When you first start trying to get value from your web analytics tool, you may be surprised by some of the road blocks put in your path by your own organization. Internal policies and procedures may be inflexible. It may not be easy to get necessary decisions made or, worse, you may not even know who needs to make them. And it may also not be readily apparent who in the organization stands to benefit from the data you can provide.

The journey from being a data-consuming organization to becoming a data-driven one can be long and painful, especially if you don’t accept at the outset that you ARE an agent of that change. Analysts or administrators can quickly find themselves, as the person who is “closest” to the data, called on not only to support the analytics tools or deliver insight from the data, but also to drive adoption of the data through internal marketing, coordinate projects with other departments, identify opportunities for increasing value to the organization, integrate analytics data with data from back-end systems, develop standards and governance models, perform cost/benefit analysis of analytics efforts, and assist with (or even drive) budgetary planning. Ultimately, your efforts as an agent of change will involve and impact many people along the way. And not all of those people will be happy about it.

Here are some ways you can plan for the  impacts of change and be successful as an agent of organizational change.

1. Diagram the dependencies. To help you identify potential road blocks to change, go through the exercise of listing all the processes in your organization that may potentially impact your web analytics efforts or that your web analytics efforts could impact in turn. Focus on the current org chart and the way things work now, not on the future state. The list should include budget planning, marketing campaign procedures, website deployment processes, data security procedures, legal concerns, and the like. On the left side of the diagram list those activities that impact web analytics, and on the right side list those that web analytics will impact in turn.

2. Identify your internal publics. Borrowing from PR models, think about all the people at your company who could be impacted by your web analytics program and put them in a list.  This should include everyone, from the guy on the hosted ops team that manages your log files, to the marketing manager who provides campaign tags to vendors, to the developer who needs tagging requirements prior to QA. You can use the dependencies diagram developed above to help you build this list.

Be sure to include higher level executives, too, in addition to the teams on your own level of the org chart. Some of those executives may need the data you have and not even be aware of it yet.

For each person, role or team that will be impacted by analytics, identify one or two main contacts for your communications.

3. Define the impacts of change. Going through your list of internal publics, classify each person, team or role on it according to how they will be impacted. Types of impacts could include:

• Process changed
• Process eliminated
• Change in control or authority
• Change in level of communication/coordination required
• Budget impacted (reduced or increased)

Understanding all the ways that your efforts impact others will help you anticipate potential conflicts and identify strategies for addressing concerns in advance. It may also help you identify areas of the organization where your efforts will provide a much-needed solution to an existing business problem. Those types of opportunities can provide the quick win a fledgling analytics effort needs to gain momentum.

4. Anticipate problems and turn them into opportunities. Looking at the materials you’ve assembled so far, think about how you can turn negative impacts into positive impacts for the people affected and how you can capitalize on those impacts to build positive “buzz” internally.

For some impacts on your list, it may be tempting to say, “Well, that’s THEIR problem; I can’t do anything about that.” However, when you are just getting started, all it takes is one or two people complaining to management to derail your efforts to build a strong web analytics program. You need to consider anything or anyone that could pose a risk to your efforts.

5. Involve internal publics/stakeholders in your planning. Now that you have a good picture of where opportunities exist and where potential conflicts could appear, you are ready to communicate with your internal publics about the changes that are coming.

If a process will be changed, meet with the owners of that process to explain how the change will benefit them long-term. Maybe that change means they have more time to devote to other tasks  or perhaps it will demonstrate to leadership their proactive efforts to boost efficiency. Everyone wants to look good for management — capitalize on that. If a new process is required, or two teams must now work together that haven’t before, help them develop the new process that will make all sides successful. And if your analysis identifies an executive who needs the insight your data can offer, go ahead and make your pitch to recruit them as an executive sponsor for analytics.

If you aren’t familiar with a process that might be impacted by your efforts, start by simply letting the owners of that process know that you would like to discuss what you need to do to work within their procedures. If change truly is required, negotiate a compromise that will have the least impact on their team, while still allowing you to move forward. Sometimes that may mean that you have to do a bit of extra work initially, but think of it as an investment in the future of your company.

If you haven’t already developed a steering committee or analytics governing body, the teams you are working with or their managers  could be the ideal place to start recruiting.

6. Stay focused on the end goal, but move in small steps. Although you may have ambitious long-term goals, set realistic shorter-term goals for how much change your organization can handle in a single time period and gauge your progress by that yardstick. Focus on bringing smaller pieces of your organization onto the analytics band wagon during the current month/quarter/year. You’ll find that, as time passes, these seeds will spread without you always having to be the driver of change. That’s when you’ll know that data-driven change has truly taken root.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, accept that if you want to help your organization move to the next level, you have to become an Agent of Change or recruit an advocate who can. The path ahead may be challenging, but the only way forward is through.

Tags: analytics management, data-driven change, governance, optimization, organizational change

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Best Practices, Industry Perspectives, Marketing Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.