I read a great article this morning on the Cult of Analytics by Dave Chaffey. In this article he details how Amazon has built their corporate culture around Analytics, and their success and longevity demonstrates the effectiveness of building not only web site but business processes around metrics.

This is all well and good for the marketing folks and major decision makers at a company, but how do you get the full buy in of the developers, or do you bother to take the time to get the Code Monkeys in the cubes, like me, to really value the data that is gathered by the metrics. It is easy to say, just assign the project like any other and make damn sure the work gets done. But I think it has to go further than that to be truly successful.

I am currently knee, ok… waist deep, into integrating Omniture analytics into our web site. And the project is daunting, but the decision makers at my company have done a fantastic job of explaining what they want from the metrics and how we will use these metrics to drive future development. It has made the hours and hours of wading through the manuals and white papers and building test scripts that much more enjoyable when the metrics start flowing in and I see that the data we are gathering is actually being used to drive projects.

Perhaps this Cult of Analytics is part of a larger corporate culture that fosters thinking outside the box at every level, not just the suits in the board room.