Spring Cleaning In December: Declutter Your Insights House
Feeling overwhelmed with all the data that your teams must wrangle before even getting to data science? Feeling like you have more than enough dashboards and tools? Feeling like you don’t have any more room in your complex data and analytics environment for yet another platform? Feeling like you can’t keep up with the exploding amount of data sources that you need to manage? Feeling strapped as an insights team because the demands from business stakeholders are too great?
If the answer to any of this is yes, then it’s time to declutter your insights house. That doesn’t just mean pruning your tech stack but also means taking a step back to clearly outline which types of insights — about your customers, operations, and partners — are going to drive your business forward.
The good news is that if you are at this inflection point — where you need to simplify your approach to data, analytics, and insights to focus on quality versus quantity — then you are already on the journey to insights-driven business transformation. By decluttering to focus on insights that spark action versus those that don’t, you are making a commitment to excelling at five competencies of an insights-driven business:
- Strategy — to elevate insights and data to gain competitive advantage
- People — to create a cross-functional insights organization and culture
- Process — to foster iterative insights development within governance and measurement processes
- Technology — to implement a tech architecture to ensure closed-loop learning and optimization
- Data — to capture, manage, and secure data from all sources and make it accessible for insights
Join me on December 4–5 at our first-ever Data Strategy & Insights 2018 Forum in Orlando, where I will discuss why and how to declutter and how to adopt a minimalist approach to insights. We have a great agenda shaping up, with my analyst colleagues and industry leaders talking about ways to ultimately turn insights into action.
Looking forward to seeing you in December! It turns out you can do spring cleaning in December — the Japanese call this osouji, which is the year-end custom of decluttering to prepare for the new year.