MINNEAPOLIS—Credit unions can talk all they want about data analytics, but putting those tools in place won’t mean much without an analytics culture.
That’s the word from two former credit union executives – Brewster Knowlton, principal of the Knowlton Group and Rich Jones, principal of Leading2Leadership – who spoke during the Analytics and Financial Innovation conference here.
“Technology is the easy part of the process,” explained Knowlton. “When we say analytics or data, people think IT. The last thing that comes to their mind is change of management or cultural transformation.”
Too often, Knowlton explained, credit unions build a data warehouse and consider the work done. “That doesn’t solve the rest of the organization’s challenges,” he said. “How do we actually get that adoption? It starts with establishing stakeholder needs [and] getting to the point where you’re getting collaboration between departments.”
One of the struggles CUs face, chimed in Jones, is that data is too often a departmental property rather than an organizational property. Data from marketing, lending, the call center and other departments must all coincide, and institutions need to understand every stakeholder in the organization and how they all use, gather, manipulate and report on data.
As credit unions work to get staff at all levels on the same page, noted Jones, they’ll also need to ensure that everyone has the same definitions. For example, he said, marketing probably has its own definition of a member – someone who’s over the age of 18 and not on the “do not market to” list, etc – that may be vastly different from the number of members on the institution’s call report.
Employees also need to understand the long-term goal and what it will take to accomplish that, Jones and Knowlton said, which means that management must start with a vision of where the credit union wants to go and not backtrack.
“What will kill your ability to get long-term buy-in is when you start changing things up,” said Knowlton.
The pair also advised making sure staff at all levels understand that this will not be a quick process. There’s probably an 18- to 36-month timeline for implementing many of these measures, said Knowlton.
“You have to make people understand that they’re not going to get fired or let go” as a result of this, he added.
“Make [staff] feel that they have value to the organization beyond just the manipulation of data,” added Jones, reminding that management must make organizational data stakeholders feel they have a voice in the integration and reporting process.
Milestones necessary
Just as important as an understanding of where the organization is going, however, are milestones that employees can recognize as the process moves along.
“If you take a top-down approach, especially as it relates to staff, focusing on the strategic objectives of the organization first and foremost, we start to realize what levers every individual within the organization needs to pull in order to help us achieve our strategic objectives,” said Knowlton. “By creating this top-down approach we establish a clear line of sight for anyone within the organization to understand how what they’re doing is impacting our success or failure toward our strategic objectives.”
Even if there’s buy-in from the entire staff, however, the department still needs a leader.
“We like to advocate that business intelligence should be an independent business unit within your credit union,” said Jones. “Think of this like HR or IT; they serve the entire organization, so they are the neutral body for the whole organization in a lot of respects. That’s where you want [business intelligence] to be, but to be successful you have to identify who is the strategic leader. Who is in there advocating and reporting on those milestones and those project deadlines from a strategic level? It should be somebody at the executive level who has a voice at that table.”
