EP #4: Why BI Teams Must Learn to Love Excel to Survive with Mayank Misra of Pfizer

Discover why using business activation philosophy is more important than user adoption

Today’s guest is near and dear to my heart. He was my manager at Pfizer during my old Business Objects consulting days. Mayank Misra was the former Head of the Global Business Intelligence Strategy and the Center of Excellence for Pfizer. Pfizer is a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company commonly known as the maker of Viagra.

Why BI team must learn to love Excel

On this episode of Analytics on Fire podcast, we invited Mayank to talk about why he stopped focusing on user adoption, and instead struck gold with his users by focusing on the business activation of technology. He shares how he took a step back to redefine his personal goals and role as a technologist to that of a practitioner to deliver value back to the business.

Mayank also talks about how and why in his journey he had to learn to love Excel (despite the fact that, from an IT perspective, Excel is viewed as an evil tool). Join us to hear Mayank’s thoughts on how to cater not just to business users but also data-hungry analysts that need instant information, and how he’s brought value to those analysts rather than just technology.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

  • Mayank’s background and his current position with Pfizer.
  • Why he got bored with managing 23 systems and 83,000 users, and what he did to change it.
  • Why Makank says, ‘Forget user adoption, Focus on the business activation of technology.’
  • Why he learned to love excel and how you can too.
  • How an organization can begin adopting the business activation philosophy.
  • Why IT/BI teams need to partner with ‘shadow IT’ instead of punishing them!
  • Mayank’s insane paradigm shift that led to his success with the business users.
  • Some of the challenges of enforcing the business activation of technology mindset.
  • How to reduce the signal to noise ratio when it comes to big data.
  • How to cater not just to business users but also to analysts.

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Links and Resources mentioned in this Episode:

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