Creating value with business analytics

Senior management support is crucial if business analytics is to be effectively adopted and integrated throughout an organisation, a leading academic in business performance has highlighted.

Senior managers must ‘lead from the front’ and be the first to engage with analytics and advocate their use instead of “just investing in a function and leaving the business analysts to promote their value”.

Dr Pietro Micheli, Professor of Business Performance and Innovation at Warwick Business School, says: “Once we have secured that level of leadership commitment, we then need to train analysts to work with people around the organisation and demonstrate how the data fits into their area of the business.”

In the fourth of a series of vlogs for Crown Workforce Management, Dr Micheli sets the scene by using a people scenario to provide context.

“Good analytics mean that we understand our competencies, how people have been working together, the skills that they have used, how they have interfaced with customers, what type of scheduling and rostering was applied and what sort of processes we had in recruitment.

“We can then try to better understand how things connect. For example, better trained employees might deliver higher levels of customer service and therefore help retain customers. Improved communication may lead to employees having a better understanding of the direction in which the organisation is going and the role that they need to play, and therefore feel more motivated," he says.

"Looking at the future, we can consider their development requirements and talent management against the needs of the organisation."

Another way in which organisations can ensure that they get best value in the introduction of business analytics is by ensuring that they are fully embedded into working processes, such as performance reviews.

Adds Dr Micheli: “In conclusion, to exploit business analytics and fully integrate them into organisations, we need leadership support, competence and embedded business analysts, and an understanding that analytics is something that we all do.”

The videos accompany a free guide to ‘Demystifying Business Analytics’ available from www.crownworkforcemanagement.com/demystifying-business-analytics

To view the vlog, ‘How We Can Create Value Through Business Analytics?’ go to: