Invest in People, Not Just Tools — Part I

Analytics · By On · 5 Comments

Con­tin­u­ing my series of arti­cles on the “Seven Keys to Cre­at­ing a Data-Driven Orga­ni­za­tion”, I’d now like to focus on the next key area — staffing and train­ing, which I’m going to break into two sep­a­rate arti­cles. Look­ing first at staffing, I like to com­pare the key roles in a web ana­lyt­ics pro­gram to the posi­tions on a sports team. Regard­less of whether your sport is base­ball, hockey, foot­ball, or “fute­bol”, a sports team has sev­eral cru­cial posi­tions which need to be filled.

Most orga­ni­za­tions have the nec­es­sary equip­ment — web ana­lyt­ics tools — but may find it sit­ting idle most of the time while one or two peo­ple run around the field try­ing to cover sev­eral posi­tions. If you don’t have all of the key posi­tions cov­ered then it can be dif­fi­cult to win the game or be suc­cess­ful with web ana­lyt­ics. Imag­ine how suc­cess­ful your favorite sports team would be with­out a pitcher, goalie, quar­ter­back, or striker — let alone a great one. Make sure you have a box of Kleenex on hand when you ask a Chicago Bears fan about their lack of a quar­ter­back (40+ changes to their start­ing quar­ter­back since 1992).

I’ve pre­sented this anal­ogy sev­eral times over the past cou­ple of years and even though I’m a die-hard hockey fan (it’s in my Cana­dian blood), I’ve pri­mar­ily used base­ball for this anal­ogy. At Omniture’s Tokyo Sum­mit in 2008, I used all-star out­fielder, Ichiro Suzuki, in my slides. For the Salt Lake City Sum­mit last Feb­ru­ary, I was orig­i­nally going to use Yan­kees all-star Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez. How­ever, when he admit­ted to using banned sub­stances, I ended up using another player, Dodgers all-star Manny Ramirez … who was later sus­pended for 50 games for using performance-enhancing drugs.

My point in bring­ing this up is that just like pro­fes­sional sports, there are no short­cuts in build­ing a web ana­lyt­ics pro­gram. That’s the last thing you prob­a­bly want to hear when bud­gets are tighter than ever, and man­agers are being forced to “do more with less”. Other than sup­ple­ment­ing your pro­gram with fully-trained and expe­ri­enced con­sul­tants, there’s no magic pill for adding more staff or trans­form­ing inex­pe­ri­enced resources into web ana­lyt­ics experts. How­ever, even in this tough econ­omy, some deter­mined com­pa­nies view the ben­e­fits from prop­erly staffing a web ana­lyt­ics pro­gram and train­ing up employ­ees on the tools as cru­cial to their short– and long-term suc­cess. Let’s hope one of these com­pa­nies is not your competitor.

Web ana­lyt­ics play­ing field

At one of my pre­vi­ous employ­ers, I was part of a mot­ley group of soft­ball play­ers. The com­pany pro­vided us with branded t-shirts and decent equip­ment, but each week we strug­gled to get suf­fi­cient num­bers out to each game. If some­one had a last-minute sched­ul­ing con­flict, got sick, or pre­ferred what­ever was on TV that night (pre-DVR era), we were unable to field a com­plete team and would have to for­feit the game. It can be equally frus­trat­ing for par­tic­i­pants in a web ana­lyt­ics pro­gram when not all of the posi­tions are being cov­ered, and the com­pany is forced to for­feit many of the ben­e­fits derived from becom­ing more data-driven.

At a high-level, the fol­low­ing posi­tions are crit­i­cal to a suc­cess­ful web ana­lyt­ics pro­gram, although the size of your orga­ni­za­tion may change the need for cer­tain roles as well as the num­ber of peo­ple in each role:

  • Exec­u­tive spon­sor: Senior exec­u­tive who sets pri­or­i­ties, pro­vides high-level sup­port, resolves inter­nal con­flicts, and pro­motes data-driven decision-making through­out the organization.
  • Web steer­ing com­mit­tee: Formed by the exec­u­tive spon­sor and con­tains exec­u­tives from all web stake­hold­ers. It is focused on over­all web per­for­mance, strat­egy, and future initiatives.
  • Omni­ture owner: Man­ages Omni­ture rela­tion­ship and web ana­lyt­ics pro­gram at com­pany. The sin­gle point of con­tact for all web analytics-related issues for the organization.
  • Core team: Cen­tral­ized team of web ana­lysts focused on over­all busi­ness mea­sure­ment, report­ing, and analy­sis. They report to the Omni­ture owner.
  • Busi­ness leads: Busi­ness man­agers and ana­lysts at the business-unit level who are respon­si­ble for mea­sure­ment, report­ing, and analysis.
  • Tech­ni­cal leads: Web devel­op­ers who imple­ment Site­Cat­a­lyst at the business-unit level.

Two key play­ers on the ana­lyt­ics field

In a pre­vi­ous arti­cle, I dis­cussed the impor­tance of hav­ing an exec­u­tive spon­sor, who is essen­tially the gen­eral man­ager for your web ana­lyt­ics team. As you build your web ana­lyt­ics team, two key types of play­ers are needed. Web ana­lysts are one key player on the ana­lyt­ics field, and fre­quently fill the roles of Omni­ture owner, core team mem­ber, or busi­ness lead. They typ­i­cally pos­sess the fol­low­ing characteristics:

  • Business-minded with marketing-related background
  • Ana­lyt­i­cal, inquis­i­tive, and detail-oriented
  • Able to bridge gap between busi­ness and IT
  • Strong com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills

Web ana­lysts trans­late busi­ness require­ments into tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions. They need to be effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tors as they work with cross-functional groups, mes­sage the value of dif­fer­ent find­ings to the orga­ni­za­tion, and drive opti­miza­tion efforts through­out the com­pany. A 2006 For­rester research study showed that web ana­lysts could gen­er­ate up to a 3000% ROI on their salary cost.

Sim­i­lar to other famous sports duos such as Montana/Rice, Stockton/Malone, Gretzky/Kurri, Pele/Garrincha, etc., good tech­ni­cal leads can form a pow­er­ful tan­dem with web ana­lysts, allow­ing the ana­lysts to deliver the high ROI iden­ti­fied by For­rester. Tech­ni­cal leads pro­vide the tech­ni­cal know-how to get the right mea­sure­ment in place and work­ing cor­rectly. They pos­sess the fol­low­ing attributes:

  • Solid under­stand­ing of inter­nal web archi­tec­ture and systems
  • Cod­ing / web devel­op­ment exper­tise (JavaScript)
  • Famil­iar­ity with Site­Cat­a­lyst deployments
  • Busi­ness acumen

Fre­quently, large com­pa­nies use a pool of IT staff to ser­vice dif­fer­ent IT projects. When you have to work with dif­fer­ent IT resources for each new web ana­lyt­ics project, you con­stantly have to edu­cate new tech­ni­cal resources on web ana­lyt­ics and you’re also unable to des­ig­nate a sin­gle point of con­tact for all future tech­ni­cal issues. For exam­ple, you may want to adjust the tag­ging for a Flash micro-site a few weeks after launch, but find out that you’re forced to work with a com­pletely dif­fer­ent tech­ni­cal resource because the orig­i­nal web devel­oper has already been assigned to another IT project. It may not make sense to have an IT per­son fully ded­i­cated to only web ana­lyt­ics projects, but it is a best prac­tice to use the same resources for all web ana­lyt­ics initiatives.

In my next arti­cle, I’ll focus on the train­ing con­sid­er­a­tions that are required to become more data-driven as an orga­ni­za­tion. Get ready for train­ing camp.

  • http://www.swellpath.com Adam Ware

    Brent, why did you have to take a great post like this and ruin it with that pic­ture of Rex Gross­man? Seri­ously though, great break­down of the stake­hold­ers, I love the play­ing field model.

    I think your last para­graph about hav­ing to edu­cate IT staff is spot on also. Hav­ing tech­ni­cal resources ded­i­cated to ana­lyt­ics has a dra­matic effect on effi­ciency and growth of the ana­lyt­ics program.

    Oh, and by the way, our quar­ter­back sit­u­a­tion has been resolved in Chicago… for now.

    - Adam (@wheresitworking)

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/bdykes Brent Dykes

    Sorry about pok­ing at a still ten­der wound for Bears fans. I hope Jay Cut­ler works out for the Bears at the QB position.

    I’ve worked with a few great ana­lyst / tech­ni­cal tandems over the years as well as many dys­func­tional teams. I found the “assigned / ded­i­cated” tech­ni­cal per­son to be really crit­i­cal to orga­ni­za­tional suc­cess with web ana­lyt­ics as they worked closely with web analysts.

    The imple­men­ta­tions were tighter. Changes could be made more quickly. More peo­ple at these com­pa­nies ended up rely­ing on the data and reports. They could also push the lim­its of our tools and use them in inno­v­a­tive ways. All of these ben­e­fits fueled the suc­cess of their ana­lyt­ics programs.

  • alyssa

    great exam­ple show­ing gross­man drop­ping the ball on some­thing so easy, it really illus­trates the point you’re making.

    it is bet­ter to have one per­son ded­i­cated to one project, it may cost more money but in the long run with all the time you save, by get­ting it done cor­rectly will be worth it.

  • http://johnhunter.com/ John Hunter

    I think a big key is to have this impor­tant knowl­edge shared. It is impor­tant for IT staff and busi­ness staff under­stand the impor­tance of web ana­lyt­ics. When they are doing their par­tic­u­lar jobs they need to inte­grate these ideas into their tasks.

    I would actu­ally pre­fer to have the knowl­edge spread out (rather than a ded­i­cated team) though if the orga­ni­za­tion is large enough some ded­i­cated staff can help — and one of their focuses should be to edu­cate others.

    I find that IT often under­stands the impor­tance of ana­lyt­ics bet­ter than the rest of the orga­ni­za­tion — and try to stop fool­ish deci­sions from being impli­mented. But often peo­ple see IT as an orga­ni­za­tion that should just imple­ment what we tell you. And those doing the telling don’t have an under­stand­ing of the impact of the deci­sions they make. Some may not like it but in the web space tech­ni­cal exper­tise is required to under­stand the options and strengths and weak­nesses of var­i­ous options.

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/bdykes Brent Dykes

    John, I agree. Knowl­edge shar­ing is very impor­tant. I cover that a lit­tle more in the next part of this arti­cle, where I talk about estab­lish­ing a web ana­lyt­ics com­mu­nity. You’re absolutely right that the core team (if you’re in a large orga­ni­za­tion) should play a key role in pro­mot­ing user adop­tion through­out the com­pany via var­i­ous train­ing opportunities.

    In terms of IT’s role in web ana­lyt­ics, I’ve inter­acted lots of dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions. I find that when the two sides — busi­ness and IT — form a close part­ner­ship on web ana­lyt­ics then you’re going to have a bet­ter imple­men­ta­tion that mea­sures the right things in an effi­cient man­ner. When one side forces its will over the other, you either end up with a waste­ful or impo­tent imple­men­ta­tion — both of which are sub­op­ti­mal situations.