In its simplest form, Insight Management is getting four things right – its all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time and in the right format to drive change.
Nothing more complicated than that.
Insight management as a role within a business is relatively new concept and, according to the Insight Management Academy, the term ‘insight management’ was only coined about 20 years ago, when it was realised that the separate functions of market research, data analysis and competitor/market intelligence could be much more effective if they worked together to generate a ‘joined-up’ view of their market
Over those 20 years, the role of insight management has developed significantly and is now viewed as a business function in its own right
Why?
Because of the exponential growth in customer and market data driven mainly by digital transactions and social media activity, which has enabled huge amounts of information to be collected about consumer behaviours and customer interactions.
In fact data is the world’s fastest growing resource, causing The Economist to publish an article back in 2017 titled “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data”.
This headline is much quoted and the article created a great deal of discussion.
But as we know, raw oil isn’t terribly useful and neither is raw data. In fact, data without preparation, cleaning and processing isn’t valuable at all, and it only becomes valuable when it can be used to show you what to do next.
So what’s the point of collecting data if it isn’t useful to the business? This is where insight management comes in.
Insight Management is not about producing more data, it goes beyond gathering and analysing data. Insight Management is a proactive role which identifies key insights from within the data and communicates these succinctly to business stakeholders to inform and drive business strategies
A successful insight management team applies a repeatable 5-stage process:-
Stage 1. Understanding the goals and capabilities of the business, organisation, department or brand.
Stage 2. Identifying the type of information that will be helpful in achieving these goals
Stage 3. Gathering relevant data and information and establishing efficient and robust methods of validation, acquisition, and storage
Stage 4. Applying an appropriate analysis technique to identify and generate useful and actionable insight
Stage 5. Communicating this insight to the people who make the decisions relating to the goals identified identified in Stage 1.
And repeat
If insight is the information that will make a difference, Insight Management is about identifying this information and getting it in front of the right person – the person who can make that difference
Nothing understands people better than people
The large amounts of data being generated by companies mean that manually comparing and evaluating the data is time-consuming and considered old-fashioned. This makes it very tempting for companies to place their insight management in the hands of a self-learning artificial intelligence (AI) system and there are certainly many of these systems available on the market.
If set up correctly and with enough base data to enable learning, an AI system will take the ‘heavy lifting’ out of data analysis by recognising patterns and revealing connections.
Insight Management humanises data. It is the human face of data analytics Click To TweetHowever, no matter how sophisticated these systems claim to be, the patterns and connections still need to be interpreted by a real person to understand important cues such as feelings, intuition and context, which can only be identified by the human brain.
So far, only the human brain can differentiate between data and true insight.
The Trend-Monitor Insight Management Framework is specifically tailored to UK home improvement brands. Access a full insight management service that has the benefit of our industry knowledge and analytics expertise at a fraction of the cost to employ an experienced in-house insight manager