Invest in People, Not Just Tools – Part II

In my pre­vi­ous arti­cle, I dis­cussed how orga­ni­za­tions some­times focus too much on hav­ing the right “tools” and not enough on the peo­ple behind the tools. It’s a com­mon prob­lem among com­pa­nies striv­ing to become more pro­fi­cient in web ana­lyt­ics. It may appear as though just hav­ing the right tools in place will mag­i­cally lift an orga­ni­za­tion to data-driven great­ness. How­ever, just like in sports, hav­ing the right equip­ment is only part of the for­mula for suc­cess. For exam­ple, a well-tuned, technologically-advanced race car is use­less on the NASCAR cir­cuit with­out a skilled dri­ver, crew chief, and pit crew to get it across the fin­ish line.

One part of the “peo­ple invest­ment” is mak­ing sure that your orga­ni­za­tion has enough peo­ple cov­er­ing the var­i­ous posi­tions on the web ana­lyt­ics play­ing field (see Part I). The sec­ond part of the “peo­ple invest­ment” is to ensure peo­ple receive ade­quate train­ing to excel in their roles. Just hav­ing peo­ple stand­ing on the bases and out­field posi­tions does not mean they are ready to play ball. Hope­fully, each indi­vid­ual knows what to do when the ball comes to them and has been trained to per­form their role effectively.

Good to great — through training

In a For­tune arti­cle “Secrets of Great­ness”, Geof­frey Colvin revealed how nat­ural tal­ent was irrel­e­vant to great suc­cess. From Tiger Woods to War­ren Buf­fet, research showed the secret to their suc­cess came down to hard work and prac­tice — not some unfair nat­ural gifts. The arti­cle pointed out that if Michael Jor­dan were just born with super­hu­man bas­ket­ball skills, he wouldn’t have been cut from his high school team.  Just like high-profile ath­letes, the peo­ple fill­ing the var­i­ous web ana­lyt­ics posi­tions need to go through hours of train­ing to develop, main­tain, and hone their skills in order to be effec­tive in their roles and get the most out of the pro­vided tools. Kurt Schlegel at META Group stated, “While web ana­lyt­ics tech­nolo­gies can be quite easy to use, the extent of their poten­tial ben­e­fits is still not well-understood… Detailed train­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties are essen­tial for get­ting the most busi­ness ben­e­fit from these solu­tions.”

Fos­ter­ing the user adop­tion of web ana­lyt­ics tools can be a crit­i­cal suc­cess fac­tor in cre­at­ing a data-driven orga­ni­za­tion. As more peo­ple share and lever­age the tools, a com­pany can derive more busi­ness value from its web ana­lyt­ics invest­ment. Per­sis­tent train­ing plays a key role in dri­ving user adop­tion. Paul Strupp at Sun Microsys­tems stated that “train­ing is not a zero-sum game”, and found that its value to the com­pany sig­nif­i­cantly out­weighed its costs. One impor­tant way to encour­age user adop­tion is to pro­vide ade­quate train­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties at all lev­els within your organization.

The web ana­lyt­ics train­ing pyramid

All great ath­letes start by learn­ing the basics and then con­tinue train­ing to fur­ther hone their skills. The train­ing tri­an­gle below shows how dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als within your orga­ni­za­tion will need dif­fer­ent train­ing approaches. At the top of this pyra­mid, you focus on advanc­ing the exper­tise of the company’s core team of web ana­lysts and tech­ni­cal staff. This select group of indi­vid­u­als will require more for­mal train­ing options such as Omni­ture cer­ti­fi­ca­tion courses. At the next level, you lever­age the for­mal train­ing and exper­tise of the core team to facil­i­tate inter­nal one-on-one train­ing for exec­u­tives and inter­nal work­shops for other key users. At the bot­tom of the pyra­mid, the large com­mu­nity of end users will lever­age more self-service options — both inter­nally pro­duced options as well as on-demand videos avail­able from Omniture.

It takes a village

In a recent con­ver­sa­tion with a web ana­lyst at a major insur­ance com­pany, the topic of web gov­er­nance came up and how “it takes a vil­lage” to estab­lish a data-driven cul­ture. An inter­nal web ana­lyt­ics com­mu­nity (i.e., vil­lage) can advance tool usage and adop­tion through­out the company.

Paul Strupp shared how per­sis­tent inter­nal train­ing helped to nur­ture a web ana­lyt­ics com­mu­nity at Sun Microsys­tems. Sun’s web ana­lyt­ics email dis­cus­sion list grew from ten peo­ple to more than one hun­dred peo­ple. Approx­i­mately half of the ques­tions are now answered by com­mu­nity mem­bers out­side of Strupp’s core team. In addi­tion, the sophis­ti­ca­tion of the ques­tions has evolved from “Page views or vis­its?” to “Why does my mar­ket­ing cam­paign show high soft­ware down­loads but low offline lead pipeline value?” Strupp iden­ti­fied one key ben­e­fit of devel­op­ing a web ana­lyt­ics “vil­lage” is that “it puts the ana­lyt­i­cal capa­bil­ity closer to the busi­ness rather than in a remote ‘report­ing’ group.” Enabling the peo­ple on the “front lines” to ana­lyze their part of the busi­ness and take action makes great busi­ness sense.

In my next blog post, I’ll be look­ing at the “rules” of the vil­lage or in other words how to estab­lish and main­tain cor­po­rate stan­dards.