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As organizations rebuild their foundations to compete in the era of data and advanced analytics, in-house capability-building programs offer the best way to train workers up to the task.
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the defining business opportunities for leaders today. Closely associated with it: the challenge of creating an organization that can rise to that opportunity and exploit the potential of AI at scale.
Meeting this challenge requires organizations to prepare their leaders, business staff, analytics teams, and end users to work and think in new ways—not only by helping these cohorts understand how to tap into AI effectively, but also by teaching them to embrace data exploration, agile development, and interdisciplinary teamwork.
Often, companies use an ad hoc approach to their talent-building efforts. They hire new workers equipped with these skills in spurts and rely on online-learning platforms, universities, and executive-level programs to train existing employees.
But these quick-fix tactics aren’t enough to transform an organization into one that’s fully AI-driven and capable of keeping up with the blazing pace of change in both technology and the nature of business competition that we’re experiencing today. While hiring new talent can address immediate resource needs, such as those required to rapidly build out an organization’s AI practice at the start, it sidesteps a critical need for most organizations: broad capability building across all levels. This is best accomplished by training current employees. Educational offerings from external parties have limitations, too: they aren’t designed to deliver the holistic, company-specific training or the cohesive, repeatable protocols essential for driving deep and lasting cultural changes, agile and cross-functional collaboration, and rapid scaling.
The answer to the talent challenge, in our experience, is creating an in-house analytics academy. These bespoke analytics-training centers are a relatively new development, and our experience to date suggests that they are poised to move from early adoption by select organizations to core elements of the AI transformations that lie ahead for most companies.
In this article, we explore what an analytics academy can do that other approaches largely can’t, as well as share best practices culled from companies that have launched academies.
It’s important to note that the current focus for analytics academies is to help their organizations successfully...