Blackbeaks Blog….All things Analytics

Thanks for the shout Steve. Of course, management buy in and support is essential, it is, in fact, the number one success criteria of any initiative that aims to transform the business culture.

This is highlighted in the Online Analytics Maturity Model and was demonstrated in all of the dozen models I reviewed as well as countless real life experience.

I agree CI might be a valuable contribution, but I see it as being more “externally focused” while my personal take is we need to look very deeply at the “internals” of the organization in order to optimize and become more competitive. I guess one can’t go without the other and those who succeed will be those who can strike the right balance and make the best use of any data at their disposal.

Stéphane

Hi Stéphane,

I agree internal stakeholders are vital to the success of a culture being created. I also understand the need to create processes internally and have the information to hand that allows us to optimize and become more competitive. You’re right in saying one can’t go without the other.

My point is that right now were talking about hammers and the way hammers are used to do jobs. What we should be talking about is building the house – an entirely different concept.

I think competitive intelligence is more about building the house than its component parts. Competitive intelligence includes BI & Analytics data sources, uses marketing intelligence to make decisions and senior people already get it. There is no hard sell to be done.

If for instance IBM start pushing this then Eric could be right but I think CoreMetrics could get lost in the IT sales pitch.

Good article Captain!

We’ve been working along a similar concept for a while now with our clients; Business Intelligence is something you don’t hear too much of lately but the concept is still hugely relevant to companies today.

How can you make informed business decisions if you are not taking into account all of the variables? The challenge for web analytics is to act as the hub for all of these variables (CI, JS tracking, social scraping, offline data integration) so the analysts can present decision makers with information not opinion.

I would suggest give Clicktale a try. I’ve been using it for 2 months and it is neat to watch what your users do, I learned a lot.

Hi all,

Good article! Current events in the business does seem to have most of us wondering, so discussion is definitely needed.

What I’d add to Steve’s and Stephane’s comments that it is true that we need to understand the internal factors within organisations. However, according to my experience most of this will come to naught unless we can show clear wins from the client front to instigate action – few VP’s or CMO’s want to be bothered with initiatives they don’t see a clear return with. Using the external benefits as the fuel to drive internal changes does seem to work well, though.

It is interesting to see how the perspective on Web Analytics data is about to shift at the moment: From the historic perspective of the “inner” view (the company looks at their own deeds) more and more environmental perspectives are taken into account (the company looks at multiple marketplaces).

The full sequence of distinctions a company has to utilize for evaluating their own operations within their environment could be described as: products – media – markets – networks – evolution – people.
Management’s task is to equip each distinctive point with identity as well as to jump from distinction to distinction: how products differentiate within a company’s portfolio is as important as how different media is used to stage them or how the products are presented in different markets. Nevertheless these questions cannot be answered all at the same time.

The first four distinctions are used for ensuring identity and control for a company to extend its own operations into an unforeseeable future. This is precisely where Competitive Intelligence is said to have its core function. “Evolution” is a general mechanism to ensure selection, variation, and retention in living environments. And “people” are observers of communication, staging, offers, prices, products, networks, and organizations. People’s observations and operations are highly contingent.
So are managerial observations and decisions.

The discussion here aims at finding the constituents for “change through knowledge”, it seems. Be it “business culture” (with the applied distinction of “internally/externally focused”), “processes” (“constituents/building”), “rationality” (“opinion/information”), or “organizational transformation” (“external benefits/internal changes”). All of that is valid, no doubt.

I guess we all would agree that market volatility is increasing, that most companies are operating in buyers’ markets these days, and that any valuable insight generation process needs to be able to deliver in or near real-time.
Nevertheless huge amounts of money are spent on producing big-ass data warehouses (pardon my French!), reporting and analysis frameworks, dashboards, and slide sets packed with actions and recommendations. What happens with all this in the end? Not enough, it seems.

Steering a company by looking through the wind screen rather than by looking at the rear view mirror is the exciting new promise where all hopes are put in. What we’ll hopefully see is Web Analytics coming out of the IT/geek corner, the growing ability to quickly correlate incongruent data from heterogeneous data sources (instead of two-year deployment schedules for data warehouse systems) and quick decisions and actions to see if something makes a difference or not.

Competitive Intelligence could provide a contrast folio for understanding particularities of products, media, markets, and networks. Current Analytics culture rephrases too often what is already known without it: a company is operating in a market with a set of products, using different media to stage.
So far Web Analytics simply can’t contribute enough to the relevant domains of innovation, evolution, people, or future.

I like this part when you describe an organisations’ approach to WA:
“For me it boils down to culture, structure, data sources, and process. ”

and I totally agree… Often, only the data sources are in place. I come in to advise on structure and process. However, if web metrics is to be a success 12 months later i.e. providing insights and driving improvements, a basic culture of “metrics understanding” has to be there.

Building a culture of metrics understanding internally can only be driven from the top down…

@Rob;

I agree, but I also would go a step further. Taking into account all the variables is required but only the variables you can act upon is useful.

I’ve seen superb analysis go nowhere due to the required changes being impossible to implement in 12 months.

@Janne – Wins communicated internally help drive adoption, especially with the executive management team. These are the guys that will steer the ship when they get on board.

@Michael – Great line;
Steering a company by looking through the windscreen rather than by looking at the rear view mirror is the exciting new promise where all hopes are put in.

I would argue steering by looking at at the rear view mirror (web analytics), the windscreen (predictive analytics) and the side view mirrors (traditional competitive analytics) is where we need to go, but it needs to be correlated in a simple and concrete way or it will continue to fail to meet its potential.

@Brian; You be speaking my language.