Writing my reflections about X Change wasn't something I thought I'd be doing in December…nearly 3 months after the event, but it's been a busy fall at Semphonic, and this just drifted to a weekly "to do list" item until now.
I attended a lot of the sessions on managing analytics. Attendees came from just about every type of organization you could imagine: private and public sector, non-profits; organizations with highly centralized management, organizations with worldwide scope; and a range of industries too…pharmaceutical, media, manufacturing, financial services, software and so on.
James Robinson (NY Times), Jim Hassert (AOL), Gil Roeder (Barclays iShares) all brought a slightly different style to facilitating the discussions, but shared a preparation and ability to keep conversations on track and more importantly provide everyone with an opportunity to share what's been working and not working in their organizations.
Some of the takeaways:
In: emphasis on report analysis training, business case support for web analytics, integration of web analytics into web governance structure, focus on business results, creating analytics user groups, developing strong working relationship with IT.
Out: evangelism, unfocused distribution of analytics throughout the organization, "analytics by the pound" production, report monkeys, analytics management is strictly the province of the online marketing team.
When we started X Change a few years ago, there wasn't a whole lot of focus on web analytics management. That there was at this year's gathering and that all of the sessions were well attended tells you something about the rising level of maturity in the field. Looking at X Change with a broader perspective, I think this year's huddles reflected well what is current and forecasted what's cutting edge. I think the most intriguing session I attended (not about web analytics management) was Michael Scherotter's (Microsoft) huddle on Standardizing Protocols for Measuring Offline and Out-of-Browser Experiences, where we focused on measuring RIA developed in frameworks like Adobe Air, Microsoft Silverlight, and Google Gears.
