Analytics and expert collaboration: How individuals navigate relationships when working with organizational data
研究在一家财富500强金融公司中实施分析功能时,专家如何通过沟通策略管理关系,发现分析工作类型(请求、协作或委托)影响关系运作,且分析人员需要自主权和技术能力来挑战固有观念。
Analytics is heralded as an important, new and increasingly widespread organizational function, and one that promises new approaches for generating value from organizational knowledge. What is not yet clear is how analytics may affect how organizations work with data, or how organizations can realize the benefits of analytics. Analytics, envisioned as not just a technical skill but a reconceptualization of data’s place in the organization, may improve, challenge or undermine existing processes and procedures. Building upon scholarship on expert collaboration and multidisciplinary knowledge work, this study reports a mixed-methods investigation of the implementation of analytics at a Fortune 500 financial services company. The findings make multiple contributions, including (a) confirming the importance of relationships among organizational experts in analytics work; (b) exploring specific communicative strategies employed by practitioners in those relationships; (c) demonstrating that the functioning of those relationships may differ depending on the type of analytics work (i.e. the degree to which it involves requesting, collaborating or commissioning); and (d) indicating that analytics practitioners need autonomy, as well as technical acumen, to question entrenched ideas about organizational data and problems. The findings contribute to practice by identifying problems that may be common in implementing analytics and strategies employed to address them.