One of my big themes lately at TeamSnap has been "bringing data to the people." Our approach has been to push broad swaths of the company to immerse themselves in the data through better tools and a lot more training.
As I have talked about before, we leverage Tableau to push analyses down to marketing, bus dev, and product people. It allows relatively non-technical people to run sophisticated analyses without any knowledge of the underlying data. What is really amazing is that the underlying data is often coming from multiple data sources in the cloud and is joined through some sophisticated data hygiene and migration techniques that these business users don't need to know about.
Over the past two days we pushed harder on a different technique to democratize our data - training. We did an intensive 2 day training session on Google Analytics with Analytics Pros. It was a huge commitment in money but more importantly in time. We had a wide range of employees from across the company attend. It was amazing to see people really get the religion about how much you can improve your product through better data and that you don't need to rely on the data scientist types to get you data. Google Analytics is incredibly powerful, but also very usable by non-technical folks especially if they some training.
One of the key takeaways for a lot of people was how flexible Google Analytics is. I often say that Google Analytics is a platform, not a tool. It can be whatever you want it to be if you know all the ways it can be used.
Upon the conclusion of the training, my main advice to most people was to find one or two ways to integrate what they learned into their daily routines. If you manage social, build a report or a dashboard or a segment that drills down into social. Have that report or dashboard show up in your email box on a regular basis so you can make decisions from it. Then tweak that report or dashboard over time to improve how you manage social. By taking these small, incremental steps to analyze the data yourself, you set yourself on the path toward data empowerment.
Are you investing enough in the analytical skills of your rank and file employees?
