You have just acquired a new software, it is generating lots of data and your team is excited. The only thing missing is how you can use all the data generated to your business’ advantage. Here is a six-step process that is designed to allow you to apply the analytics in all areas of your business.
#1: What do You Want Answered?
Developing any kind of analytics framework requires asking the most critical question – what problem are you trying to solve in your business? However, this strategic question can be as broad or as specific as you want. Nevertheless, be warned that broad questions require more data, procedures and objectives to find an answer, while specific questions require fewer procedures, data and objectives.
#2: Define Your Objectives
Once you have defined your strategic question, define the objectives that help answer that question. To do this, you may be required to break down the question to smaller parts and determine what it will require to get an answer. As you work through the other steps below, you may be required to revisit the objectives and add a few more items.
#3: Get Data
The next step involves gathering various data elements necessary to help you complete your analysis. Discuss with your IT department at the beginning of the process to determine how can you obtain data. For example, you can buy Pinterest followers and gather data from them based on how they interact with you and answer your questions.
The ideal setup would be to establish an open connection with a database to reduce your dependency on the IT department. If that is not workable, consider working with IT and create a schedule of when you should be receiving the files you require for analysis.
#4: Create Procedures
Procedure creation should take place in phases. The ultimate objective of carrying out routine or recurring tests is to help you develop an automated analytics. However, this is not the beginning of the process; break down your procedure development to four phases, these are ad hoc individual, automated individual, automated groups and continuous analytics.
#5: Analyze the Results
The next step in developing a framework involves results analysis. The first phase of this step involves determining whether the results you get are reasonably based upon your expectations. Apart from this, you should also be able to identify potential false positives and negatives in the results.
Expect there to be a couple of false positives when you run the procedure for the first time. If you receive no false positives, the procedure’s focus area is too narrow and may generate false negative results.
The second part of this step is finding out if the results meet your objective and answer the strategic question established above. The analysis should lead you back to the overall goal of carrying out the analytics, which is answering the strategic question.
#6: Managing the Results
Once you have identified the results of your strategic question, you are ready to move on to the final step, which is result management. Create a plan of how you intend to use the results early in the analytics process, and once you get to this final step, you are ready to put them to good use.
An important component of this step is identifying who will use the results generated. If there are multiple users within your organization, identify what components are important to each of them. It is better if you could have multiple ways and formats to deliver the results, depending on the audience.
Conclusion
Following this six-step framework development will offer you a structure that successfully incorporates analytics into your organization.