“CIOs who take an early leadership role in analytics governance will further demonstrate their own value and help invent their organizations’ future[s],” according to an article in CIO Magazine.
Taming the Wild West
Today’s CIOs must tame an organizational “Wild West” brought on by the promise of Big Data and analytics that are more sophisticated than in the past. The reason for this Wild West is that an increasing number of business units are looking to analytics to answer any number of questions including: What happened? Why did it happen? What will happen next? How can we make it happen?
The authors of the CIO article say companies like eBay are constantly running analytical experiments—and every customer is involved in at least one. American Express mines structured and unstructured behavioral data to predict how customers will respond to a set of quickly executed offers.
To tame this new Wild West, CIOs “should play a key role in aligning business and IT when deploying predictive analytics campaigns,” the article notes.
Six Steps to Implementing Analytics Campaigns
The authors point to a six-step process detailed by Michael Goul of Arizona State University to help CIOs implement analytics campaigns that are coordinated, tracked, and measured, and can be turned into fast action:
- Design: Decide the pace of the campaign, how long it will last and how to measure its success.
- Embed: Develop and test user interfaces and ensure that results appear at the right time and for the right people.
- Empower: Teach employees to interpret the results of the model and use them as intended. If the content changes rapidly, be sure the results of the model refresh fast enough to keep up with changes.
- Measure performance: Ensure campaign managers can access the results in real time. Create dashboards so the progress of the campaigns can be monitored. Alert managers if the campaigns appear to be veering off course.
- Evaluate: Study the progress of the campaign or how effective it is. Answer such questions as: Are the number of errors acceptable? Were the results of the campaign worth the money spent on the analytics system?
- Re-target: Review the results of the campaign and decide if you need to make any changes.
It bears repeating: CIOs who take an early leadership role in analytics governance will become more valuable to their companies, and they’ll also help invent the future of their organizations.
