Best strategy: Get started

Accenture’s Duane Fernandes says that to understand whether your organisation is getting the best from analytics, ask yourself two questions:

Do you think you are making better decisions through data analytics?

Are you seeing the return on investment in analytics? He says the answers will provide the yardstick to compare with high performing companies. And his advice is to start right away on the road to improvement. “The way people used to do business intelligence in the old world was to build this massive data warehouse somewhere and get all of your data in there, wait for it to be perfect and then start analysing it,” says Fernandes. “That actually led to a lot of disappointment. “The way the technology has evolved and the way the economics of it has evolved is you don’t need to go through that process anymore.” The workflow trends shaping software development are also happening in analytics. Short sprints of data analysis — anything from a day up to two weeks — are a way to gain insights, then drive the next question, Fernandes says. “Analytics is not a replacement for good business strategy either,” says Accenture’s Justin Gray. “It’s always going to be something that can be a capability and tool that can help validate, steer, direct and fine tune a business strategy, but you still have to start with the fundamentals of your business and what question you want to answer and analytics will help you on that journey.”