ICG member Curtis Arthur is an experienced and accomplished loyalty analytics and consulting professional who has made a career of creatively making the most of low budgets and disparate pieces of information. Here he writes about how to maximise theuse of insights you already own.
The term Sweating the Assets originated in the IT environment over a decade ago. Variously defined as cutting costs, virtualising, or “getting as much use as possible out of what you already possess”*, it is as imperative in the Insights world today because almost all of us have been asked to do more with less, regardless of our company, function, or level.
The great news is that sweating insight assets, aka knowledge activation (taking insights beyond assimilation into actions), works.
Successes from my personal experience include:
- Improving 18% on the annual project budget by identifying and prioritising desired insights, planning and optimising projects, and not re-answering what is already known
- Saving time and resources by establishing baseline knowledge and allowing internal teams to access materials themselves
- Establishing a team as the company’s thought leaders via workshops, webinars, and other attention-grabbing communications
- Helping new Insights Directors ramp up quickly to form a point of view on their existing assets and create a vision for their future.
The backbone for sweating your insights assets is creating order out of chaos – a knowledge system with all of your assets in a consistent, searchable, accessible format.
An important strategy is creating a one-page abstract of each project that includes relevant findings as well as links to the source materials and contact details. The abstracts are then complied into a meta-library which can be searched, skimmed, and quoted easily by anyone in the organisation.
This library can be created in SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, or another collaborative platform.
Note: Mike Stevens’s blog article 15 Tools to Manage and Analyse Qualitative User Research references larger scale tools but there are also easier solutions that are often just as effective at a fraction of the cost.