Have you thought about where your organisation is from a data and process maturity point of view? Most data heavy organisations have hired highly educated and experienced finance teams that, in our experience, can spend between 60% to 90% of their time on excel. This means that the time left for analysis is marginal and that your people are often over-worked and can be unengaged as they do not have the time or opportunity to contribute at the level they would like to. In a world that is increasingly focusing on people as the biggest organisational asset, the way your people’s time and capability is used, needs to change.
One of the first steps to moving your organisation up the Data and Process Maturity Model is to move from becoming data aware to data savvy. This essentially means automating excel processes which reduces time to delivery for analysis and reporting. By partnering with your business and finance teams, we can help you instil an environment of self-driven analytics and data literacy or we can develop the process automation for you, to optimise efficiencies and free up time for strategic thinking or actions that have an impact on organisational growth and profitability.
The last stage of the Data and Process Maturity Model is moving to a data driven organisation that includes hyper automation. We use a platform called Alteryx as an enabler to clean, blend and prep data to repurpose the teams to deliver value add to organisations. We don’t see AI technology as a way to cut heads, but rather as a way to better utilise these highly educated people to optimise organisational value.
The future for data driven organisations is data democratisation where every business user, within his or her scope, can access the data and reports that are needed with a press of a button. The future of citizen data scientists, where everyone in an organisation can access and use data affectively without the need for an advanced analytics team, is essentially what moves an organisation up the maturity model.
A key part of this is partnering with the IT function to ensure data governance and entrench expertise, as well as to inculcate continued learning and value delivery.
To build a citizen data scientist culture, you need to look at 4 core buckets which we believe are:
- Self-service Process Automation
- Democratisation of data analytics
- Data Governance so the right people have access to the right data
- Build internal capability of your people through coaching and training
It’s great to just talk about these things, but case studies give tangible examples of where the potential lies. As one example, Dimago spent 4 hours with one person in a shared services team and automated a process that usually takes 12 hours a week. This effectively turned into 4 months of time saved in a year for one person.
The value from these initiatives is exponential as it results in an organisational culture that has more time to do the things that create tangible value resulting in an engaged workforce that is agile, responsive, and resilient.
