Deloitte Greenhouse: Canada

The client’s challenge

The newly appointed Chief Data Officer (CDO) at a large financial services company in Canada faced an immediate challenge: how to establish new analytics capabilities that would equip management with insights on the company’s performance. The company was encumbered with institutional barriers that confined data, knowledge, and insights to their departments. And its legacy analytics initiatives were out of sync with each other and with the bank’s strategic priorities.

Deloitte’s solution

Deloitte Canada’s Greenhouse facilitators and analytics specialists set out to help the CDO mobilize his team behind a common understanding of the potential for analytics to transform their business. The Deloitte team wanted to give them a picture of what a sophisticated, centralized analytics operation might ultimately look like, along with a clear plan of action for putting that operation into effect.

The Deloitte team set up the entire Greenhouse in Toronto as a model of an analytics “center of excellence.” Each of the five rooms in the Greenhouse represented an arm of the client’s business. Using the Greenhouse as an interactive studio, the Deloitte team conducted immersive, hands-on demonstrations of the analytics capabilities required to transform an organization’s culture to one that uses data to drive insights, as well as the role that the CDO could play in this transformation. The team also demonstrated new processes that can strengthen an analytics program, such as launching small, high-value analytics projects as the kernels of new initiatives, and offering awareness and training programs to catalyze new thinking and collaboration across the business.

Facilitators introduced the client team to design-thinking exercises that would help them define a vision for the company’s next-generation analytics capabilities and set priorities for supporting management. The CDO and his team also considered the possibilities for consolidating knowledge and expertise that was dispersed across the company into an integrated analytics program that would deliver the best possible analytics solutions across the business.

Impact on client’s business

At the conclusion of the three-hour session in the Greenhouse, the CDO and his team had developed a concrete plan for creating and delivering a comprehensive, high-performance analytics program, along with an agreed concept for what changes in operations, technology, culture, and human resources would be needed to realize the shared vision. The Greenhouse made this result possible by exposing the client’s team to myriad possibilities for new analytics functions and illustrating an unconventional but highly effective approach to planning their change agenda.