As Insights professionals, part of our job is to spot and understand changes in the macro environment. When we see early signals of the external world changing with implications for our company’s strategy, we must ask ourselves, as Insights leaders, what role do we want to have in shaping the future of the company? What impact do we want the Insights function to have? Is the team ready to play that role and is it set up to have optimal impact to drive company growth? Our answer to this should inform the (potentially evolving) mission of the insights function and subsequently, the team’s strategy for delivering on its mission.
One may say, what we offer the company as an Insights function is the confidence to make smart, timely business decisions leveraging customer-centric, fact-based and data-driven perspectives and strategic advice. It means:
- Complementing deep business knowledge with externally-focused audience expertise to provide more contextually relevant and actionable insights to inform and shape business decisions.
- Combining related business disciplines under one consulting leadership to help realize synergies in business issue diagnosis, while elevating top enterprise (product-agnostic) insights needs.
- Keeping abreast of the latest developments in research, analytics and emerging methods to ensure we accelerate the development of new capabilities that would optimize insights-generation approaches.
- Enabling faster and better decisions along the value chain, improving speed and agility with streamlined processes and standardization where appropriate, identifying and leveraging best practices.
To successfully achieve the above, some capabilities matter more than others. The profile of skills and expertise that are needed for the team must be in support of these capabilities.
Business consulting
- Diagnose underlying business issues
- Define knowledge gaps and research objectives
- Connect dots across initiatives and prioritize based on impact
- Advise to inform business decisions using insights
Culture and audience expertise
- Audit and synthesize findings across multiple sources for deeper insights
- Curate and infuse culture trends and audience specific knowledge into research objectives, question framework and storytelling
Operational excellence
- Identify the optimal methodological approach to reach stated objectives
- Analyze, integrate and harmonize data across sources to unlock insights
- Execute research projects in-house and stand up new capabilities as appropriate
- Devise vendor partnership strategy and optimize return on vendor investments
While not a capability on its own, technology enablement is a critical component, especially in the context of the future of work. More and more, we must proactively find ways to leverage technology for tactical, reactive tasks and free up time for our teams to shift more towards areas where humans add the most value and where value gets generated from insights – which is the activation stage.
Identifying the capabilities and organizational structure alone isn’t enough to organize the Insights function for maximum impact. It is just as important (if not more) to establish the ways of working and clear roles and responsibilities. Successful change management has everything to do with transparency, clear and consistent
communication, and most importantly, asking and listening for feedback. While we can design and organize for optimal impact, we must continue to seek feedback and remain open to iterative changes and adaptations.
Jackie Chan
Head of Decision Insights Group,
Prudential
1025603-00001-00
