Corporations invest heavily in their analytics, from software licenses and platforms to hardware, personnel, and data. The process is not easy, and costs are high. Data lies in several locations and formats and has quality issues. Security is key, and data needs to be protected.
The result is worthwhile: dashboards, analysis, and reports (DAR) deliver great value after adoption, but over time, key aspects change. Organizations have processes in place to create and maintain these assets but do not apply key principles of asset management that are common for financial and other assets. Analytics teams have much to gain from managing their analytics assets.
Marketing uses several reports for its campaigns – standard analytic assets often delivered through marketing tools. Finance has very complex reports converted from Excel to BI tools while incorporating different consolidation rules. The marketing reports have a different failure mode than the financial reports. They, therefore, need to be managed differently.
It’s time for the company’s monthly business review. The marketing department proceeds to report on leads acquired per salesperson. Unfortunately, half the team has left the organization, and the data fails to load accurately. While this is an inconvenience for the marketing group, it isn’t detrimental to the business. However, a failure in financial reporting for a human resource consulting firm with 1000s contractors that contains critical and complex calculations about sickness, fees, hours, etc, has major implications and needs to be managed differently.