International Institute for Analytics

Introduction In 1996, two computer science students — Larry and Sergei — were enthralled by the emerging internet. But finding anything on the undeveloped web was horribly difficult. Then came the “Aha!” discovery that academic web page citations (URLs) are a proxy for popularity. If many websites “like” the same web page, that page value is probably higher to researchers. So Larry and Sergei designed an algorithm called PageRank. It measured “link juice” — the strength between web pages. Google emerged from PageRank, web URLs and an advertising business model. This article explores the incredible value of “link juice.” Graph analysis turns the relational…

Uncorking Analytics: Moving the Wine Industry Towards Data-Driven Decisions

The wine industry is thousands of years old, and has always been based on artistry, taste, love, and romance. The culture and practices of the wine industry are deeply embedded and slow to change. But as in all industries, analytics is changing the game. Wineries can now tap into new sources of data to better understand market dynamics in countries across the globe and can better understand consumer preferences along multiple dimensions. This is impacting decisions about R&D, production, and marketing.

You Built It, But They Didn’t Come: How Human-Centered Design Increases The Value of Decision Support Tools

Too often decision support tools are developed and thrust upon users who don’t get value from them. By using a design process (also termed “design thinking”), analytics tools are developed based on understanding people’s needs, goals, and attitudes. The result is tools that are used and that create significant value.

Structured, rigorous design processes have been used to produce better places, spaces, products, services, stores, and parks. Design can certainly be used to build better analytics, software, and data products.

Mastering The Art and Science of Storytelling

Storytelling is the most powerful way to convey ideas. Stories beat statistics because they are more memorable and persuasive; we feel stories. Stories that combine the right data, narrative, and visuals can change beliefs and attitudes and get people to take action.

IIA’s 14th Analytics Symposium was held in Portland, Oregon, on March 12, 2019. This Symposium brought together leading analytics thinkers on the future of AI, data engineering, and analytics, along with analytics leaders from different industries, functions, and geographies to share insights and best practices.

This paper explores the processes and success factors for operationalizing customer analytics by drawing on the experiences of four varied financial services institutions: a large credit union, a full-service bank with a strong focus on retail customers, and two firms focused on small and growing business customers. We’ll profile each and then look across them for commonalities and lessons learned.

Inquiry:

We’ve gathered occasion-based customer segmentation data through a third-party survey firm, but now what? How we can better design and use surveys in general?

Despite there being a broad range in the types of Content Marketing campaign types, there is a very powerful common thread around generating high quality content that motivates an authentic customer response and leads to greater engagement, loyalty, sales and satisfaction.

This paper is the second in a series of focused discussions on the most interesting, cutting-edge, impactful data and analytics advances that can benefit the Operational Analytics Team in support of the Marketing Professional and partner organizations like Finance, Operations, Product Design, Project Management and Technology.

Learn strategies to motivate, coach and train the “demand” side of the analytics partnership to ask better questions, make better decisions, and do their jobs more efficiently using data and advanced analytics.