Building an analytics team and an environment for collaboration

You will need to hire a leader. You will need to empower and fund that leader to hire and lead a team. I refer to this team as the Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence (AA&AI COE). The COE leader and team will need to learn the broader organization and to build a network of collaborators, sponsors, and allies. This new network, which we will refer to as the Community of Practice, or COP, will span the entire organization and global operations. If your organization numbers in the thousands, the AA&AI COE will be less than 50 staff members within the first two years and the COP will be a few hundred in number.

The most recent COP that I built took approximately a year to reach critical mass and was made up of between 400 and 500 staff members spanning the globe, including every operational department in the company. I stopped counting after the first 14 months, but, in the first...