Advanced analytics should be a prerequisite for an OSM to be effective in the digital age.
Thanks to breath-taking advances in technology in recent decades, most organisations are drowning in data but thirsting for insights. Managers and directors are expected to behave like gold prospectors: They must sift through masses of background data to find those few, strategically critical, golden insights.
As I’ve noted before, despite the digitization of business and the rising importance of analytics, offices of strategic management (OSMs) are largely making decisions without the full benefits of data. Yes, they have BI dashboards and understand that business units may be using data. But at the strategic level, analytics is still not forming a core part of their tool set.
This is unfortunate. Based on publically available data, our own research, and extensive experience working with C-level managers, we at Synergy Consulting Group see that many organizations could take the lead in their industries by incorporating analytics into their daily decision making. In fact, we strongly argue that advanced analytics should be a prerequisite for an OSM to be effective in the digital age.A survey by Tobias Klatt, Marten Schlaefke and Klaus Moeller, published in the Journal of Business Strategy, indicates increased interest in analytics’ application in strategic planning is growing among both practitioners and scholars, and found that an analytical planning style is positively associated with better performance.
Of course, deployment will depend on the structure of the organisation. These skills might be either within the OSM itself or in other departments, but utilised by the strategy department. What matters is that powerful, accurate, and data-driven decision support becomes the norm and that the OSM has the skills to present these findings.
Leadership commitment
The leadership/management team must value, understand, and sponsor the use of data-driven decision making and increase reliance on analytics across all steps of the strategy execution management process. For some senior managers, this means sacrificing much (but not all) of their career reliance on gut instinct and experience — a hard pill for many to swallow.
Data management
Moreover, data has to be optimally managed. Most organisations capture a lot of data, but it is dispersed across siloed systems, thus making it a huge challenge for analytics teams to conduct analysis and correlation across the various data points. There are several key steps to overcoming this challenge:
The revolution has begun
Advanced descriptive and predictive analytics rapidly and automatically filter out irrelevant data and makes sense of the relevant. As advances in technology accelerate, the ability to integrate data-driven analytics capabilities into the KPI management and reporting process – and so continually test the underlying cause-effect hypotheses of the Strategy Map – will represent the next evolutionary step of the Balanced Scorecard strategy management system.
By using our Synergy Consulting Group approach is to deploy analytics to create cause-effect strategy mapping, OSM leaders can and should be at the vanguard of this revolution.
See if our Strategy Execution Management Consulting Practice can help you.
For more information about the role of Analytics in your organization’s strategy execution management process, download Palladium and Synergy Consulting Group’s White Paper: The XPP and Analytics.
If you have questions about how Synergy Consulting Group can help you develop strategy – please