Placing Analytics team in Organization Structure
Typically Analytics team is the core support team in any organization. This is a team of people that are always pressurized for timelines, and seldom given credit for the contribution they have made to the business.
Different teams, have different claims on the credits - Customer Engagement for Winbacks, Branding for Acquisitions, Product for the incoming traffic etc. What these teams miss is how their tasks are manifold effective because of the back end data support that they receive. Organizations where support teams are valued and credited fairly, are the ones where you would see a structure in plans and thus, effective execution.
So where does Analytics team fit in the organization?
The placement of this card is just as crucial as any other cards of the organization, probably more.
The Analytics team should have only one dependency and absolutely no influence.
The only dependency of this team has to be on the technology, that too limited to data provision. Any extra dependency, or lags in the one dependency exponentially increases the timelines of requests and thereby actions taken by the company.
While the data team has to provide support to all teams, it should be made sure that no one team has an unfair influence on it. If anything, the data team should have influence on the other teams that its support - basis the trends and numbers they churn.
There are so many organizations structures currently active in the market, and none of them are exactly alike.
Some organizations have fragmented analytics team, each fragment associated with another vertical. This strategy creates several issues like synchronization, multiple channels of data, bandwidth wastage due to repeat requests, lack of cross learning.
Some organizations have a centralized analytics team. One team for all tasks. This strategy has its own cons too - like lack of expertise development, unorganized task list and increased turn around time.
A few organizations have realized the impact of this in the business processes, and have started following a Hybrid model.
The Hybrid Model includes having a centralized Analytics team, which leads multiple fragments of Analytics team. The central team behaves like a group of consultants, while the fragmented teams are sort of process dedicated resources.
Each of the fragments is aligned to one team/process/product, thereby developing expertise in the area and reducing TATs of requests coming their way.
Once the resource in a fragment has reached the top of the learning curve in its area, he/she can be shifted to the central team. This resource can for a while share the learnings from the fragment with the entire central pool. Once this KT is done, another resource from the central pool can be shifted to the fragment to fill the void.
No resource should be shifted from one fragment to another fragment directly.
All handovers have to happen through the central team.
