3 Key Use Cases for a Strategic Data Assessment, Vision, and Roadmap

An AVR describes the methodology for establishing a personalized and actionable enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) Strategy, spanning the core activities of Assessment, Vision, and Roadmap. Within these engagements, companies look at how people, processes, technology, and data are working together to optimize and accelerate their brand.

Process Assessment

An Analytics Center of Excellence or ACoE, is an internal team developed to provide governance, training, and adoption of data and analytics practices across the organization. These teams often focus on achieving a strategic and cohesive enterprise-wide analytics practice.

For one Florida-based company, developing an ACoE couldn’t come soon enough. The company was experiencing hyper-growth and tremendous client satisfaction but was suffering from an inability to forecast revenue or properly manage cash flow. The answer seemed simple enough: invest in a robust enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) tool for more visibility into data and reporting operations. However, the success of a reporting tool is dependent on its adoption and use once you get it inside the building.

Developing an Analytics Center of Excellence that aligned line of business requirements with IT capabilities allowed this organization to successfully implement a self-service environment that empowers their employees to proactively engage in data discovery and exploration.

Vision

A Fortune 500 homebuilder engaged CCG to perform a strategic AVR that would inform a software selection. The IT-defined vision for this project was simply to invest in a tool that would offer better reporting automation. However, upon assessment, a deeper, truer vision emerged.

The executive team wanted to use this investment as a springboard to transform the organization from a home-building, market-driven company that used technology to react, to a technology-driven company that leveraged data to act and lead the market through change. This vision emphasized the need for successful adoption throughout the organization, not just within IT. The need was no longer basic reporting, but a highly- personalized self-service experience, deployed seamlessly across desktop, mobile and with offline connectivity for employees at all levels in the office or in the field to collaborate.

Understanding the true vision led to a focus on vendors that supported custom visualizations with an emphasis on ease of use. Furthermore, it required a mature data governance capability to ensure secure and accurate reporting. The roadmap that rolled out this solution focused largely on IT, encouraging the lines of business in building their own capabilities using an enterprise analytics platform.

Roadmap

Founded in 1957, Honey Baked Ham (HBH) is a nationwide retailer of meats, sides, and desserts. After substantial investments in IT, HBH possessed a large array of transaction data but lacked a unified reporting platform to make sense of it.

CCG presented a three-part solution for HBH. First, CCG performed executive workshops to interview key stakeholders and identify the needs of the business users to formulate a unified future vision. The strategic AVR resulted in an achievable roadmap of phased initiatives laid out for HBH to successfully fulfill that vision.

Second, CCG worked with HBH to select the appropriate analytics toolset, based on their specific requirements (including ad-hoc analysis, dashboarding and scorecarding, predictive analytics, and mobile integration).

Third and finally, CCG created a fully-functional proof-of-concept for HBH. This actionable POC immediately supported HBH’s investment decision and allowed them to quickly begin reaping the benefits of a realized analytics solution.

This solution set in place data quality processes such as address cleansing, integration of 3rd party demographic information and creation of a unified view of the customer from their various entry points, including web site registration, catalog orders, and points of sale (POS). It enabled customer segmentation by volume, regency, and frequency of purchase. With a roadmap in place, HBH was empowered to strategically grow their business and plan for the future.

These three organizations were able to reflect on their people, processes, technology, and data through the use of an AVR. By leveraging an Analytics Centers of Excellence (ACoE) or BI Steering Committees, organizations can focus on clear organization, training, and adoption of their data practices. These things combined can strengthen a company to innovate for the future.

Learn more about developing an AVR by contacting a Data Strategist at (813) 265-3239 or reading more at www.ccganalytics.com/avr .