How Will You Respond When The Senior Leaders Ask You For Your Insights and Recommendations?

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A few posts ago, I had talked about what three areas a CIO is typically interested in from an operations standpoint. 1 - Reducing Volumes, 2 - Improving Response/Resolve Times and 3 - Improving the Client Satisfaction. I already touched on points 2 and 3. Let me address point 1 before we close this thread.

Imagine you, as a Data Analyst/Data Scientist are in a meeting with the CIO/CTO/Operational Leaders and they are talking about the increased volumes to the IT teams which are leading to delays, reduced uptime and availability, etc. They ask you as the brains in the room what are your insights and recommendations. What would you say?

Will you say you will build attractive PowerBI/Tableau Dashboards to tell them?

Will you say you will tell them a beautiful story at the end explaining what is going on?

Will you say you will import their data, cleanse it and transform it before you run it through various ML models?

Will you know what ITSM data to ask for? What fields to request? Will you know what to look for in the data? How to harvest it for operational insights?

Now imagine this was a billion-dollar deal that was at risk. I have been there many times as the overall P&L owner. What will you say to convince the client that you are the person to get behind the issues and turn things around because you have done this 100s of times before?

Now ask yourself, if all the podcasts you are listening to, books you are reading, posts you are liking, certifications you are achieving, will help you in this situation.

This situation is no different from a client asking you for your insights on poor sales pipelines, ineffective marketing campaigns, employee experience challenges, client experience challenges, etc.

How will you respond?

What are some of the things that impact workloads to the IT teams and what are some recommendations you can make to identify the specific problem, determine the impact of that problem, identify the expected outcomes, validate the problem, determine the root cause and contributing factors, and most importantly, identify prescriptive actions that need to be taken to address the problem?

If you don't know. It is perfectly fine. Everyone has a starting point. Since IT is part of every company. IT Operational Analytics is a solid area to get started. As I always say, if the Data Center is down and none of your products and services are available for sales. No amount of sales and marketing analysis is going to help you.