Field of dreams and analytics
When I’m not busy working in the web analytics world I’m often playing or practicing for a very competitive baseball team. The team is basically made up of my group of friends, and none of us are even close to being major league quality. However, when you put a bunch of guys into an athletic context, even friends have a tendency to get cutthroat.
During my team’s pre-season our manager made a habit of sending the players a copy of each game’s box score. This maneuver was an attempt at being transparent with the information upon which he was making his decisions. His presumed logic was to show us the factual breakdown of the game so as to validate his impending decisions as well as cut down on the inevitable questions and complaints relating to them.
Despite his best efforts, the approach backfired miserably. Guys on the team were putting almost all the official scoring into question: if a player got a hit but officially it was ruled an error, that player would claim he was a victim of an unfair judgment and indeed deserved that hit; if, while on the field, one of our players blew a throw to first base and was charged with an error, he alleged that the throw would have been on target had the first baseman been properly positioned.
This situation is analogous to internal dissent within a company: if a website is suffering, it’s entirely possible that the person responsible for the site’s content will blame those responsible for the site’s navigation (can you see the potential domino affect?). Sure the click stream data may shed some light into users’ respective paths, points of abandonment and conversion frequency, but it falls short in revealing why customers actually did what they did.
When my manager stopped relaying the factual score sheet to us and alternatively started to record an in-depth account of each play that transpired, the questioning and squabbling stopped abruptly. The story on each play went from being hazy and contentious to being tellingly unambiguous.
Even though creating organizational harmony is not the primary purpose of attitudinal analytics, could that possibly be one of its side benefits? Now that players on my team have a written explanation of what they’re doing, both right and wrong, they are actually going out of their way to ask others how they can improve.
When the story is being told by the customers instead of the numbers that track them, department heads need not be at odds over where the website’s strengths and weaknesses lie – the answers are right in front of them!
If complete transparency of results can be leveraged to foster an environment of mutual accountability and collective accomplishment, a company’s website knows no bounds. As for my baseball team, I still need to learn how to hit a curveball.
