The right way to set your data & analytics strategy
D&A is here to serve the business... and to be successful, it must align to it. In this post, Yoni, our CEO & Co-Founder, will share insights from a deep conversation with a D&A leader on this matter.
When I come across D&A leaders and ask them what’s top of mind for them, I usually get answers belonging to one of two groups:
Our CEO has set initiatives A, B, C, and KPIs X, Y, and so we are taking steps 1, 2, 3 to support those. (about 10% of the time)
We are in the middle of rolling out technology initiative X, to further my important company-wide initiative Y. (about 90% of the time)
Today I want to dig deep into a conversation I had with a D&A leader on this matter, and how he beautifully connected the two groups. I truly think it’s something to learn from and replicate in how other D&A leaders approach their business.
I have replaced some of the details to keep Bill and their organization anonymous, of course.
Business Background
Bill is a D&A leader at a large travel company with tens of thousands of employees. Most employees are out in the company locations all over the world, interacting with travelers. A small percentage are part of the corporate team in the US. Still, almost all employees have an element of “knowledge work” in their role - they interact with company computers along the day to better serve their customers.
A new CEO came in and has decided to focus the company around two metrics:
Revenue per room.
Utilization of rooms.
Naturally, the two are interrelated - increase utilization, you’ll likely increase revenue.
At the same time, the CEO is looking to get rid of some of the properties (the less performing ones), resize some properties that are under utilized, and invest in modernizing the high performing ones. All of this with the goal of improving the two metrics.
All of this, in order to position the company to grab a growing share of the $1.35 trillion US travel market.
Analytics Needs from the Business
So, with this in mind, Bill sat down with the business leaders across the company to understand what analytics they need, and their people need, to deliver on the CEO’s initiatives. He heard back that they need visibility into things like:
Current revenue per room and utilization per room, both on a per property basis, with various filters or dimensions.
Customer satisfaction, NPS and other measurements, across the different points of engagement customers have in each property (rooms, cleaning, food, etc.).
Status of each room - is it clear for use, is it still being cleaned from the previous guest, does it have maintenance issues, etc.
Employee roster, availability and utilization rates.
They wanted to get the data 24/7 live, so that property managers can see what’s going on at any moment and make decisions on the spot. Property managers are already used to consuming reports and dashboards, though these generally aren’t timely nor very detailed, hindering the ability to make decisions on the ground rapidly.
By providing this to the property managers, the time to making a decision shortens, allowing property managers to identify issue areas and address them immediately.
D&A Needs for 2025
So, with the above requirements in mind, Bill and his leadership team reviewed what they currently have available, what’s missing, and what needs to change.
Firstly, a lot of data that’s needed isn’t even being collected, or isn’t being piped into the warehouse they use. Obviously, that also means that most of the required dashboards and reports aren’t yet available.
In addition, the realized that their current technology stack won’t support the needs. They have seven different data warehouses that were set up over time (this company has been around for decades), with data flowing from dozens of source systems. Bringing the data together, into a modern cloud data warehouse, is required to be able to deliver on the capabilities defined with the business stakeholders. You could use various data virtualization solutions, but those have performance limitations and aren’t the solution of choice in this case.
In parallel to bringing the data together, the D&A leadership team has identified the BI solution they’ll use (it’s already in their stack).
The AI angle
You can’t talk about D&A plans in 2025 without mentioning AI (or even in yoga it seems).
The D&A team wants to make sure that all the reports and dashboards are built on top of the correct data sets, and that the dashboards themselves are easily searchable for the end users. To that end, they looked at an AI-based cataloging solution.
Unfortunately, present day catalogs suffer from several challenges. To name a few:
Analysts find them hard to use, and not terribly relevant to their needs. Business stakeholders can’t use them at all.
The AI baked into the data catalogs is often naive. For example, if your organization uses the term AA, then AI will think it means “Alcoholics Anonymous” or “American Airlines”, not the term your organization actually uses internally.
The data catalog ignores the need to support the complex analytics workflow within the organization (from the business, to the analysts, to the data team, and back).
So they also looked at AI-based chatbots for natural language analytics. That worked, but for a very narrow use case, as we’ve seen in the past. Not enough to really leverage the power of AI.
Having discovered Solid, Bill and the team are now evaluating its ability to actually help support the business and technological initiatives they’re looking at for 2025. Their hope is that with Solid they will be able to make all of their investment into the data stack more accessible to analysts and business stakeholders - all the way through to the property managers themselves.
Conclusion
Starting from the top-down business initiatives allows a D&A organization to be highly relevant and supporting of the company’s needs. It creates stronger partnerships with the various departments and ensures that the investment into the data and analytics stack and the people who run it is translated into meaningful and material impact.
In our 200+ conversations with D&A leaders, plus our continued analysis of the market, we’ve been able to identify that D&A leaders who think like Bill are more likely to be successful in their role. Something worth considering, no?