At LEGO they have taken web analytics a step further than most organisations by aligning it with the business objectives. This was the message I received, when talking to Gbemi Petersen, Manager of the Process & Online Intelligence team at LEGO in Billund in Denmark. Her team has worked actively on spreading the insights they collect to the entire organisation. The ambition is to work smarter and to allow the business units to make more informed decisions.
Where most organisations find limited use of their numbers e.g. to encourage editors or to justify the costs of their work to managers, LEGO wants to make web analytics a key part of business development. To accomplish this, Gbemi and her team of 3 strive to get involved with new projects as early as possible in order to help set KPIs to clear business goals, and provide useful data on a regular basis.
The Online Intelligence team at LEGO still holds the responsibility of gathering and distributing traffic data, but in order to get more time for the business development efforts, self-service is encouraged. The site owners and the key account managers are offered training in the analytics system at workshops facilitated by the vendor. In addition Gbemi’s team is going to setup a hotline, where support will be offered at specific times. This will free up time to focus on the more value adding tasks like setting measurable KPIs linked to business goals and providing actionable insights to the businesses when a KPI is met or not met.
According to Gbemi, the key to get web analytics this far is a strong buy-in at management level. The senior managers simply need to acknowledge the value of online analytics. Consequently the Process & Online Intelligence team meets with senior management to ensure that the things they measure support the overall business strategy.
In addition, Gbemi argues that you need a dedicated team responsible for gathering online intelligence. Even with a dedicated team it can be hard to work strategically if you don’t distribute the tasks to the online stakeholders and allow them to help themselves through training and support.
What is your organisation doing about analytics? Simply using it to justify the online team’s existence – or using the detailed results strategically? Share your experiences below…
You can learn more about the LEGO case at our international conference in Aarhus in November 2010, where Gbemi will be presenting on the Digital Strategy Track.
J. Boye | Danske Bank: From statistics to analytics September 21st, 2010 12:46
[...] In addition to providing the training, the analytics team helps the business units set up KPI strategies to help them get started. The hope is that this effort will free up time in the long run so the analytics team can focus more on analysis and optimization. This move towards self-service was also a trend that LEGO followed in their effort to acknowledge analytics as a business process. [...]