Using soft skills and OR tools to solve "data analytics' big problem"

Originally reported by ZD Net; read the full story

OMV Petrom, a Romanian oil company, is using soft power to get employees to use its new data analytics tools.

"All these tools are very nice," says Jaco Fok, OMV Petrom’s chief of innovation and digitisation, [but] "we find that getting people to use the tools is actually 70% of the effort."

Fok's answer was a combination of introducing simple scorecards, a “tribe” of 30 hand-picked champions and shared data visualisation dashboards, which avoid the problem of managers "bringing their own data" to meetings and arguing about which data sets are more accurate.

For OMV Petrom, this has demonstrated that change is as much about ‘hearts and minds’ as tools and technology.