Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by David Court for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. New technology tools are making adoption by the front line much easier, and that’s accelerating the organizational adaptation needed to produce results. To read the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.

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The world has become excited about big data and advanced analytics not just because the data are big but also because the potential for impact is big. Our colleagues at the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) caught many people’s attention several years ago when they estimated that retailers exploiting data analytics at scale across their organizations could increase their operating margins by more than 60 percent and that the US healthcare sector could reduce costs by 8 percent through data-analytics efficiency and quality improvements.

Unfortunately, achieving the level of impact MGI foresaw has proved difficult. True, there are successful examples of companies such as Amazon and Google, where data analytics is a foundation of the enterprise. But for most legacy companies, data-analytics success has been limited to a few tests or to narrow slices of the business. Very few have achieved what we would call “big impact through big data,” or impact at scale. For example, we recently assembled a group of analytics leaders from major companies that are quite committed to realizing the potential of big data and advanced analytics. When we asked them what degree of revenue or cost improvement they had achieved through the use of these techniques, three-quarters said it was less than 1 percent.

In previous articles, we’ve shown how capturing the potential of data analytics requires the building blocks of any good strategic transformation: it starts with a plan, demands the creation of new senior-management capacity to really focus on data, and, perhaps most important, addresses the cultural and skill-building challenges needed for the front line (not just the analytics team) to embrace the change.

Here, we want to focus on what to do when you’re in the midst of that transformation and facing the inevitable challenges to realizing large-scale benefits (exhibit). For example, management teams frequently don’t see enough immediate financial impact to justify additional investments. Frontline managers lack understanding and confidence in the analytics and hesitate to employ it. Existing organizational processes are unable to accommodate advancements in analytics and automation, often because protocols for decision making require multiple levels of approval.

How to accelerate your data-analysis transformation

If you see your organization struggling with these impediments to scaling data-analytics efforts, the first step is to make sure you are doing enough to adopt some of the new tools that are emerging to help deal with such challenges. These tools deliver fast results, build the confidence of the front line, and automate the delivery of analytic insights to it in usable formats.

But the tools alone are insufficient. Organizational adaptation is also needed to overcome fear and catalyze change. Management teams need to shift priorities from small-scale exercises to focusing on critical business areas and driving the use of analytics across the organization. And at times, jobs need to be redesigned to embrace advancements in digitization and automation. An organization that quickly adopts new tools and adapts itself to capture their potential is more likely to achieve large-scale benefits from its data-analytics efforts.

Why data-analytics efforts bog down before they get big
As recently as two or three years ago, the key challenges for data-analytics leaders were getting their senior teams to understand its potential, finding enough talent to build models, and creating the right data fabric to tie together the often disparate databases inside and outside the enterprise. But as these professionals have pushed for scale, new challenges have emerged.

First, many senior managers are reluctant to double down on their investments in analytics—investments required for scale, because early efforts have not yielded a significant return. In many cases, they were focused on more open-ended efforts to gain novel insights from big data. These efforts were fueled by analytics vendors and data scientists who were eager to take data and run all types of analyses in the hope of finding diamonds. Many executives heard the claim “just give us your data, and we will find new patterns and insights to drive your business.”

These open-ended exercises often yielded novel insights, without achieving large-scale results. For example, an executive at one automaker recently invested in an initiative to understand how social media could be used to improve production planning and forecasting. While the analysis surfaced interesting details on customer preferences, it didn’t provide much guidance on how to improve the company’s forecasting approach. Executives can often point to examples such as this one where early efforts to understand interesting patterns were not actionable or able to influence business results in a meaningful way. The upshot: senior management often is hesitant about financing the investments required for scale, such as analytics centers of excellence, tools, and training.

Second, frontline managers and business users frequently lack confidence that analytics will improve their decision making. One of the common complaints from this audience is that the tools are too much like black boxes; managers simply don’t understand the analytics or the recommendations it suggests. Frontline mangers and business users understandably fall back on their historic rules of thumb when they don’t trust the analytics, particularly if their analytics-based tools are not easy to use or are not embedded into established workflows and processes. For example, at a sales call center, staff members failed to use a product-recommendation engine because they didn’t know how the tool formulated the recommendations and because it was not user friendly. Once the tool was updated to explain why the recommendations were being made and the interface was improved, adoption increased dramatically.

Finally, a company’s core processes can also be a barrier to capturing the potential of sophisticated analytics. For the “born through analytics” companies, like Amazon and Facebook, processes such as pricing, ad serving, and supply-chain management have been built around a foundation of automated analytics. These organizations also have built big data processing systems that support automation and developed recruiting approaches that attract analytics talent.

But in more established organizations, management-approval processes have not kept up with the advancements in data analytics. For example, it’s great to have real-time data and automated pricing engines, but if management processes are designed to set prices on a weekly basis, the organization won’t be able to realize the full impact of these new technologies. Moreover, organizations that fail to leverage such enhancements risk falling behind.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

David Court is a director in McKinsey’s Dallas office. He would like to acknowledge the contributions of Mohammed Aaser, Matt Ariker, Brad Brown, and Stephanie Coyles.