A Strategy for Building the Business Impact of Insights

Not all the Insights leaders we have talked to have a strategic plan.  We think they should. We strongly believe that the best strategic plan for Insights is one which focuses first and foremost on building business impact.  Firstly, this is a survival tool for the Insights team, but more importantly it is a tool for ensuring the business gets maximum impact from Insights and therefore increases its investment in Insights as data and insights becomes more and more the fuel which is driving customer-centric growth. This new GRBN Building Insights Business Impact Handbook to be released next month is partly a ‘how-to’ manual, but it is also very much a ‘call-to-action’, and as such we want to give Insights leaders a vision to believe in. The growth cycle on the left is that vision, so let’s embrace it and make it come our collective reality.

Making a Plan

Insights leaders need to design and implement a strategy for building business impact if they are to grow their impact and as a result their resources. We recommend five important steps to take when building a business impact focused strategy for Insights:

Step 1 Build on the c-suite strategic priorities

Obviously, the strategy for Insights needs to be built upon the corporate strategy, but specifically it should be designed with the current corporate strategic priorities in mind. Whilst this focus on strategic priorities is important from a business success perspective, it is also very important from the perspective of getting Insights on the C-suite radar and earning a seat at the table.  More often than not, top management’s bonuses are linked to the achievement of goals related to these strategic priorities. If an Insights leaders can provide a report on how Insights is feeding into each of these priorities and then demonstrate the business value Insights is contributing in each area, then the Insights team will get the attention of the C-suite and be more likely to get funding for new and innovative research which helps top management even better reach their strategic priority objectives.

STEP 2 Map out decision-making processes

Secondly, Insights leaders need to build their strategy upon a deep understanding of how the organization makes decisions, and should therefore map out the company’s key decision-making processes (how, who, when, where) and evaluate where Insights could have most impact in each of the processes in terms of ROI / business impact.  This evaluation should take into account both the tools the Insights team has at its disposal, as well as ones it could have, but currently doesn’t have. These resources can either be internal to the Insights function, internal to the company, but external to the Insights team (e.g. CX data), or indeed external to the company (e.g. open data).   Having made this evaluation for each of the company’s key process, the Insights leader should next create a Master Data Plan for Insight, mapping out all the different types of data and where they should be used to inform the key decisions in each of the key processes. The next issue of Global Insights will look at the next steps in the process.