CEOs Don’t Care About Data

It’s time to flip the script and talk results... not data.

Let me be clear: analytics is hard. It is meticulous, time-consuming, and, at times, thankless work. It requires a significant investment in infrastructure, appreciating and adding new skills to your team, and a ridiculous amount of data scrubbing, validation and integrity.

I think it’s the amount of work “behind the scenes” that makes most of us in analytics want to tell you how the clock works as opposed to telling you the time.

But, here’s the truth: no one really cares about data. Or, insights for that matter.  You may think I’m being a bit harsh, but follow me on this:  What people care about is results... positive or negative. Results that have been made via decisions. Decisions that have been made via insights. And, insights that have been made via data.  

At analytic.li, we do our best to think about how we align to a CEO’s results strategy... not an analytics strategy.

In a word, CEOs are responsible for results. CEOs are responsible for the financial health of their business, the culture of the organization and the happiness of their customers.  There’s more - but, this is a blog not a book...!

CEOs are not alone in these responsibilities, they have teams of people who share in them. These teams are the ones making the decisions...based off the insights... based off the data.  These decisions can include:

Decisions around efficiency - like a food manufacturer being able to keep a line running by quickly knowing who knows how to run a machine when the operator doesn’t show up for work.
Decisions around customer satisfaction - like an apple and fruit processor keeping its customers happy since it can get orders out on time and in-full thanks to quick staffing changes.
Decisions that impact culture - like a distributor who can retain employees longer since they added additional, shorter shifts to avoid burnout.

In these cases, the decisions yielded positive results based on good actions taken by the leaders and managers in the organization. Sure, these insights were garnered through a very sophisticated data pipeline – made up of data acquisition, data transformation, data aggregation and data analysis.  But, what’s the value of a data pipeline if it doesn’t yield positive results?

I’ll admit: I have to catch myself in talking too much about our data pipeline because I am so proud of our team’s hard work.  It’s an effort to combine workforce, labor, operations and finance data together.  But, what makes it impactful is the positive change that can be made on our customers’ operations, their customers’ satisfaction and their team.

A crucial component to our work is workforce, labor and human capital data.  That’s why we are thankful for the partnership with UKG and our place in their technology marketplace.  Follow the link here to take the first step in replacing your analytics strategy with a results strategy.

The content from this blog is courtesy of Jana Fuelberth, Co-Founder, President & CEO of analytic.li.  Make your data work harder, so your people work smarter.  To learn more about analytic.li and UKG partnership, visit their marketplace page.