Last week at the Conversion Conference in San Francisco I had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Davenport. Tom, is a Babson College Distinguished Professor, and research/faculty leader and co-founder of International Institute for Analytics.
I blogged last week on his keynote to the conference. In the video interview below, I ask Tom specifically how we can apply his thinking to ecommerce and web analytics.
Some key takeouts from this interview:
If you’re an analyst, it may be easier to move to a different employer than struggle to make analytics relevant to your organization
Companies that compete on analytics often look to hire-in analytically oriented talent when building teams
More data in ecommerce means that there’s enormous scope to get competitive advantage from your data
Many ecommerce companies are still struggling to make web analytics actionable
The average number of web analysts per company is 0.25 full time equivalents
Do you agree with Tom? Let us know your thoughts below. Please also let me know whether video blogs of this sort are useful. Thanks in advance!
The code to embed this video on your site can be found here. Click on the ‘Share’ tab to copy the embed code, and the ‘Details’ tab to download a copy. (…)
When Tom Davenport keynoted the Conversion Conference in San Francisco this week, he set out to inspire ecommerce teams to focus on the business, not on the analytics themselves. Quoting Carl Kemp, the chief mathematician at Intel, ‘It’s not about the math… it’s about relationships with the business,’ Tom encouraged web analysts and eMarketers to embrace bigger business challenges and look beyond their current horizons. Rather than focusing on the numbers, he advocated building relationships with business management by offering solutions to business challenges.
For his groupies, Davenport has neared deity status. As President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, he teaches MBAs and executives about decision-making and analytics. But he’s best known for legitimizing and making analytics relevant to business with his breakthrough HBR article and subsequent book, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning.
In short, he made analytics sexy to business leaders for the first time.
Davenport showed, in Competing on Analytics, how companies including Netflix, Google, Amazon, Harrah’s, and Capital One have focused their organizations on analytics as a critical competence. By making analytics an integral part of the way these companies run, they make better decisions, optimize processes and achieve strategic advantage that enabled them to become leaders in their markets. These companies test, measure and refine on a continuous basis.
But for the majority of companies, analytics are not central to the business, and Davenport found a receptive audience eager to learn new ways of engaging senior management. His recipe was simple: focus on helping the business to achieve ambitious outcomes which would not be possible without analytics.
In listening to his keynote, I was reminded of the Australian mine that told the AkzoNobel chemical company that their explosives were no longer required—the mine had found a cheaper supplier. (…)
