Everyone agrees that culture is a critical factor for success with analytics. Most cultural discussions in the field focus on creating an analytics culture. But creating a culture and changing culture are long, difficult, and slow processes. Perhaps a more practical approach is to acknowledge that you have an existing culture, understand the characteristics of that culture, and know how to apply your cultural attributes to drive analytics success. Over the long term, you may choose to reshape your organization’s culture. In the short term, cultural awareness can help to accelerate your analytics efforts.

CULTURE AND ANALYTICS

Let’s begin with two simple questions: (1) What is culture, and (2) What does it have to do with analytics. Culture is the social behaviors and norms of a society or organization including the collective and individual attitudes, beliefs, customs, capabilities, and habits of the people in the group. In the world of analytics, we are especially interested in two areas of attitudes—those related to people and those related to change. (See figure 1.)

Figure 1. Culture Influences Analytics

Attitudes about people span a continuum that at one end places a high value on independence, and at the other end values interdependence. Self-service analysts value independence and autonomy. But analytics is a “team sport” where communication, cooperation, and collaboration are important behaviors.

Attitudes about change range from flexible, resilient, and readily accepting of change to heavily biased toward stability with a sense that change is disruptive. Both business and technical stakeholders need the flexibility to adapt and be agile. But data consumers value a stable environment. How we accept and adapt to change without creating stress, confusion, or chaos influences analytics maturity and success.

DIMENSIONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

To achieve cultural awareness and understand the characteristics of your organization’s culture it is useful to look at eight dimensions of organizational culture as shown in figure 2. Each of these dimensions spans a range of attitudes and beliefs with opposites at each extreme. Most organizations fall somewhere in the middle of the range but with a bias toward one extreme.

Figure 2. Organizational Culture Dimensions

Consider your organization’s attitudes, beliefs, customs, capabilities, and habits related to each of these dimensions to evaluate where and to what degree you exhibit a bias toward one extreme or the other. Evaluate objectively without concern about right or wrong answers. There is no right or wrong—simply acknowledge reality.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AS LEVERS AND INHIBITORS

Understanding your position relative to each of these dimensions is important because they can help you to find strengths that you can leverage for analytics success and risks or weaknesses that you may need to remediate or mitigate. For every dimension, each end of the range represents both levers and inhibitors as illustrated in figure 3. Levers are shown in green and inhibitors in red. (If you’re among those who are red/green colorblind then look at the punctuation. Levers use “!” and inhibitors use “?” to distinguish between them.)

Figure 3. Analytics Levers and Inhibitors in Organizational Culture

Use your evaluation of organizational culture to identify where you have strengths to leverage and where you have risks or weaknesses to manage. You may at some time choose to reshape culture to minimize risks and to further develop strengths. But that is future looking. The immediate goal is simply to recognize both levers and inhibitors and plan analytics efforts to gain an advantage from that knowledge.

DIMENSIONS OF ANALYTICS CULTURE

Analytics culture also has an important role in analytics success. The six dimensions of analytics culture shown in figure 4 bear a strong influence on analytics maturity and analytics capabilities. These dimensions are not opposite extremes as was shown with organizational culture. They are positive cultural attributes for which your capabilities fall somewhere in a range from low to high.

Figure 4. Dimensions of Analytics Culture

Consider your organization’s capabilities and maturity for each of these dimensions and rate yourself somewhere along the scale from low to high. For each of the dimensions, a high rating is favorable and a low rating is likely to be problematic. Rate objectively and avoid the temptation toward vanity ratings to get truly useful information.

ANALYTICS CULTURE AS LEVERS AND INHIBITORS

Similar to organizational culture, you’ll find strengths and weaknesses—levers and inhibitors—in analytics culture. High ratings are indicative of strengths and low ratings of weaknesses or risks. Figure 5 illustrates some important considerations for each of the dimensions, with levers shown in green and inhibitors in red. (If you’re among those who are red/green colorblind then look at the position. Levers are listed first and inhibitors second for each culture dimension.)

Figure 5. Levers and Inhibitors in Analytics Culture

Again, use your cultural evaluation to identify where you have strengths, risks, and weaknesses with the goal plan analytics efforts that gain advantage from the knowledge.

CULTURE AND ANALYTICS SUCCESS FACTORS

To actively apply the knowledge gained from cultural assessment, you’ll need to consider where and how each strength, weakness, or risk influences the outcomes of analytics efforts. The influences can be mapped to eight analytics success factors:

• Vision — The executive team has a clear vision of how analytics meets business needs.
• Usage — Ability to identify business use cases and describe the value of each use case.
• Transformation — Ability to see how analytics shapes strategic business transformations. 
• Roles and Talents — Defined roles in analytics and the talent needed to fill those roles. 
• Integration — Expectations and the ability to weave analytics into business processes.
• Data Quality — Processes, skills, and disciplines to measure and improve data quality.
• Architecture — Well-defined and adaptable data management architecture. 
• Values— Social, ethical, and regulatory awareness for everyone who works with data.

Figure 6 illustrates how the cultural dimensions—both for organizational culture and for analytics culture—map to the analytics success factors.

Figure 6. Culture and Analytics Success Factors

Understanding the connections of culture with success factors helps to know where to apply strengths to gain advantage and where to manage risks and weaknesses to get the best results from your analytics efforts.

MANAGING AND EVOLVING CULTURE FOR ANALYTICS SUCCESS

The primary focus of this article is to describe how you can evaluate culture and apply that evaluation immediately to improve the success of analytics projects. Beyond the immediate application, you can expect to see cultural shifts occurring as a result of awareness. When you describe, discuss, and routinely assess, your analytics leaders and stakeholders become culturally conscious in a way that reshapes the attitudes, beliefs, customs, capabilities, and habits of all analytics stakeholders.