ONE TIME INTRO: So I've recently taken to my company's Business Intelligence blog to starting sharing some of the best practices, lessons learned, and thought leadership I've discovered over the years as the "voice of the analyst". And then it dawned on me...who better to also appreciate these than my comrades in the DAA! Stop by the global.qlik.com/us/blog to view the original post and leave comments, or just keep scrolling to read the latest...
THE REAL POST: You’ve been there. You identify a business problem, and you develop a global
BI
solution, application or dashboard to serve that need. The app not only
solves the business problem, but also anticipates the next business
question and solves future business needs: so you start preaching it
throughout your organization.
Except, you’re met with confusion from some users. People are asking
questions that the app should answer intuitively, and worst of all, your
stakeholders are reluctant to use the app. The app is “great, but a bit
too complicated.” Womp womp.
If this sounds familiar to you, one of the potential issues surrounding users’ confusion could be that you need to increase data literacy
among your stakeholders. While there is something to be said for
building user-friendly, at-a-glance BI applications, often times the
problem is not the app itself. It doesn’t need to be further simplified,
it doesn’t need more features and there don’t need to be more
enablement documents, how-to sessions, FAQs, or walkthroughs.
The basic premise here is that users must understand the underlying
data and business processes that it supports to properly utilize the BI
tool that it's built around. How will your marketing users recognize
registration numbers if they don’t know what a lead or a contact is in
their CRM system? Try explaining your new revenue forecast, which you’ve
boiled down to a single number, to someone who has no idea how pipeline
is managed in the system!
So how do you increase data literacy if you don’t hold more webinar
enablement sessions or meet with every one of the reps in your 1,000
member sales force?
Door-to-door isn’t the answer. It isn’t effective and it
certainly isn’t scalable. You need an effective way to teach multiple
users complex concepts quickly and here’s how you can do it.
Focus on the faithful few who want to be the early adopters
of every new app, super users of every new feature who peak under the
hood of each new metric, those who find all the flaws in your shiny new
predictive model. They are already familiar with the underlying data and
are relying on you to work your BI magic on top of it, all the while
making their jobs easier and tickling their analytical fancies.
Why does this work? It’s much more than the classic "train the
trainer" approach; it actually borrows from a marketing concept. Think
of your BI app much like any other software application. It has a brand.
It has a community. It relies heavily on word of mouth to be
successful.
These power users are the ones that sit within the smaller teams,
work with them day in and day out, and their opinions are trusted. They
know the specific business questions, use cases, recently run campaigns
and sales territories of interest that their team members need to see
within your app for it to really click. Your advocates aren’t just
interested in showing off their own prowess within the app. They are
thoroughly invested in winning converts and they will dig deep to teach
the underlying data so that their teammates can have that same light
bulb moment that turned them on to your app.
BUT, every rule is made to be broken. There is still some training you have to do yourself…
- You have informally created trainers who will train others.
But you still have to train the trainers. Hold regular sessions with
your faithful few, and make sure they know your app or metric or feature
and love it. One-on-one sessions work best here. Often times a small
forum for power users to ask questions, get expert level tips and
tricks, and receive enablement materials can also raise the collective
skill level of the group to take back to their teams.
- Some questions are asked by everyone. I still
provide training and host all-inclusive FAQ sessions on the most basic
business questions, tips and tricks. The key word there is basic. For
these types of questions, most users have a common level of data
literacy and often benefit greatly from consistent, recurring training
on just a few core concepts. Giving all your users a channel to ask the expert also provides another tier of support and a last line of analytical defense.
Moral of the story? Instead of simplifying your app and thereby
risking devaluation, or spending lots of time (proverbially) speaking
Greek to your stakeholders, spend your time teaching them the business
process that the app supports via the grassroots effort of your power
users and the other tools in your toolbox.
You may have built the app, but leave the training to the champions!