International Institute for Analytics

Inquiry:

I’m charged with driving analytic strategy, starting with formalizing an enterprise analytics function. We have scattered pockets of analytic capability. How do I ease these teams into the new paradigm?

Inquiry:

We have a customer loyalty program, and we want to improve our customer lifetime value (CLV) and retention, and also move more customers toward using loyalty cards. What are some interesting techniques and frameworks that could aid our efforts?

Join Christopher Bergh as he presents the seven steps to get these groups of people working together. These seven steps contain practical, doable steps that can help you achieve data agility through DataOps. This presentation will illustrate how to make changes to big data, models, and visualizations quickly, with high quality, using the tools teams love. We synthesize techniques from DevOps, Deming, and direct experience.

Big Data and analytics are going to change in this COVID-19 era. In this Webinar, Jesse Anderson, leading expert in big data and related technologies and techniques, shares what he’s been telling his clients who call and ask, ‘Jesse, with all that’s going on what should we do now?’

Jesse explores a number of topics ranging from the implications of working from home to the tweaks that may be necessary to your current organizational models in the current economic climate.

My Immediate Response:

1. ALL HANDS ON DECK FOR OPERATIONAL REPORTING
   There will be new reporting needs and the frequency of information will need to speed up. Look for options and data that will be impacted by the current crisis. You will need to figure out how to quickly deliver information even if not perfect. Do the best you can, provide any glaring risks. Executives are starving for information. Make sure to provide the information to the most senior people first. Analytics teams can assist operations teams, data science people should even jump in as they have some of the best skills even if they are not using their modeling skills. Work with IT to pull information more quickly. Accept that you will be reporting off of sandboxes that are not production quality, get the exceptions from Risk and IT. You may need to time shift your team to earlier in the day as the executives will want things first thing when they come in if possible. Blend new data sets together to provide insights. Make sure to grab the customer feedback as even simple things like a word cloud may help.

Inquiry:

With our Agile transformation, there’s friction between IT and Analytics regarding project management responsibilities, and with the data scientists who don’t like Agile. How can we implement our Agile transformation to limit friction?

As we move rapidly toward an AI-first world, laws and regulations are not keeping pace. Laws were made to govern human interactions, and as such, the legal system is playing catch up to figure out how to oversee autonomous systems. However, even in the absence of clear laws upon which to manage responsible applications of AI and autonomous use of data, organizations must still take action against their considerable liability and risk.

Inquiry:

Headcount is currently calculated in a number of different ways, and before we can move on to more interesting HR analytics we need to reconcile the headcount numbers across the enterprise. What’s the best way to work through this initial hurdle?

Most analytics organizations at large companies do not own the entire lifecycle of their analytics applications. Instead, often-distributed analytical applications teams have to work with their partners in IT/IS organizations, as well as seek requirements, advice and consent from legal, compliance and governance functions within their organization. The essentially distributed nature of these work streams frequently results in inefficiencies or even full-on breakdowns in progressing an analytics application from proof of concept (PoC) to production. Success in distributed environments requires an overt, agreed-upon, stepwise plan along with the emotional intelligence to navigate the necessary conversations with your colleagues to build that plan.

Inquiry:

As part of our strategy for BI and self-service, we’re planning an enterprise-wide Tableau rollout to over 2000 users initially. What are best practices we should be aware of to ensure and measure success?