If operational intelligence – having the information you need when you need it – can make a teenager more efficient imagine what it can do for a business?

That’s exactly what data enthusiast Nancy Kopp-Hensley (follow her @nancykoppdw), our Business Analytics Maverick of the Week explored in a recent blog entry.

Nancy, who works in Data Warehouse and Analytics product strategy at IBM, entertainingly described how she leveraged real time data to curb her teenage daughter’s text messaging usage, thereby making her teenager more efficient.

The real magic (that most will miss) is that Nancy included her daughter in the value chain when gathering operational intelligence to address the problem.

In addition to analyzing the more traditional operational issues, Nancy has a long history as her parent and knew how to present the data in a way her daughter was more likely to buy into.

The business equivalent is using data to inform how you would communicate change to employees by directly factoring in how the employees themselves – the people doing the work – prefer to be communicated with.

Since working relationships are less developed than a parent-child relationship, having accessible data that informs you intuition on how to best communicate enables you to gain buy-in, avoid push back (dig-in) and drive better business performance.

Mike Kennedy is a Technical Evangelist at Talent Analytics, Corp. He can be reached via mike@talentanalytics.com.