Goals

Short-term goals

We should combine short-term analytics goals with a strategic picture of how analytics can be used to create business value. The organization’s strategic analytics framework and roadmap should include this strategic picture. Short-term goals and projects in analytics are important because they:

• Build and/or improve the organization’s momentum as it starts or continues its analytics journey.

• Validate the value of data analytics for the business.

• Give us a chance to try out and quickly learn how analytics models and tools can be used in the organization’s context.

• Confirm the business case for investing in analytical tools and platforms.

Short-term analytics goals and objectives shouldn’t take more than two to three months to implement, depending on the size of the organization and how easy it is to get the data. They may also need to use both structured and unstructured data.

Structured data is information that has been put into a set field in a file or record. Structured datasets are things such as the data in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or an Access database. Unstructured data, such as video, PDF documents, social media data, and emails, is not set up in a traditional database or spreadsheet format and may not be as easy to analyze (in comparison to structured data).

The majority of the data in the world is unstructured, and only a small portion of the data is structured. Some estimates say only about 20% of the ...