Questions that keep me up at night: Confessions of an analytics leader

Leaders charged with generating insight and innovation using analytics have many challenges to confront. Here are some of the ones that I’ve had to puzzle through.

As both a consultant and corporate leader, my role for the past decade has been to figure out how to transform data into insights that generate revenue and competitive advantage. Here are two things I’ve learned: it can be a scary proposition, and when I first started, there was no roadmap on how to do the job. I suspect that for many newly minted and aspiring analytics leaders the same is true for them too.

There are legions of research firms that offer trends, analytics courses that teach cutting-edge techniques and an endless number of people knocking at the door with sophisticated new tools. But none of these resources could answer the questions that were keeping me up at night. Why is that?

It’s because the problems I was worried about had nothing to do with analytics. They were more fundamental. They were about how to run a business whose product is data and insights: a product where answers aren’t always clear cut, getting to results requires challenging conventions and changing …