Early on employees will not be empowered by analytics. They do not have dashboards, and do not have the opportunities to do things themselves. There is little focus on Empowerment in the early stages of the process. However those responsible for analytics can create dashboards for employees to use, to follow current performance and make decisions.
Create basic dashboards and reports to empower employees.
Reports are already providing a way to monitor performance. Managers now might also be interested in improving this performance through a data-driven way of working. However they lack the knowledge and tools to take action. The analytics team should help, educate, and provide tools, to others in the organization that wish to take action. They can help with the implementation of experiments or other activities that can help improve the performance of certain processes. Wide adoption of a data-driven mindset should be nurtured at every opportunity.
Educate and provide tools to allow managers to use data and create dashboard.
Nurture the adoption of a data-driven mindset; how can we use data to create success?
Employees will be further empowered in two ways. The first is having systems that can track performance over time. While the glaring issues have been tackled in the last stages by analyzing the current situation, the attention now shifts to optimizing the processes. By making small adjustments and tracking results over time, you can steer into the right direction. This is the central philosophy of continuous improvement, and this only works if you can look at the process over a longer period of time. The other improvement comes from the closer integration of analytics into production systems. This allows new data to be reported in real-time. Dashboards can be made that show the current state of operations without any reporting delay. New events can be quickly acted on or resolved before becoming a problem. Because the time, between the occurrence and resolving of an issue, is drastically reduced it becomes easier to also find the source of the issue. Employees should be encouraged to systematically eliminate the sources of these issues, also known as defects in Lean manufacturing.
Give employees real-time insight into operations and performance.
Give employees the information to improve their processes.
This stage is focused on empowering the organization to engage in analytics. The main way to scale analytics organization-wide is to provide infrastructure centrally and distribute the analysis. Basic analysis can be done with self-service BI tools to create reports and dashboards. Users have access to on-demand reports that they have compiled to their own needs. Advanced analytics can be performed by data scientists with domain knowledge that belong to a specific team or department. Training will empower employees with the knowledge to systematically approach challenges in a data-driven way.
Scale analytics with self-service BI
Combine domain knowledge with analytical knowledge to better suit to the needs of departments
Everyone has been given access to analytics, and it is now the time to do great things with it. Through organization-wide training initiatives and hiring practices, everyone will have some degree of data-literacy and the right mindset for an analytical organization. Data-driven organizations give employees access to massive amounts of data and analytical capabilities. Combined with the right knowledge and mindset these unlock new opportunities for products and services; either a new product or a new analytical feature. These analytical capabilities also allow you to continuously improve existing processes.
Give everyone the opportunity to use data and analytical capabilities
Trust employees with the power to innovate and improve