will help management decide what talent gaps to fill internally, where upskilling may be needed and if some degree of outsourcing might be helpful.

Many organizations have disparate and disjointed data systems that make it difficult to obtain a more holistic view of operations. Data may be held in functional/geographical/divisional vaults that make it difficult even for trained analysts to perform data analytics.

Your organization may be exceptional: You may have clearly defined roles and responsibilities related to analytics, as well as curated data warehouses or a data lake house and perhaps a center of excellence to support the ways that you currently employ data and analytics. But as you add new uses and “democratize” analytics to empower additional business users, you may need to make modifications.

For example, if incorporating new external data about your customers, your industry or economic conditions would strengthen your analytics capabilities, your organization may need to modify relationships with partners or service providers, and then reconfigure data stores, data privacy and data security processes.

It can be daunting to select data and analytics technologies that are a good fit for your business model, use cases, level of technology maturity and depth of staff capabilities. Many solutions are available, and deciding whether to go with on-premises or cloud-based solutions complicates the selection process.

Our partner relationships with Oracle, SAP, AWS, MAPR, Alteryx and other technology providers allow us to provide guidance as you seek out solutions tailored to your company’s data and analytics goals. To reduce redundancy and streamline user access, for example, you may find it cost-effective to move analytic applications to the cloud, as many companies are doing.

Above all, our unrivaled knowledge of proven best practices means that your organization can rapidly realize the benefits of deploying data and analytics solutions. Our Business Best Practices Intelligence Center™ is the world’s largest searchable online repository of empirically proven business best practices, performance metrics, implementation tools, and associated Hackett research and events.

As your company adds to the ways you apply data and analytics, you will want to continually measure business outcomes. Keeping project goals clearly defined makes this easier. Recognize that in some cases initial results may disappoint and a different approach may be needed. Or you may need to revise use cases as more insights are discovered or new technologies emerge.

A key success factor is to use a collaborative model, so that your company’s analysts partner with business leaders who have detailed knowledge of key processes. This aids in obtaining useful outcomes from data and analytics initiatives.