Avoiding the pitfalls - staying focused on the purpose not the process of analytics

It’s all too easy to be ‘seduced’ by technology and eye-catching charts and graphs when introducing business analytics into an organisation, a leading business expert advises.

Dr Pietro Micheli, Professor of Business Performance and Innovation at Warwick Business School, says it’s vital to focus on the primary objective: to inform strategic thinking and not allow the process of collecting and analysing data become an industry in itself.

He focuses on how organisations can avoid pitfalls when introducing business analytics, in the third of a series of vlogs for Crown Workforce Management. The videos accompany a free guide to ‘Demystifying Business Analytics’ available from www.crownworkforcemanagement.com/demystifying-business-analytics

“It’s easy to get excited by new technology and our ability to identify lots of patterns and create charts and graphs. We suddenly have all this data about our performance but that’s only helpful if we do something with it. Gathering data, in itself does not add value, it is how that information is used to support our strategic objectives, which is important,” he says.