Better business decisions happen when business, data and analytics, and other IT leaders work together.
Data and analytics is a business function that fuels digital acceleration. However most organizations don’t have a systematic way to assess, optimize and articulate data and analytics value. Rita Sallam distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, believes CDOs, CIOs, and data and analytics leaders, need to optimize business impact and align to key business initiatives.
Sallam noted that Gartner’s chief data officer research and surveys show that data and analytics leaders that are involved in strategy development are able to deliver far more business value than those who aren’t.
“Data and analytics leaders struggle to optimize business value, and there’s often a lack of alignment to mission-critical priorities,” she said. “You as data and analytics leaders need to function as your organization’s ‘chief value officers.’
“The ROAR (Risk, Opportunity, Appetite, and Return) Model gives you a systematic way to score both benefits and risks for each initiative and then think about the combination of those initiatives in terms of an optimal portfolio.”
Sallam noted that while there are models that can help them think through and prioritize, it’s what goes behind those models — that’s important.
“Thinking trumps doing,” she said. “Optimizing value from data and analytics is a continuous process. It’s not just a once a year activity, it’s not just a quarterly activity — you need to think about it as central to everything else that you manage.
Key recommendation includes:
- Identify what decisions to reengineer, and why
- Prioritize decisions, analytics and data
- Fit artificial intelligence into decision making
- Rethink your D&A architecture
- Build skills, habits and teams geared for effective decision making
