You may have an approach that works in terms of tackling the major challenge of getting people with suitable skills into your organisation, but this won’t mean much if the business isn’t structured in such a way that gets most out of them. Building on the previous blog looking at skills, we’ve also looked at the related area of organisational design, operating models and governance. We again spoke to SAS customers in a range of industries to get their thoughts, and this blog sets out some key points arising from those discussions.

Centralised and decentralised teams

It was agreed that a hybrid approach is best, combining centralised and decentralised teams. The central team would look at:

• Strategic purposes and definition of the architecture
• Cross-operating business unit objectives
• Cross-functional activities

The decentralised team would cover:

• All day-to-day operational activities
• A major part of consumption of information, e.g. via dashboards
• The self-service of information
• Analysis of quick business wins

It’s important that there is good communication between both teams. There should be common communication tools with defined access for both teams. In addition, there should be weekly meetings to keep the lines of communication open.

Team location

There is an overlap here with the skills challenges, as the need to retain highly qualified people means that it’s important to show them the impact of their work so they feel highly valued. It was felt the potential high turnover of these employees means they could leave after six months if they’re not being shown this information.

The need to retain highly qualified people means that it’s important to show them the impact of their work so they feel highly valued #SASCIConnectionCircle Click To Tweet

There also needs to be strong co-operation between central and decentralised teams, with clear definitions of the data and systems used to support analysts. It’s important that those in decentralised teams don’t start using their own tools to do things quickly. It’s better to have a structure in place to cope with analysts wanting to spend longer using certain pre-existing systems, or to cover a situation where someone is away from the business for a period of time.

As an analytics provider, customers felt that SAS could help;:

• list areas to be covered by both teams
• provide deeper insights into processes that should operate between the teams and within each team
• provide deeper understanding on how to prioritise tasks
• select the right personnel and set out the key business needs from analytics

Processes and governance

When it comes to governance, one of the SAS customers felt there were three areas covered by a central team:

• Strategy: answering questions from the business leaders and management
• Science: answering questions from within the business, rather than management
• Analytics: technical experts that link and analyse data from across the business

There needs to be a central definition of key strategic objectives. And once defined, each person in each team must be carrying out work related to these objectives. It will also be necessary to prioritise which are the more important objectives, where there is a resourcing conflict. Inevitably there will be a trade-off from time to time as new objectives emerge.

There also needs to be agreement on data availability with clear rights set out on when it can be used, to avoid lock-down where individuals hold on to data for their own use. It was felt there are too many people within many organisations that don’t release data to other parts of the business, as they see it as a means of protecting their role or maintaining power.

Agility and speed of deployment

It was felt IT teams are typically slowed down by legacy processes and the current infrastructure, and they should be involved earlier in business discussions to build up their understanding of business requests that come in and the need to be more speedy and agile.

It was also felt that IT needed a change of mindset – from a risk to an opportunity perspective.

One customer was keen to point out that a big obstacle is not coming up with business insights from analytics, but deploying those insights so they become embedded within the business. This is the only way to then measure impact so they can be developed further. This is another area where the software vendor, through experience of working with different organisations across industries, might also be able to help.

The vendor might also be able to assist IT in understanding the value of data to the business.

An approach is needed so different teams can work with each other to come up with common goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). This is the groundwork that’s needed so it can help serve the end game, which is that the more data an organisation uses, the more insights it can extract to better serve its customers.

Are you interested in learning more about this theme? Please find more blog posts in this series by tapping into the tag SAS CI Connection Circle.

 

This blog post was first published in German on the SAS blog site Mehr Wissen.