Disruptions create an opportunity to break from the norm and gain a fresh perspective. Analytics is a disrupter in businesses. A priority for organizations is to leverage analytics to disrupt the status quo in the business to remain competitive or improve revenue opportunities. The key to the effectiveness of an analytics solution is adoption. Two key areas of adoption to focus are awareness and understanding.
Benefits do not come from technology alone; they require adoption – a use it or lose it mentality.
Awareness
Do your users know which application to leverage? Do they know the use case of each application or the purpose of the application? New and existing users are distinct communities that can be targets for an awareness campaign. The analytics department focuses on creating and distributing applications or dashboards for the user base. These are made available in the hub or customer portals. Often, users are provided access to the system with little understanding of which application to leverage or how. Defining an onboarding plan is a method to address this challenge. The onboard plan includes the basic skills to leverage the application, the use case for the application, and the core list of questions the application can be leveraged to address.
An additional awareness tactic is to target the existing user base. There is a sea of data and reports flowing around organizations. Running a campaign that serves as a reminder of the existing applications and their benefits can prove very valuable. During the holiday season, we worked with a customer that ran the 12 Days of Qlik Campaign. Each day, an asset was highlighted explaining the benefits and how to leverage them. It was a fun and educational campaign. As a result, there was a measurable increase in users on the system.
Understanding
Awareness by itself does not improve the impact of an analytics solution. The users need to understand the data and how to leverage the information. A data literate workforce derives quicker insights and fosters employee engagement. Qlik supports a six-step approach to developing a data literacy program across your organization. By leveraging this framework and resources from the Data Literacy Project, you can enhance the data literacy of your organization.
Best of Both Worlds
A highly effective technique is leveraging Analytics Days – or, as we like to call them, “Qlik Days.” Given the current climate, we are planning to deliver these with our customers remotely. We have repeatedly seen spikes in users on the Qlik platform and new plateaus established in the months following these sessions. Analytics Days are great opportunities to combine the Understanding and Awareness approach into one adoption session. Last year, we ran quarterly sessions with a global manufacturing firm. The following month new peaks in system usage were achieved. The firm’s strategic focus on analytics democratization resulted in shifting 50 percent of the operations team’s focus on other, new development opportunities.
How do you know if this works? There are several key areas to track:
- Leverage the Qlik Operations Monitor to measure adoption each month and after each cycle of your awareness campaign.
- If you leverage the data literacy content on Qlik, tracking Data Literacy Certifications is also a key metric.
These are key metrics Customer Success Managers leverage in our Business Reviews with customers.
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