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. (more…)