As our world becomes more digital by the day, the flow of data to the business desktop is quickly overwhelming managers’ ability to make sense of it. Coming from all directions – business systems, mobile phones, internet browsers, call centers and the like, managers are confronted with a seemingly infinite number of choices concerning what products to make, where to market them, who to target and how to reach their audience.
With this rise in the volume of business data, managers are increasingly at risk of Analysis Paralysis, a condition arising from too much information, too many choices and too little focus. In some ways, -it is a rational response when confronted with a lot of information, many unknowns and competing choices.
Guided Analytics, A Cure for Analysis Paralysis
Use of Guided Analytics in the decision management process helps managers overcome Analysis Paralysis. Some of the benefits include:
- to get beyond the data to the underlying insights, explore alternative paths to a solution weighing risks and benefits along the way in order to take action
- to distinguish big impact decisions from small ones
- to set a beginning and an end for their analytic journey, limiting the risk of an endless analytic spin cycle
In order to make good decisions that drive their business forward, managers need to move beyond simply reading the news and further into making sense of it, diagnosing problems, putting two and two together to create new opportunities. Guided Analytics is the tool and the process that leads managers to a productive solution in order to take action on the analytics presented
With analysis that is standardized, organized, and dynamic, managers can systematically look at the components of the business problem or opportunity, discriminating large from small and prioritizing important over irrelevant. They can explore alternative paths to a solution, assess risks, and quantify benefits, using this information to select options that will move the needle more than others.
Finally, Guided Analytics gives managers a path with guard rails to keep them moving on the analytic journey while avoiding pitfalls of analytic dead ends or bottomless whirlpools. Presenting relevant information in an objective and digestible manner, Guided Analytics guards against falling prey to cognitive biases that can creep into our decisions, such as relying too heavily on intuition, weighing the most recently encountered information more heavily or succumbing to group think.
How to put the Guide into the Analytics
Too many analytic solutions simply present tables of data and metrics, leaving it to the user to do the heavy lifting of connecting the dots, discerning patterns, and pulling out the insights. Guided analytics is not about converting these massive tables of data into pretty charts and dashboards to no-where. Rather, it is about delivering a journey through the analysis that is driven by a business objective, facilitating exploration in a manner that works with a manager’s train of thought and ending in action. In fact, a Guided Analytic solution will often lead the user to the data or list of prospects that can be used to drive a marketing campaign or target a group of properties for improvement.
To produce effective Guided Analytics, you need to:
- Architect your decisions
- Develop your data for analytics
- Present your analysis visually, dynamically and interactively
Architect your decisions. Take time to develop a decision architecture before developing an analytical solution. By Decision Architecture, we mean the set of tools and techniques you can use to systematically assess the business problem or opportunity, identify impactful decisions and actions, and craft strategies. Decision Architecture provides the starting and ending points for your analytical solution. A well-developed decision architecture focuses managers on the important decisions to achieve the business objective, actions to be taken, and metrics to measure performance.
Develop your data for answers. Structure your data to support the questions and decisions that you want to ask of it. Data without cleansing, transformations and structure is just data. In order to make useful information out of your data, you need to spend time validating it so that your user base has confidence in the answers you guide them to. You need to structure the data, enriching it with data science to uncover insights. You should create metrics and select KPIs that are relevant to the business objective that is the focus of the analysis.
Guide your analysis. Finally, take time to present the most fruitful analytic journeys in a manner that follows a path of least resistance, one that lets managers work through an analysis in a way that adapts to their train of thought and processing style. Make use of the new breed of data exploration and visualization tools that let managers consume information on demand, interactively, and dynamically, letting them ask their own questions of the data at the speed of thought. Build competencies in data visualization concepts and techniques that deliver effective UI/UX (User Interfaces and User Experiences), such as gestalt principles, progressive reveal, modular design and performance load management.
The road to business failure is littered with “would of”, “could of”, and “should of”. Guided Analytics is a great tool managers can use to navigate their way to success among the many choices and decisions confronting them in this new world of big data to avoid the pitfalls of Analysis Paralysis.
Kathy Williams Chiang is VP, Business Insights, at Wunderman Data Management. Andrew Roman Wells is the CEO of Aspirent, a management-consulting firm focused on analytics. They are the co-authors of Monetizing Your Data: A Guide to Turning Data into Profit-Driving Strategies and Solutions. For more information, please visit www.monetizingyourdata.com.
