Rotman Management – April 2019

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ROLE 4: BI as Chief Strategist
In these cases, every touchpoint with an internal or exter-
nal stakeholder is run from a behavioural perspective. The
organization is human-centric in everything that it does, with
behavioural insight as its main operating principle.
In these cases, firms can create BI-informed decision tools
that help agents make better choices by providing feedback,
rules of thumb, computational support, decision support or peer
comparisons. For example, with a mandate to improve financial
literacy and facilitate positive behaviour change, the Financial
Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) started offering finan-
cial tools and calculators to educate Canadian consumers and
help them make better financial decisions: Its Mortgage Calcu-
lator helps determine a mortgage payment schedule based on
user inputs and allows the user to input different pre-payment
options to show them how they can save money; its Budget Cal-
culator helps consumers get a portrait of where their money
comes from and where it is going; and its Financial Goal Calcu-
lator helps people figure out how to pay off their debts or reach
their savings goals.
Another example is Evree, whose app connects to your
bank account and helps you save money for things that really
matter to you. It basically employs many of the same behav-
ioural science tactics that other companies use to make you part
with your cash — but uses them to help you make smarter finan-
cial decisions instead.
All members of the Evree team, including management,
content designers and engineers, are trained to understand the
basic principles and applications of behavioural science. The
objective is for the entire team to resolve problems using a sci-
entific method and to approach daily operating roles with a BI
lens. According to Stephanie Bank, a behavioural economist at
Evree, “We look at behavioural science as our foundation, not
just as a tool for a designer or a problem solver. All of our staff
members are trained to look at business problems and opportu-
nities through a behavioural lens.”

How to Get Started
Before deciding which of the four domains can create the most
value for your organization, there are two key decisions to
be made:

1.THE LOCUS OF EXPERTISE: whether to set up a concentrated

team/unit within your organization OR to diffuse expertise

across the enterprise; and

2.THE LOCUS OF APPLICATIONS: whether to use BI in a narrow

application where they are applied to a specific geographic

Embedding BIs in Organizations: Four Approaches

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Concentrated

Expertise

Diffused

Expertise

FOCUSED

INTERNAL

CONSULTING

BEHAVIOURALLY

INFORMED

ORGANIZATION

CAPACITY

BUILDING

location or department OR to use BI in broad applica-

tions where it is applied across domains, geographies and

departments.

These two decisions create four main approaches to embedding

BI in an organization.

THE FOCUSED APPROACH. Employment and Social Development

Canada has its own Innovation Lab comprised of behavioural

scientists, data analysts, designers and policy analysts. The LAB

works on projects with internal partners to tackle problems us-

ing a combination of human-centred design and BI methods. Its

full-scale design project for 2017 was the Canada Learning Bond,

which found ways to increase uptake and better understand per-

ceptions of education and financial decision making among low

income families.

THE CAPACITY-BUILDING APPROACH. The federal government’s Im-

pact and Innovation Unit (IIU) houses expertise in four areas:

innovative finance, partnerships and capacity building, im-

FIGURE ONE