Deliver Business Value
With the above tactics done well, you would have laid a strong foundation for driving data transformation. However, enablers by themselves can only do so much; it is important for the central transformation team to demonstrate regularly that they are competent in delivering real business outcomes for the organisation. The leadership is often impatient in wanting to see tangible results from any data projects and initiatives, especially when they made a huge investment to set up a data transformation team.
Herein lies the dilemma – as the central team you know that building up the strong enablers is important for the long run, yet there is a need to balance and ensure that improvements to business outcomes are delivered frequently. It is a difficult balancing act. Put too much emphasis in building up the enablers and there will hardly be any data projects and outcomes to speak of, but put too much emphasis on projects and the lack of a strong foundation will show in the long term as the value derived from the projects become more one-off and unsustainable.
To help the leadership and management see that the value of the data transformation efforts is closely aligned to the organisation’s mission, the central transformation team must ensure that they embark on sufficient high-impact, top-down initiatives. Such projects are commissioned at the leadership level and senior leaders are brought in as project sponsors and kept informed of the project milestones. Lessons learnt in the early stages of the transformation journey also provide a reflection of the current state of the organisation’s data analytics-readiness such as data quality, governance and data projects. These invaluable lessons also help to shape up the development of longer-term enablers for the organisation. By delivering high-impact projects, the central team helps the leadership to see the value of data-driven insights and decision making and in turn leads to stronger leadership buy-in to effect greater organisational change.
However, bottom-up initiatives are equally important. To help all staff feel like they are a part of this data transformation journey, an avenue should be provided for staff to explore data-related initiatives that can help to improve their work processes or experiment with solutions. As this group of staff are willing to step up and take a data-driven approach to improve the way that they have been running their work and operations, the central team must ensure that support is rendered to them.
A good data strategy that balances both top-down high-impact projects and bottom-up staff-initiated projects will be key to a sustainable data transformation where all members of the organisation feel a part of.
Bottom-Up Initiatives Encouraged
With the availability of software, tools and training, staff can start on their data projects more easily. Ground-up projects are crucial as it allows staff to work on business problems and improve existing processes and business outcomes. Such projects may help to bring out hygiene issues or even be able to improve pain-points commonly encountered on the ground. To the management, sometimes these projects feel somewhat less significant through an organisation perspective, but to the staff such improvements can help them greatly in their day-to-day work. The central transformation team should not over-extend to work on every one of such problems, but instead try to extend some support through clinic sessions to help resolve roadblocks that the staff may encounter.
Data Champions are also another group of change agents; equipped with the skills to perform intermediate analytics work they would have worked on a data project during the DC Bootcamp training. Thereafter, they will continue to lead divisional data projects to uplift the division’s internal capabilities.
With projects led from bottom-up, we can leverage motivated employees and their business knowledge to kick-start change in a more scalable manner. As we continue to embark on the transformation journey, more staff and divisions will be more adept at their skills and in turn drive more impactful work to improve business outcomes.
Top-Down Projects Aligned With Strategic Objectives
The central data transformation team is invested in delivering the high impact projects and this is reflected by the direct partnership with other line businesses. As we have mentioned earlier these projects are identified and agreed upon at the senior leadership level to ensure that these efforts are aligned with the organisation’s missions and priorities. One important aspect of data transformation is to help the leaders and business lines recognise the business value that can be realized, be it through increased efficiency, cost savings or enhanced performance for their business processes. With clarity on the business outcomes, it will be easier to obtain senior leadership buy-in to work on high impact projects that may cut across different divisions. Divisions may also start to engage the central data transformation team for projects unique to their domain in a more long-term partnership.
By balancing quick win success through ground-up projects and developing capabilities to support longer term goals through top-down projects, the goal is to ensure that data analytics will be used in our day-to-day decision making to improve business delivery. We can broaden out from lessons learned in initial use cases to establish a modus operandi for consistent, repeatable expectations and a delivery approach for sustained success.
