What is a gap analysis?

A gap analysis is a business tool used to find the gap between where you are now and where you want to be within certain aspects of your company.

This analysis can be used for almost every aspect of your business where you set a goal you want to reach (growth / performance) or must reach, defined by law (compliance).

Using this as a tool can be very useful when planning your resources and investments in your business, so you spend your money in the places that have the highest impact on future growth or risk.

A good gap analysis should look at your company’s mission statement, your strategic goals and the objectives of improvement.

After those are identified, you start analysing your business, collecting the relevant data and how you have chosen to allocate resources to the different areas of your business.
This data can be collected in a lot of different ways and from different sources, such as documentation, observing, brainstorming and interviewing managers and employees.

The last step would be the comparing the current state to the desired state of things, create a comprehensive plan that outlines which steps needs to be taken to fill the gap and meet your (or compliance) requirements.

First stage – Objectives

At the first stage of the gap analysis you look at your company’s mission statement, your strategic goal and objectives of improvement.

What is your company’s mission statement, and have you reviewed it since you started your company? – do you work with it daily or keep it in mind when making decisions that affect your business?

Some examples of mission statements could be:

• Tesla: To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
• IKEA: To create a better everyday life for the many people.
• TED: To Spread ideas.
• Nordstrom: To give customers the most compelling shopping experience possible.
• Google: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Which strategic goals are important for your company’s growth, competitive edge and relevance?

To be able to demonstrate a clear vision to your employees and customers, it is important that you have set goals for yourself and your company, that are in line with your mission statement.
This helps keeping you focused on what matters to you to achieve your goals – as well as the overall “look” and “feel” of your company.

Once you have those 2 things down – you start looking at the objectives of improvement you might set for yourself and your company.

A gap analysis can help you make these objectives practical and formulated into actionable insights.

Second stage – Analysis

At the second stage of the gap analysis, you do the actual analysing part of your company.

This can be tough to do without biases, so it can be a good idea to hire an external consultant to do the analysis on your behalf to get the most honest and anonymised answers possible.

This whole analysis is worthless if it is not answered in full honesty and transparency.

During this second stage, a multitude of sources can be used to build the material on which the gap analysis is based on.

This includes but is not limited to:

• Management interviews
• Employee interviews
• Documentation review
• Brainstorming
• Silent observations

After all the data is gathered it is entered into the Current state of the working document of the gap analysis.

Third stage – Goals

This is the stage where you define where you want to go in the future state.

The strategic, growth and economic goals should already be defined by other business development strategies, so those can be transferred to the gap analysis with ease.

Some of the “softer” goals can be a bit tougher to set, as some parameters are not necessarily goals which can be measured by KPIs you are used to work with.
Those could include:

• Employee satisfaction
• Employee development
• Employee health
• Transparency
• Public perception

What is important when defining goals is as always that they must be; specific, measurable and delineated.

When talking about compliance, the goals are usually somewhat easy to define, as they are defined for you (based on law texts and court rulings).

Fourth stage – The gap

At the fourth stage you describe and compare the data you collected from the analysis and your goals.

When you overlay the two, the area separating the current state and future state is the gap.

The description of the gap should outline what constitutes the gap and the factors which contribute to it.

You cannot succeed by fighting your way towards your goals alone, you need to get everybody onboard and help in the day-to-day operation of your company.
So to close the gap, it is important that you describe the gap in clear, specific and objective terms so it becomes easier to work with and understand for everybody in the organisation.

The gap can be represented in different ways.
One of the most used methods is drawing a graph for both current and future state the overlaying those to help visualise how big the gap is.
Different ways of representing the gap visually, could be using; indexes or % in a red, yellow and green range or smileys.

How can Glavind IT help?

We can assist you in doing a full gap analysis from a GDPR compliance point of view.

With our experience, we can help you identify the areas of interest and be the outside unbiased council you need to create a gap analysis that you can then work on implementing into your workflow.

With our expertise within GDPR, IT and security, we can provide you with efficient and actionable solutions to reach your desired level of compliance.

We offer:

• Help you do the GDPR gap analysis
• Interview management and employees
• Collect insight from documentation
• Help you brainstorm
• Be a silent observer, referring to you to give you the insight you might need
• Photograph and document what is observed
• Practical implementation of workflows and technologies to help you bridge the gap

All this is of course done under NDA and completely confidential.