Analytics budgets are changing at a rapid pace and CIOs can take five steps toward bring their spending up to speed, according to The Future of IT study.
This recent study is a follow up to a report released three years ago that predicted four important changes would affect IT:
1. Greater support needs as the work/personal life lines blurred
2. More frequent changes in organizational structure (meaning a shorter timeframe for IT response)
3. More emphasis on analytics and collaboration and less emphasis on automation
4. More tech choices (BYOD and apps for everything)
These changes have come full circle. But the need still exists for firms to direct their budget dollars toward the technologies and projects that will provide the most bang for their bucks.
Today, the study offers five areas of focus for bringing budgets up to speed. We’ll review the five steps and offer a look at the role big data analytics plays in the budget focus.
CIO Focus Area No. 1: Use technology to increase employee productivity
We know that if a technology doesn’t help your teams get the data they need quickly, it will be ignored. If the technology relies on multiple players, your employees are going to ignore it or find a workaround. No one has time to wait on technology.
That’s why we’ve seen self-service analytics platforms become increasingly popular. While the market for business intelligence and analytics software has matured, there are still areas for growth including “decentralization and user-empowerment,” according to a recent Cloud Times article.
CIO Focus Area No. 2: Give employees competencies, not just tools
“Too many managers are, with the help of their analyst colleagues, simply compiling vast databases of information that never see the light of day, or that only get disseminated in auto-generated business intelligence reports,” writes Tom Davenport, a professor and author of many books on analytics.
It’s time to empower and educate your teams on how to use the data to effectively and efficiently move business to the next level.
CIO Focus Area No. 3: Split off flexible interfaces from foundational data
Splitting out the data offers up opportunities to glean real insights from the data, as we mention in a recent post. Splitting the data up first gives you a better opportunity to “manipulate and prep the data for visualization and analysis,” notes Benjamin Spiegel, director of search analytics at Catalyst.
CIO Focus Area No. 4: Shift engagement focus from managers back to employees
We couldn’t agree more with this statement. Managers definitely have a place in the data, but the real empowerment comes in offering up data analysis to the employees who use it every day to make an impact in their jobs.
Michael Foley made a great point recently in his Forbes post introducing EMC’s Marketing Science Lab.
” . . . Big data becomes more than a buzzword when you unlock its potential to bring business units together, bring enterprises together with vendors, and bring billions of customers together with the businesses they rely on and with each other,” Foley says. “Big data is the catalyst for collaboration across the board.”
CIO Focus No. 5: Shift IT from a reactive approach to business demands to a proactive one
Budget really comes into play here, says Andrew Horne, managing director of research for CEB.
“The way in which IT gets money from the business just has to change,” he says. “The whole multi-year or annual, long-term process just doesn’t work in a time of such rapid technological change; the organization needs to be a lot more flexible in terms of IT strategy, able to make quick decisions and react better.”
Wrapping Up
Business priorities and how organizations use data have changed. In order to stay ahead of the curve, it’s important that CIOs and business executive teams look toward being proactive and productive in data analytics projects. That means looking at new ways to prioritize projects, budgets and how employees work with data.
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Amanda Brandon
Spotfire Blogging Team
