Arguably the best piece of thought on developing a marketing culture comes from Anne Milley of Smart Data Collective, who compared the process with organic gardening, adding that \u201cif we want to harvest good things from our organizations, we have to nurture the culture. We can\u2019t control every factor, but we can do a number of things to influence the harvest.\u201d That piece, entitled \u201cAnalytical Cultures: Nurture Yours Through Training\u201d goes on to describe the role business intelligence plays in an overall business culture. If we\u2019re talking about culture, which judging by the streams of content across the net that define and redefine new systems of thinking, shouldn\u2019t we pay perhaps the closer attention to the analytics involved? I think so.<\/p>\n
So how exactly do you factor in a culture of analytics into your existing business stream? Here is another area where Milley\u2019s post excels, offering not just glossy theory but rather a set of tangible ideas that you can put into practice this week. Noting that \u201corganizations with strong analytic cultures have powerful analytic infrastructures with multiple usage paradigms,\u201d she a list of suggestions, including:<\/p>\n
1. Holding Workshops<\/strong><\/p>\n Call them \u201cAnalytics Days\u201d but the idea here is to have a meeting of the minds among industry colleagues to see what works, what doesn\u2019t, and what can be improved upon.<\/p>\n Essentially, she promotes creating an analytical hive mind \u2013 or in other words, a group mind. Oddly enough, the idea is also not too different from the gaming software of a similar name, HiveMind. HiveMind, for example, is a personal gaming concept in which the player\u2019s interests affect the content of the game. In the case of a game like FarmVille, which most of us are probably familiar with, the idea would be to learn about users and implement that intelligence into the gaming framework (as opposed to the other way around). It\u2019s a brilliant theory that should be applied to workshops; the idea that we actually walk away changing the system rather than having the system change us.<\/p>\n You could also tap into the collective \u201chive mind\u201d of the industry\u2019s best analytical thinkers by attending any number of annual summits and conventions on the subject. There\u2019s the (1) Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit taking place February 19 and 20 in San Diego, Ca., (2) Gartner Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit from March 31 \u2013 April 4 in Las Vegas, and (3) Analytics 2014 Conference Series, also in Las Vegas from October 20-21.<\/p>\n