Contributed by Bob Messier, Senior Director of Business Analytics, SAS


Last week I participated in the SAS Power Series event in Minneapolis. It included about 23-30 folks representing a broad range of industries.

Analytics was the central topic of the event. What is analytics? How do you get your organization to more broadly adopt analytics into the enterprise, not just in one department? How can we get our organization to trust analytics to make better decisions? How do we get our executives better engaged in analytics? While we seemed to have a common understanding of what analytics is, the teams are struggling to answer the latter questions.

My key takeaways? There is an opportunity to better incorporate the business users into the art of leveraging analytics and to enable more impactful decisions.

Further, based on the feedback from the event, it’s clear to me that IT and business are still not quite in sync, and this divide is hard to cross without IT having a better understanding of how the analyst works through the discovery process to investigate and visualize information. On the other side of the coin, the business analysts need to understand the negative impact they can have on corporate IT governance as well as systems performance. The participants could see the challenges, but they need answers as to how to execute and change their organizations to be an analytics-led decision making culture.

Read the tips in the image here to learn how to start overcoming those challenges and get to your desired state (click image to enlarge). And stay tuned for more tips like these. There's a lot more to come this summer from the SAS Power Series …