Best Practices Summary:

• Hire people with marketing and communications skills for analytics teams

• Develop consultative skills through job rotations in roles that require both business acumen and stakeholder communications

• Develop a Center of Excellence to help centralize complex or high investment analyses while providing a hub for training and education for other groups. 

• Form cross-functional virtual teams around projects with business, data, and technical stakeholders to increase alignment and use of analytics. 

Case Study:

An online travel shopping company sought to improve their analytics and insights capabilities that drive travel provider engagement and loyalty. There was a team dedicated to providing analytics to the business, but adoption of the recommendations by stakeholders were constrained by limitations in the understanding and skills of data engineers and analysts providing the insights. They often misunderstood the business environment and culture due to myopic focus on data and analytics. Massive changes in tools and technologies over the years have left many business users with limited understanding about how to use analytics. Compounding this problem, analysts often overestimated business stakeholders’ ability to change in short periods of time and could end up making assumptions or overcomplicating analyses. From a skills perspective, analysts often lacked the communications skills to ensure both alignment of analyses with business needs and adoption of analytic insights. 

The VP of Enterprise Data Platforms and Services helped to address these challenges through both hiring and skill building approaches. First, she hired people to the analytics team that combined analyst capabilities with marketing and communications skills. These skills were used to better engage the business. For existing engineers and analysts on the team, she leveraged a Partner Services team that regularly interacted with external partners – providing an environment to hone communication skills. She rotated people into the group for three+ months for skill-building and then brought them back onto her analytics team. The newly built communication skills and increased business acumen were essential skills for working with the business more effectively. In addition, she guided her analysts to form cross-functional teams with business, data, and technical stakeholders to address selected business problems in a project format. This helped to align the analytics iterations and outputs more closely with business needs and outcomes. 

As a result of these approaches, the analytics team was able to build more trust with business stakeholders. Their analyses and insights more directly addressed business needs due to the close working relationships and better understanding of the business on a project basis. With more analytics adoption, the business saw increased revenue growth through better targeting and engagement of travel partners.