ROI for Business Intelligence

How do you tell if you are getting a good return on your investment in data and analytics?

CEO to Head of BI: ‘So how’s our new reporting and analytics platform going?’

‍Head of BI: ‘Well, um, great. We have published almost 50 dashboards, migrated 30, and have now run training sessions to our 200 users. All the dashboards are working and the numbers are flowing through accurately.’

CEO: ‘Yeah, ok. But is anyone using it? Or do we just have another collection of fancy dashboards that are collecting digital dust?’

Head of BI, you, me… wearing these shoes, how do you answer your CEO?

As data analysts, so much of our job is developing metric dashboards for business users. But like the mechanic whose own car never gets the attention it needs, do you know of many BI teams that have metrics about themselves? KPIs for data teams?

In speaking with dozens of organisations, less than 20% of organisations actually track their own performance, let alone the value they are creating.

A great approach

Measuring adoption of your analytics platform and user engagement is a great metric to start with.

User engagement can simply be tracked as how often your cohort of business users are logging in. This is a good starting point. We would argue that understanding high value user interactions is a better measure of adoption than a simple login count... but more on this later.

How do you even track these metrics? What are the data sources, especially if you are using multiple BI reporting systems? You need a mini-data mart to join all this disparate data together. And many organisations are also publishing reports and insights into file systems or collaboration platforms like Confluence. So how do you track user engagement across different systems and types of users?

We encounter these common obstacles in reporting on user engagement with BI platforms:

1.     The views and logins in analytics admin systems are unwieldy

2.     Second, most large organisations run 3.8 BI systems (360Suite’s Business Intelligence Survey) *now we have a data modelling challenge: hooray say the data analysts in the room.

3.     Third, user engagement isn’t just about clicking on a dashboard or a legacy report, it is about conversations about data (could be Teams or Slack), connecting users to the right resources (IT support systems), insights (Sharepoint maybe), and workflow (more IT support systems).

What does Good look like?

First question we normally get is what does a data driven organisation look like? How many of their users tap into data on a regular basis? What are some benchmarks we should strive for?

Well Gartner has some great research on this, and it turns out that even the best organisations struggle to get adoption rates above 30%.

We frequently see BI teams focused on their output: dashboards, new data sets modelled, user requests responded to. Tracking deployment of these deliverables is straightforward. But are they moving the needle and resonating with your users? Are these tools keeping up with changing requirements and goal posts?

Our view is that understanding product adoption (of your BI platform) is a better measure of the value the BI team is delivering to their organisation. Understanding how your users are engaging with the platform is a powerful insight into the hearts and minds of your customers.

dablr tracks engagement

dablr is an analytics collaboration platform, the first ever designed with regular business users as the hero, and the platform that brings to life insights and all the great work that data teams do. Tracking and analysing user engagement is at the forefront of our solution, with the mission to quantify the value that an organisation’s data & analytics platform provides. We measure user engagement across a range of metrics:

·       Monthly and daily active users (DAU/MAU)

·       Session density

·       Response to prompts

·       Engagement with different assets

·       User segments

We track user engagement at a granular level to understand who our users are, how capable our users are, and form an idea about how our community of users are responding to an evolving BI platform. At its heart, dablr provides a quantified insight into the hearts and minds of our users.

To the point, what do our users need to be successful and how do we best support them on their journey from new users first interacting with data, to content creators of all types that are making discoveries and want to share their insights with their teammates. And how can we do this at scale?

Our mission is to amplify the power of an organisation’s data platform and lift engagement by 300%, which we are already achieving with our Foundation customers.

Let us know how you track value in your BI platform and understand your community of user’s engagement with data.