The Insight Management Academy (IMA) are the world’s leading authority on transforming insight teams. This year, The IMA’s CEO James Wycherley condensed 16 years of The IMA’s thinking into a book – Transforming Insight. The book contains advice across 42 areas that’ll help insight professionals identify value, drive change, manage their teams, optimise insight’s impact and plan for the future. It’s vital reading for insight professionals. If you want to make insight commercially valuable, then glue Transforming Insight to your desk and refer to it daily.
This week we’ll be discussing Transforming Insight’s key learnings. Today, we’re discussing how insight creates commercial value.
But how does insight do this?
Learn your business’s commerciality equation
For insight to create commercial value, insights professionals must know the details of what commerciality is. Simply put, insight that’s valuable to a business will be commercially impactful – i.e. it’ll help them make money.
Transforming Insight defines commercial success simply as the sum of customer + operations + finance. Insight owns the first part of the equation. But what about the other two?
Broaden your audience
Transforming Insight proposes that truly valuable insight joins the dots between the customer, operations and finance. The issue is that insight professionals rarely engage with operations and finance. A hurdle in this is language. Operations and finance speak in the language of costs, revenue and money. Insights don’t.
Wycherley believes this must change, especially as “insights are well placed to join the dots with operations and finance as we know about data and have access to it in abundance.” These dots along with core stats, a business blueprint and knowledge of trends and threats are what Transforming Insight refers to as ‘commercial foundations.’
Put outcomes before methods
Wycherley also believes that if insights teams get closer to operations and finance it’ll “change the way projects are scoped out.” And this is important. A more financially focused insights professional will know about measurable financial outcomes. These can then be measures of project success.
The hurdle is that insights leaders obtain leadership positions due to their strong technical research skills which means overly focussing on methods. As Wycherley says, “methods can be a means to an end – we should work in ways which prioritise outcomes that address specific business issues”.
Think short and long term
Great insight must do all of the above in two ways: 1) to solve immediate business questions and 2) to add ongoing value. Both are vital if insight wants to contribute to commercial success. Solving immediate questions helps solve the short-term challenges businesses face. And adding ongoing value makes insight teams a valuable strategic partner.
Transforming Insight warns against overly focusing on one or the other. Over focusing on immediate questions means insight risks being a ‘helpdesk service’. Conversely, over focusing on the longer-term means risking insight risks being seen as unagile.
However, for insights to be commercially valuable, they must drive change within a business. And tomorrow, we’ll discuss how to do this.
Want to know more about Transforming Insight? Then click here.
