Which Way Do Your Insights Flow?
Some organisations have centralised data and insight teams.
These teams specialise in extracting and presenting actionable information from data for the various departments in their organisation.
In smaller businesses, this might be a team of one - while in larger organisations, there could be dozens of people spread across subteams like data engineering, data science, and insight management.
In organisations with these specialised teams, insights flow from the outside, into departments.
In an organisation set up in this way, a marketing executive would have their reports, dashboards, and alerts set up and administered by this specialist team, rather than someone from marketing being responsible for this.
On the other hand, some organisations have individual departments compile insights about their own activity, both for their own use and for dissemination to other senior leaders.
In an organisation set up in this way, that same executive may task a marketing coordinator with the role of putting together the required reports.
Both of these are valid approaches, with their own sets of benefits and drawbacks.
There is also a hybrid approach, which can take many forms.
What follows is an outline of some key benefits of the two "extreme" approaches, as well as some thoughts on a hybrid approach.
Outside In
Specialisation
A specialist data and insight team, as the name implies, holds specialised skills in the area of extracting insights from data.
It is a rare case where an experienced marketing coordinator, public relations officer, or warehouse supervisor possesses technical insight generation skills to rival even a junior data engineer.
Just don't let that data engineer draft your press releases!
Economies of Scale
Many insight generation tasks only need to be done once, regardless of the number of required reports and ad-hoc insights.
A specialised team can set this "plumbing" up once, while departments delivering their own insights will each set this up independently.
Organisations can avoid this replication of effort with a centralised data and insights team.
Data Integration
Many nuanced, actionable insights are only made available by combining multiple data sources.Having a single team managing all data and insights means that this team is across all of the organisation's data sources.
As such, there will be a greater chance of these insights coming to light.
Inside Out
Domain Knowledge
While our data engineer may have the technical skills to extract insights from various types of data, he is less likely to know why he is doing this from a business standpoint.
On the other hand, an experienced marketing coordinator knows very well what they want to learn from the data - and with some technical training, they'll be able to get at this precise knowledge themselves.
Excellent collaboration between the insights team and the departments they serve partly negates this advantage.
Self Reliance
It's Friday afternoon, the manufacturing report is due out before the close of business, and the insights team has gone on their monthly outing.
There's one more chart that would make this report truly shine, and enhance the level of understanding of the other executives.
Unfortunately, without the insights team around, no-one can add this in.
If the warehouse supervisors frequently compiled the manufacturing reports during their shifts, this wouldn't be a problem.
But they don't, and so it is.
Agility
When the responsibility for insights lies outside of their department, a manager has less control over their delivery and development.
If she needs a new chart to track a new initiative, then that request goes into another teams queue - rather than her own.
You could argue that by having a centralised data and insights team, the base of insight is likely more flexible due to its higher quality. If this is the case, then the advantage of agility resides with the centralised team.
A Hybrid Approach
With benefits available from both approaches, a hybrid approach, if executed well, promises a valuable balance.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself to see if you've got the balance right.
| Are multiple people in the organisation pulling the same data from the same source systems, and making the same adjustments to it? |
If this is the case, your organisation could likely benefit from a little more centralisation, where data professionals set up and maintain the up-front structure. This level of centralised effort will allow business users to focus on the insights, rather than the data preparation. |
| Can departments make their own, simple adjustments to reports when necessary? | If a department is unable to make simple changes to their reports internally, then this could point to an over-centralisation of efforts in data and insights. It could be worth getting the data and insights team to train up key people within departments on the basics of the tool, and how to make changes. Some documentation never went astray either! |
| Are different tools and methodologies being used across the organisation to achieve the same end? |
While experimenting with different approaches is necessary to make improvements, if these different approaches are happening in isolation, then you're unlikely to see the benefit. A Centre of Excellence could be a useful addition if this is the case for your organisation. This CoE would see relevant people from different departments come together to put together and steward a set of conventions and best practices for the organisation's data and insights efforts. |
In Conclusion
By getting the balance of centralisation right, your team can strip out duplication of effort, while maintaining the ability of departments to make changes to their insights where required.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach; however, by keeping in mind the goals of agility and efficiency, you can tweak your organisation's data and insight efforts to build upon your data and insight capabilities.