Paralysis by analysis.
It happens when you can’t decide what to order when perusing the way too long menu at a Chinese restaurant. It happens to everyone who plays in a fantasy football league. It happens to all types of people in many different ways. It occurs when people have too much information – overanalyzing to the extent they outthink themselves until they are completely lost.
Paralysis by overanalysis happens to companies, too. And it’s happening more often thanks to the advanced research and analytics tools available. While more data provides amazing intel that can lead to greater business success, it’s critical to understand how to use it. Organizations must have a sound data strategy and process in place.
Director Timothy Sullivan, Data Scientist Eric Hixson, Senior Director Andrew Proctor and Medical Director Timothy Crone, all from the Cleveland Clinic’s Business Intelligence team, shared a helpful case study in the December issue of Business Intelligence Journal about how they successfully tackled this issue using Lean techniques.
It’s no surprise that more and more organizations like the Cleveland Clinic are assembling business intelligence (BI) teams to help them respond to ever shifting regulatory requirements, economics, consumer demands and industry trends. Broadly defined, BI is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable information to help business leaders make more informed decisions.
At the heart of useful business intelligence is effective data management and reporting. It encompasses a wide variety of tools and methodologies that enable organizations to collect data from internal systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, develop and run queries against the data, and create reports, dashboards and data visualizations to make the analytical results available to corporate decision makers as well as operational workers.
Sullivan and his team describe how it’s wonderful to have a data-driven organizational culture. But without an overarching strategy, a company can easily exhaust its limited BI resources by duplicating data requests, effort and spending.
The article gives an overview of how the Cleveland Clinic team utilized Lean techniques to improve their data use processes and is definitely worth the read. The core idea behind Lean is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, Lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.
One of the most interesting takeaways for me was the process they developed to effectively prioritize their data analysis projects using a weighted scoring system. The concept is applicable to large organizations like theirs, and small ones too.
Each work request is assigned a weighted project score based on request type, complexity, organizational value, and sponsor engagement. They focused on truly understanding the data they have, rearranging their department structure to be able to provide that to users, either in a self-service-type environment, or via pre-processed reporting; but doing it in a way that will further their usage of information, not just putting it into a report that no one will ever use.
How about your organization?
- What are the important areas that need information?
- What is the outcome you’re trying to influence?
- Where can data fill a gap to influence decisions, direct or indirect, about your business?
How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive workplace.
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