In a fight to reclaim the autonomy to use the data they need, these teams subject themselves to a disjointed, inefficient process that’s prone to error, rife with context-switching, and antithetical to achieving the deep state of focus required for knowledge workers and customer-facing teams.
Kashish Gupta, cofounder of Hightouch, prefers the term “data activation” to “operational analytics” because it solves this issue.
“I don’t think ‘operational analytics’ is the right term for this category. I think ‘data activation’ is the right term. If I asked you, ‘What is operational analytics?’ you probably have a different definition than the next person. With data activation we want people to think about, now that you have your data, how do you use it? They should consider whether the job of the BI team is strictly analytics or is the job to activate data across the company."
"The word ‘activation’ resonates with people because they know they have data but want to know how to activate it. We define activation by what data is used in the wild. The whole idea is taking a company’s revenue generating teams and empowering them with data. At a B2B company you give customer success and sales teams data on their customer, and they can run a much better sales and success process. In a B2C world, you give the marketing team data, and they can run much better marketing campaigns."