Enterprises do analytics. They just don’t use analytics.
That’s the first, and for me the most frustrating, of the litany of failures I listed in my last post that drive digital incompetence in the enterprise. Most readers will assume I mean by this assertion that organizations spend time analyzing the data but then do nothing to act on the implications of that analysis. That’s true, but it’s only a small part of what I mean when I say the enterprises don't use analytics. Nearly every enterprise that I work with or talk to has a digital analytics team ranging in size from modest to substantial. Some of these teams are very strong, some aren’t. But good or not-so-good, in almost every case, their efforts are focused on a very narrow range of analysis. Reporting on and attributing digital marketing, reporting on digital consumption, and conversion rate optimization around the funnel account for nearly all of the work these organizations produce.
Is that really all there is too digital analytics?
Though I’ve been struggling to find the right term (I’ve called it full-stack, full-spectrum and top-down analytics), the core idea is the same – every decision about digital at every level in the enterprise should be analytically driven. C-Level decision-makers who are deciding how much to invest in digital and what types of products or big-initiatives might bear fruit, senior leaders who are allocating budget and fleshing out major campaigns and initiatives, program managers who are prioritizing audiences, features and functionality, designers who are building content or campaign creative; every level and every decision should be supported and driven by data.
That simply isn’t the case at any enterprise I know. It isn’t even close to the case. Not even at the very best of the best. And the problem almost always begins at the top.
How do really senior decision-makers decide which products to invest in and how to carve up budgets? From a marketing perspective, there are organizations that efficiently use mix-modeling to support high-level decisions around marketing spend. That’s a good thing, but it’s a very small part of the equation. Senior decision-makers ought to have constantly before them a comprehensive and data-driven understanding of their customer types and customer journeys. They ought to understand which of those journeys they as a business perform well at and at which they lag behind. They ought to understand what audiences they don’t do well with, and what the keys to success for that audience are. They ought to have a deep understanding of how previous initiatives have impacted those audiences and journeys - which have been successful and which have failed.
This mostly just doesn’t exist.
Journey mapping in the organization is static, old-fashioned, non-segmented and mostly ignored. There’s no VoC surfaced to decision-makers except NPS – which is entirely useless for actually understanding your customers (instead of understanding what they think about you). There is no monitoring of journey success or failure – either overall or by audience. Where journey maps exist, they exist entirely independent of KPIs and measurement. There is no understanding of how initiatives have impacted either specific audiences or journeys. There is no interesting tracking of audiences in general, no detailed briefings about where the enterprise is failing, no deep-dives into potential target populations and what they care about. In short, C-Level decision-makers get almost no interesting or relevant data on which to base the types of decisions they actually need to make.
Given that complete absence of interesting data, what you typically get is the same old style of decision-making we’ve been at forever. Raise digital budgets by 10% because it sounds about right. Invest in a mobile app because Gartner says mobile is the coming thing. Create a social media command center because company X has one. This isn’t transformation. It isn’t analytics. It isn’t right.
Things don’t get better as you descend the hierarchy of an organization. The senior leaders taking those high-level decisions and fleshing out programs and initiatives lack all of those same things the C-Level folks lack. They don’t get useful VoC, interesting and data-supported journey mapping, comprehensive segmented performance tracking, or interesting analysis of historical performance by initiative either. They need all that stuff too.
Worse, since they don’t have any of those things and aren’t basing their decisions on them, most initiatives are shaped without having a clear business purpose that will translate into decisions downstream around targeting, creative, functionality and, of course, measurement.
If you’re building a mobile app to have a mobile app, not because you need to improve key aspects of a universally understood and agreed upon set of customer journeys for specific audiences, how much less effective will all of the downstream decisions about that app be? From content development to campaign planning to measurement and testing, a huge number of enterprise digital initiatives are crippled from the get-go by the lack of a consistent and clear vision at the senior levels about what they are designed to accomplish.
That lack of vision is, of course, fueled by a gaping hole in enterprise measurement – the lack of a comprehensive, segmented customer journey framework that is the basis for performance measurement and customer research.
Yes, there are pockets in the enterprise where data is used. Digital campaigns do get attributed (sometimes) and optimized (sometimes). Funnels do get improved with CRO. But even these often ardent users of data work, almost always, without the big picture. They have no better framework or data around that big-picture than anyone else and, unlike their counterparts in the C-Suite, they tend to be focused almost entirely on channel level concerns. This leads, inevitably, to a host of rotten but fully data-driven decisions based on a narrow view of the data, the customer, and the business function.
There are, too, vast swathes of the mid and low level digital enterprise where data is as foreign to day-to-day operations as Texas BBQ would be in Timbuktu. The agencies and internal teams that create campaigns, build content and develop tools live their lives gloriously unconstrained by data. They know almost nothing of the target audiences for which the content and campaigns are built, they have no historical tracking of creative or feature delivery correlated to journey or audience success, they get no VoC information about what those audiences lack, struggle with or make decisions using. They lack, in short, the basic data around which they might understand why they are building an experience, what it should consist of, and how it should address the specific target audiences. They generally have no idea, either, how what they build will be measured or which aspects of its usage will be chosen by the organization as Key Performance Indicators.
Take all this together and what it means is that even in the enterprise with a strong digital analytics department, the overwhelming majority of decisions about digital – including nearly all the most important choices – are made with little or no data.
This isn’t a worst-case picture. It’s almost a best-case picture. Most organizations aren’t even dimly aware of how much they lack when it comes to using data to drive digital decision-making. Their view of digital analytics is framed by a set of preconceptions that limit its application to evaluating campaign performance or optimizing funnels.
That’s not full-spectrum analytics. It’s one little ray of light – and that a sickly, purplish hue – cast on an otherwise empty gray void. To transform the enterprise around digital – to be really good at digital with all the competitive advantage that implies – it takes analytics. But by analytics I don’t mean this pale, restricted version of digital analytics that claims for its territory nothing but a small set of choices around which marketing campaign to invest in. I mean, instead, a form of analytics that provides support for decision-makers of every type and at every level in the organization. An analytics that provides a common understanding throughout the enterprise of who your customers are, what journeys they have, which journeys are easy and which a struggle for each type of customer, detailed and constantly improving profiles of those audiences and those journeys and the decision-making and attitudes that drive them, and a rich understanding of how initiatives and changes at every level of the enterprise have succeeded, failed, or changed those journeys over time.
You can’t be great, or even very good, at digital without all this.
A flat-out majority of the enterprises I talk to these days are going on about transforming themselves with digital and all that implies for customer-centricity and agility, I’m pretty sure I know what they mean. They mean creating a siloed testing program and adding five people to their digital analytics team. They mean tracking NPS with their online surveys. They mean the sort of "agile" development that has lead the original creators of agile to abandon the term in despair. They mean creating a set of static journey maps which are used once by the web design team and which are never tied to any measurement. They mean, in short, to pursue the same old ways of doing business and of making decisions with a gloss of customer experience, agile development, analytics, and testing that change almost nothing.
It’s all too easy to guess how transformative and effective these efforts will be.
Fun way to start the week, this one. /s
This forum has been a source of true digital analytical thought leadership for years. To read a post as grim in outlook as this one is pretty disheartening.
I hope your week improves from here, Mr. Angel. Based on this post, there's not a lot of room for it to worsen.
Posted by: Jeff | August 31, 2015 at 11:05 AM
Gary, this is a brilliant summary of the uphill battle that we all face in enterprise analytics, across all verticals (even the supposedly "mature" ones). All I can say is that the momentum is moving slowly in the right direction, albeit not fast enough.
Posted by: Jon | September 02, 2015 at 07:40 AM