Three reasons why you're not taking full advantage of analytics - and what to do about it

Make no mistake about it: Analytics are essential to maintain your competitive advantage. Data, technology and analysis can now combine in powerful ways to help you better understand and respond to employees, partners and customers.

If your organization hasn’t completely embraced data-driven decision making, what’s holding you back? Here are some common roadblocks that can be hard to overcome:

Old habits die hard.

Most managers still aren’t interested in anything other than “red, yellow, green” status reports. It’s as though they’re conditioned to only want to know how well they’re doing at the current moment in time —and not how they got there or where they should go next. Breaking out of this comfort zone won’t be easy; embracing change never is. But there has to be a mindshift that moves organizational updates away from “here we are” to “here’s what we can do about it.”

You don’t know what you don’t know.

It’s difficult to fully embrace analytics if you’re not sure how they can benefit your organization. If you're not a data scientist or you're still learning how to communicate the value of business analytics it's easy to fall short of the mark.

Business analytics aren’t one-size-fits-all.

Updating an old approach is easy if the way forward is simple and straightforward. That’s rarely the case with analytics. Because they need to be customized for each business problem, analytics are often seen as overly complicated and time-consuming. When there’s a perception that the activation energy is too high, managers shy away.

The best way to get around roadblocks like these is to start thinking in terms of actionable insights. You don’t have understand heavy, technical explanations about how big data works in order to appreciate analytics. You just have to understand that analytics, done right, lead to actions that solve business problems.

And that’s exactly what a digital engagement platform can do. It provides the levers to make analytics actionable.

Our digital engagement platform integrates both gamification and big data analytics with your existing systems of record to generate what we call “performance enhancing data.” This performance enhancing data is the key –it’s the insight you need to guide your actions, so that you’re motivating employees to act in ways that have a direct, positive impact on the bottom line.

Think of it like this: The systems of record your employees are already using are churning out huge amounts of activity data –from learning, training, customer service, sales, CRM, etc. Our digital engagement platform empowers you with the analytics you need to use all that data to make better decisions.

So tell us: What’s holding you back?