After college, I went to work in an IT organization where I got to see first hand how this break-down of traditional buyer-seller norms works. It goes a little something like this:

→CEO buys an expensive piece of software

→CEO mandates to IT organization to deploy & support said software

→IT organization rules with an iron fist because the CEO said it so therefore the end-user doesn’t have a choice

→The end-user, THE CUSTOMER, does have a choice and they begin to move away from IT supported solutions

This same scenario is played out everyday, in most companies across the world, and by no means is it limited to the IT organization.

So, what can we do about it?

First, you must recognize that your “end-users” are really customers and they do have a choice. Once you make this fundamental mind shift, everything else will start to fall into place.

You must treat internal customers like you would treat external customers. They aren’t going to use your product just because you work for the same company. They aren’t going to use your product just because the CEO is mandating it. You have to market to them and sell them on the value of your services. If you force your product on them, they will begrudgingly use it while they curse you under their breath. If you give them the choice, and they select your services, they will reap great rewards and will become your champions.

Brand Advocates
Brand advocates are critically important to any business and they are just as important to your internal business. Take the time to understand who your potential brand advocates are and really invest in those relationships. Your brand advocates will go out of their way to create information that supports your practice, they are usually very influential and will help sell others within the company on the value of your services, and they will go to war for you if the situation arises.

Identifying and supporting brand avocates will go a long way in helping you create a data driven culture.

Branding
You have to take off your analyst hat here and replace it with your marketeer hat. Creating a brand around your analytics practice is key to generating an emotional attachment to your services. It gives your customers and potential customers a sense of belonging and it has the intangible ability to express quality.

Take a look around at the products you use on a daily basis, I’m sure there are some that by the packaging alone, you already know they are high quality products. The same will be true of your analytics practice, create a brand focused practice that sets your organization apart for the 99% of organizations that are focused on “end-users.”

Traditional Marketing
Just because your customers are internal to your organization, don’t think that traditional marketing can’t help you to create a more data driven culture. I have personally used many traditional marketing techniques to great success, such as:

→Email Marketing Campaigns
→Monthly News Letters
→Video Campaigns
→Event Marketing
→And Even Snail Mail

Website
Every business has to have a website and there is no excuse that just because you run an internal business that you can’t have a website too. Create a website to help you market your brand by sharing relevant industry news, providing easy access to reports & analysis, and other necessities such as a corporate glossary, variable map, and an analytics road map.

Your customers should have a single destination to find everything relevant to your practice. Make it easy to access and provide customers what they need, and they will be repeat customers for years to come.

As your customers mature, your practice has to mature, if your product & your marketing effort don’t keep up, your customers will start looking somewhere else.

As your practice matures, the time invested to marketing activites will never decrease, you must continually win your customers business month to month.

NEVER take your internal customers for granted, they are paying for your services, literally. Each department that choose to partake of your services, provides a portion of their budget to cover your costs. That is a huge responsibility, don’t take it lightly.

So, are you actively marketing your internal practice? If not, you better start today!

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, implementation has to be completed for your organization to have access to all the rich data you need to start building a data driven culture. However, what many companies fail to realize is that implementation is not limited to a technology task. Implementation also involves integrating your analytics practice into the fabric of your organization.

How many times have you heard something like this, “I’m so frustrated, our product team launched a new feature this morning and the CEO is demanding an analysis. We don’t even have the correct tracking on the new feature, I just found out about it this morning!!!”?

In our excitement to deploy our shiny new analytics solution, we rushed into the build without reading the instructions first. Had we slowed down at bit, we would have realized that one of the critical steps in the process was to ensure that the solution was integrated into our existing processes.

When I was running the analytics practice for 28 corporate brands at Spark Networks, one of the first things I did was to identify the process we followed for managing product enhancements. Internally, we used a solutions called JIRA to manage our software development lifecycle. It was critical that I fully understood the process for how new features were rolled out to our sites, from ideation to launch, and how our systems supported that process.

It became clear to me that I needed to integrate my analytics practice into the product request process that we managed within JIRA. The simple task of adding a few required fields to a JIRA request, made my life so much simpler and I never again had to tell the CEO, “we aren’t tracking that new feature yet.”

When a product manager submitted a feature request, they were now required to complete two additional fields in their request:

1) Is analytics required for this feature?
2) If yes, what are the requirements, if no, why not?

This simple update to the process forced product managers to stop and think about analytics as part of their process for rolling out enhancements to the site.

This example is only one place that I integrated analytics into the process and there are many, many more that I won’t go into detail on but to get you thinking, I also integrated my practice into:

• →Bi-Monthly Executive Staff Meeting
• →Creative Request Process
• →Email Marketing Process
• →Engineering Bug Tracking
• →Quarterly Earnings Calls
• →Product Launch Post-Mortem Reviews
• →And Many, Many More

Take the time to look around your organization and identify the areas that are critical to running the business, find ways for integrating your analtyics practice into these areas and you will take a huge step forward in building a data driven culture.

Of course, to accomplish this, it takes adoption and buy-in from across the organization, so I will address the importance of user adoption in the next part of this series.

See Also: Building a Data Driven Culture: The Tools

The greatest lesson I ever learned was the importance of sportsmanship. With time, I could no longer go 5 sets on the tennis court and gone were the days I could pull up for a transition 3 but what I learned about how to treat others has never left and it is a skill that has prepared me well for a successful business career.

I was thinking about this a lot yesterday, seeing two contrasting styles of leadership. First, at my son’s soccer game, one of his teammates went down with an injury, I saw the opposing coach gather his team to explain the importance of the moment. I witnessed the opposing team following the coach’s lead in taking a knee and bowing their heads. At that moment, I knew these kids were fortunate for being taught these important life lessons now. They would be better, more successful, people for it.

In contrast, during my daughter’s soccer game, I watched player after player being injured, by the same opposing player, finishing with my daughter in the emergency room being treated for a concussion. Never once did the opposing team express concern. Never once did I see a hand extended to help up a fallen competitor. Never once did I see the opposing coach use this as a teaching opportunity. After the game, when most players leave the game on the field and become friends again, I witnessed the offending player refuse to shake her opponents hands. At that moment, I knew these kids were unfortunate for being taught how to be great soccer players but not being taught how to be great women.

Sportsmanship matters and the most important lessons you learn on the field are life lessons. What lessons do you want your kids to learn?

I have always loved working with Michael. He is smart, talented, unassuming, and JUST GETS IT.

It’s no surprise that I have found ways to continue working with him, even though our careers have led us to different companies.

It seems like a no-brainer now, I have the opportunity to work with so many amazing people everyday and most of them don’t even work in the same company that I do, but at one point in my career I was brainwashed into believing that partnerships were dangerous – “let’s just keep everything in-house.”

It seems like at some point, we all have to fight this urge, that voice in your head that says “let’s just keep everything we know to ourselves, people will think we are smarter, people won’t steal our ideas, we will be indispensable.”  The ironic thing is that those who think that way, both people and organizations alike, are the ones who quickly become dispensable.

As I talked about is my previous post, Talented People Collaborate, I have found that when you are open with your knowledge and willing to work with others, you are far more likely to produce works of greatness.

I truly believe that by working together, we can accomplish more, at a higher level of quality, than we ever could going it alone.

Thank you to all of my amazing business partners, colleagues, and friends that have been willing to collaborate with me — we are all better for it!

As the story rolled, there was no focus at all on Jordan’s lack of leadership ability and there was no focus on Jordan surrounding himself, either deliberately or not (Jordan is arguably the greatest NBA player in history, he would be a tough person to disagree with), with an executive team that nods their head up and down every time he speaks.

Instead, Outside the Lines continually made excuses for Jordan’s failures (he has built, statistically, the worst team in NBA history) based on owning a “small market team” and “a person can only be successfully in a limited amount of areas in life.”

I’m not even going to address the stupidity of the second statement.

Growing up in Utah and following not only a “small market team” but a destination that most NBA players don’t want to visit, let alone be here fulltime, I have been spoiled watching an executive team put a competitive team on the court year after year. To give Jordan a pass because his team is located in North Carolina seems a bit of a copout seeing first hand that it can be done, with the right leadership at the helm.

WHERE ARE THE TOUGH QUESTIONS? Even those not on Jordan’s payroll are afraid to disagree with him, no wonder he is running a failing organization.

When I started to build a team, one of the first things I did was hire someone whom I have vehemently disagreed with over the years and it has been one of the best decisions I have made.

Greatness rarely comes out of an environment where there are no differences, where there is no creative tension, and where everyone nods their head approvingly whenever the boss is in the room.

The number one lesson I have learned about creating a business is that in order to achieve greatness, you must surround yourself with creative people, who are all focused on a common goal but who feel secure enough to fight for opposing points of view of how to get to that goal.

Everyone in Jordan’s organization is focused on the same goal, yet because no one is willing to disagree with Jordan, everyday they take a step further away from where they really want to be.

Disagreements build greatness, create and foster an environment where creative tension is celebrated.

My video wasn’t convincing? Here are 3 simple reasons why you shouldn’t take your current customers for granted:

1. They pay you $$$
2. Treated right, they will likely buy more products/services
3. Word of mouth is so much more valuable than cold calls

As I was preparing to write this post, I found myself struggling to come up with a good analogy to make my point. I was struggling because I couldn’t find just one analogy — I found thousands. In every moment of life, we are making use of some kind of tool. This makes sense, the way that humans make and use tools is one of the major components that sets us apart from other species, so how could I pick just one (there are millions of specialized tools for woodworking, cooking, building a house, paving a road, fishing, hunting, writing, and on and on and on) to illustrate the importance of tools?

When it comes to digital measurement, we have seemed to forget the age old adage of “use the right tool for the job.” We have developed such smart analysts that we can in fact use a hammer to saw a piece of wood…or can we?

If your goal is to build a data driven culture within your organization, don’t fall into the trap that it’s not about the tools, if you do, the culture you create will be mediocre at best, will fail miserably at worst. The right tool for the job is critically important and should be treated as such. I have seen many organizations that simply grabbed the nearest tool off the shelf and expected their really smart people to produce. It was no mystery to me that the organizations failed to excel and were mired in frustration.

As you are examining the types of tools you will make use of in your organization, ask yourself questions like:

1. How will people adopt the tools I expect them to use?
2. Does the tool create efficiencies within the organization?
3. Will the tool provide the type of data needed?
4. Is the level of precision provided by the tool in alignment with our needs?
5. Is this the right tool for the job? i.e. Should I use a chainsaw to make precise cuts?

Aligning the right tools (and the right people) with your business needs will go a long way in helping build a data driven culture.

See Also: Building a Data Driven Culture: Process Integration

How does this happen? From concept to development, did no one at Discovery Channel dare raise their hand and say “guys, this is a great idea but the white text on the baby blue background is unreadable, especially if you are going to use 8 pt. font.”

I’m all for agile and being in the moment but when you compromise your standards, in order to be part of whatever the current trend is, there is a very real possibility that you may end up hurting your brand.

If you want to Tweet, Tweet. If you want to Pin, then join Pinterest. If you want to share video, YouTube it. Social is awesome but don’t blindly push out some social strategy because a disconnected board said that is what all the cool kids are doing, so we need to do it too.