- Use Case
- 4 min reading time
Dr. Yvonne Avaro
The BI & Analytics team
Our client is one of the leading insurance companies in Switzerland. The insurance company's BI & Analytics team is organized as an agile product team. The product members come from both IT and business. This combination of technical know-how with data and IT expertise is the basis on which the internal users and systems are supplied with data and information on a daily basis. The team is responsible for the company's central enterprise data warehouse and creates analytical data products with added value for business users. A working group for SSBI was established within the team in order to provide better support for the business, especially in matters relating to self-service BI (SSBI), and to promote the use of SSBI in general.
The project
The aim of the project, which the BI & Analytics team carried out in collaboration with s-peers AG from 2022 to 2024, was to significantly increase both awareness of the SSBI services on offer and their use within the company. To this end, an internal marketing and communication strategy tailored to the needs of the insurer was developed and implemented to address the above-mentioned challenges.
The challenges
Self-Service BI is a key component in putting the insurer's ambition to become a data-driven company into practice. The SSBI working group recognized early on that it is not enough to simply provide users with the appropriate tools and access to the data relevant to them. Rather, additional communication and marketing measures are needed to lower access barriers and increase user acceptance. In concrete terms, this means, among other things
1. the Development and expansion of data skillsto enable employees to carry out complex data analyses independently and interpret the results correctly.
2. the Support with tool selection and trainingto ensure that the most suitable tool is used for the task at hand and that it can be used competently.
3. the Building a communityto enable and promote exchange between groups with
different requirements (e.g. consumers and authors) and backgrounds (e.g. business and IT).
The marketing and communication strategy implemented with the help of s-peers AG communication strategy implemented with the help of s-peers AG has given an enormous boost to user acceptance of self-service BI. By the different needs of our users in detail and deriving four descriptive personas from them, we were able to plan and implement appropriate target group-oriented measures, which as a result increased awareness of the services offered and significantly increased the number of users and their usage intensity on our SSBI platform. significantly increased the number of users and their intensity of use on our SSBI platform.
Solution
The marketing and communication strategy included a series of
attention-grabbing measures:
1. development of a clear SSBI vision
The team formulated an inspiring vision (see Fig. 1): "We create the most active SSBI community by connecting our colleagues and enabling them to work with data." This vision was communicated via various channels and kept visually present, e.g. through posters in the offices.
2. establishment of a unique visual identity
The theme of "space"
was chosen as the central anchor point of the visual communication. This metaphor was intended to convey fascination, curiosity and innovation and create a high recall value. The association with outer space helped to emotionally charge the
topic of SSBI, which may be perceived as too technical, and make it more tangible.
3. detailed target group analysis
Four personas (see Fig. 2) were defined through extensive interviews and analyses in order to better understand the different needs and challenges of users. These personas helped to develop customized communication and training approaches.
4. target group and user-oriented measures
The target group and user-oriented measures (see Fig. 3) were divided into three
categories: Inform, Involve and Enable. The BI & Analytics team's intranet page plays an important role in Inform. It is the central communication hub and serves as a landing page for regular mailings to the individual user groups. Examples of Involve measures include the Learning Nugget videos and community building via a Viva Engage channel. The Enable measures were aimed at enabling the insurer's employees to work better with the SSBI tools. Examples of this include SAP Analysis for Office (AfO) and SAP Analytics Cloud training as well as web-based training (WBT) on the topic of data literacy.
Conclusion
SSBI success story: Growth, commitment and outlook to 2025:
- The number of SSBI users has increased. The intensity of use on the SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) SSBI platform has increased significantly and there are more active SSBI users and a third more authors in the SAC (see Fig. 4).
- An SSBI community has emerged and grown significantly. Over 200 participants have taken part in the SSBI events.
- The BI & Analytics team has become better known internally. This is reflected, among other things, in the significant increase in the number of visitors to the team's internal SharePoint page (see Fig. 4).
- In general, it can be said that the needs of business users are better understood by IT and vice versa.
The targets for 2025 include
- Expansion of community activities in the area of data literacy.
- Transfer standard marketing activities to regular operations.
- Further increase business involvement through more intensive cooperation with the controller community.
