It can be difficult for leaders to fully understand their teams’ contributions. People are working more asynchronously and have more specialized responsibilities, and sometimes their work is not directly connected to how the company measures value. Also, leaders often struggle to access trustworthy data and rely on intuition rather than data-driven insights.
Addressing these challenges was at the core of my Inspire 2023 session titled “Three Steps to Valuing Your Analytics Investments.” With insights from guest speakers Dan Gillis of the LEGO Group and Janardan Prasad, a distinguished product manager from Alteryx, we delved into how to unlock the true business value of investments and move beyond operational efficiency to strategic impact and tangible business outcomes.
Data Driven Impact with Alteryx
While Alteryx excels at driving efficiency through automation and time-saving processes, its real power lies in aligning these efficiencies with broader strategic goals that leadership values most.
Drawing from his experience in the insurance industry before joining the LEGO Group, Dan shared how Alteryx streamlined labor-intensive data-gathering processes, improving efficiency and data quality. But this was just the beginning. By using Alteryx to develop risk scoring and to focus audits and inspections on the most urgent cases, teams shifted the conversation with their business stakeholders from time-saving to strategic risk reduction, thus making a clear connection between Alteryx and a measure of success that is always top of mind for executives.
Modeling behavior like this elevates the value, importance, and necessity of Alteryx to leadership, creating a virtuous cycle that supports career growth, job security, and, most critically, continued investments in Alteryx.
Leveraging Alteryx Capabilities to Connect with Leadership
We next discussed how Alteryx users could leverage the platform’s capabilities to communicate their work’s value effectively. By solving this “Analytic Empathy Gap,” Alteryx users can bridge the divide between intuition-based decision-making and more effective data-driven insights.
This is similar to what Alteryx uncovered in recent independent research titled The Decision-Making Technologies Shaping the Future of the Enterprise.
Alteryx Auto Insights was highlighted as a powerful solution that can operate on existing workflows, speeding up use cases by addressing time-consuming data preparation. The reuse of workflows is a form of data product, enabling a tangible link between Alteryx use cases and the most critical business metrics characteristic of analytically mature organizations.
Janardan’s demonstration showcased how Alteryx aligns use case outcomes with corporate KPIs, providing an effective communication vehicle for conveying value to leadership.
Future-Proofing Your Alteryx Investment
It’s also critical to be aware of the environment in which we operate. Businesses are scrutinizing costs now more than ever, and technology is among an enterprise’s largest expenses. Technology adopted in a decentralized manner is often targeted because it’s not aligned with company architecture or governance. Thus, rationalizing targeting tech debt and redundancies is accelerating in many organizations.
Governance should be viewed as an invaluable tool rather than a hindrance to progress. Creating an internal user group was recommended as a crucial first step to address the challenge of separate Alteryx user teams and leadership being unable to prioritize a top-down effort. This fosters collaboration, resource sharing, and standardized methods, ultimately elevating the value of Alteryx to leadership.
By following these steps, Alteryx users can ensure their good work is valued by leaders, build confidence in data-driven decision-making, and position themselves as catalysts for organizational growth and improvement. Inspiring leaders to become more data-driven benefits individual careers and job security and lays the foundation for ongoing investments in Alteryx that directly contribute to the organization’s success.
Recommended Next Steps
- Document the value of use cases today as the basis for communicating their value. You can start by retroactively completing the exercise in this Discovery Guide, which requires you to specify a workflow project’s ultimate business outcomes and how success is measured.
- Plan to use Alteryx to automate the collection of business outcomes across the use case portfolio so that up-to-the-minute results are available for review by leadership. Seeing this evidence will also help you persuade others in the business to work on challenging problems to further expand on the value of Alteryx.
- Complete the Analytics Maturity Assessment.It benchmarks your organization against the best in your segment and provides recommendations to improve. If you have done the legwork to document present value, leaders will invest the time, especially if you are coming from a weak competitive position in need of immediate attention or can seize the advantage in your segment.