Nobody cares about the efficiency of the data analyst

Sharing the uncomfortable truth about solutions that improve the efficiency of individual contributors.

“Don’t come to me with efficiency gains, I’ll never see the impact on the bottom line”, the CEO of a $10B investment bank recently said to his head of technology.

He was responding to that head of technology’s desire to drive an initiative that will save 20% of the time of hundreds of employees at the firm. What the CEO meant, is that even if you save people an hour or two a day, you won’t see the bottom line impact, because they will fill that time with other “stuff”. It also won’t allow that CEO to lay off 20% of the team, as the efficiency gains are so spread across different tasks there’s no gain in the ability to reduce headcount.

Nate Suda of Gartner discussed this at his presentation in the D&A symposium last March. A lot of the AI initiatives being promoted today are justified by efficiency gains - saving people time, reducing manual labor, and so forth. The reality though, is that nobody (really) cares about saving individual contributors’ time.

What people care about is business impact. It’s possible, that a solution will deliver both, but the primary driver would be the business impact, and the secondary driver would be the efficiency gain.

The case for SDR automation

Sales Development Reps (SDRs), are those people at software vendors who are responsible for reaching out to potential prospects, getting them interested, and setting up a meeting with a sales executive at the vendor.

At my previous startup (Indeni), the head of sales came to me and said she found a great solution, called Outreach, that will save our SDRs a ton of time. It cost approximately $1,500 per SDR per year, and would save the SDRs much more time (in dollar terms) than what we’d spend on the solution.

That did not win me over. While I appreciate wanting to help people do less mundane/annoying work, spending more of a startup’s limited resources to save people time isn’t justifiable. The SDRs have attainable goals, and they should do their job and work hard to meet them.

Then, she switched the pitch - told me that with this tool, we can increase the SDRs’ monthly goals. They will achieve higher results for the business and will save themselves time and frustration in the process.

THAT pitch won me over. Getting more customers through the door and making my employees happier? Sign me up!

Bringing it around to analysts

Data and business analysts are individual contributors much like the SDRs above. Unfortunately for them, though, they are (much) further removed from the business. It’s very hard to tie an analyst’s work to tangible business results. (there’s actually a much bigger challenge of tying D&A in general to the business)

Also, analysts are generally paid lower salaries compared to their business and engineering counterparts (the people they support, and the people who support them, respectively). So, even if you save 20% of an analyst’s time, not only does it not bring any business impact, it doesn’t save much in actual dollars (assuming you could decrease your analyst team due to the 20% savings, or avoid hiring more analysts).

So, while D&A leaders do want to improve the lives of the analysts who work for them (either directly or indirectly), they’ll have a hard time making the case for it. Especially in the current macro climate (ZIRP’s just a tiny speck in our rear-view mirror).

What the business cares about is achieving their business goals. To achieve their goals, they need to leverage analytics, and use insights from the data. To do that, they need analysts to be able to deliver better and faster insights to them. Shorten the time to insight, improve the quality of the insight, and the consistency across insights.

A solution that achieves this improved insight delivery (in tangible form) will win the attention of business leaders. Such a solution can also help with analyst efficiency, remove mundane work and increase employee satisfaction. A win for everyone.

But let’s not forget what’s the primary driver and what is the secondary here:

Value to the business is primary.
Employee satisfaction and efficiency is secondary.