08 Jan Siloed Analytics vs. Broad Business Analytics
How can organizations have their cake and eat it too?
The phrases are very common:
- Break down the silos
- Data silos create barriers which impedes decision making
- Collaborate across all part of a business
Here is a fact: not everyone in a company can operate at the C-Level and make global, enterprise-wise business decisions. Therefore, having data and metrics at the organizational and/or individual level is needed for organizations. However, to improve overall supply chain performance, organizations needs to intelligently aggregate such metrics. Here are some thoughts regarding analytics in silos vs. broad business analytics:
Re-thinking Analytics for Indirect KPI’s
Your overall analytics strategy needs to be thought of differently. Many current business intelligence platforms utilize a “drill-down” or “roll-up” manner, using data from the same or similar systems. To enable individuals to contribute to improvements in business performance, many of their metrics may need to remain the same. As such, Siloed Analytics tend to be generated from department scorecards:
- Customer Services focuses on Customer Service Metrics
- Production focuses on Production metrics
These scorecards can provide good value within departments and provide insights at the right level of detail for the group. However, such metrics may be impacted by metrics from different organizations and/or different systems.
Metrics or KPIs which are not found in a standard “drill-up”/”drill-down” manner are known as Indirect KPIs. The example above shows the use of Indirect KPIs at an individual level. Indirect KPIs can be leveraged across organizations and used at all levels within an organization.
“Indirect KPIs are a very good example of breaking down silos between organizations and linking metrics across functional areas into broad business analytics.”
Real-time
A common misconception is that the closer metrics are to the individual level, the more real-time they can become. Conversely, the higher-level a metric is, the less real-time they are. This is furthest from the truth. With today’s modern analytical infrastructures, enterprises can be smart about moving to real-time analytics, and reap real-time benefits, regardless if such metrics are trapped within silos at the individual level, or at the broadest level of a business.
Summary
Analytics initiatives, which break down silos in organizations, do not mean we eliminate metrics which exists within those silos. In fact, for broad business metrics to provide an impact, organizations may need to start with the individual-level analytics and redesign those metrics in order to provide the right insight to feed the broader business metrics.
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