International Institute for Analytics

Procurement Integrity (PI) represents a broader problem and bigger opportunity than most businesses recognize. Comprehensive PI programs continuously validate purchasing transactions, using data and analytics to trace patterns, spot anomalies, and reduce fraud, waste, and abuse. The problems uncovered range from occasional opportunistic fraud to ongoing organized fraud, from duplicate invoices and other improper payments to regular kickbacks, from conflicts of interest to ongoing collusion with suppliers. Continuous monitoring of anomalies in procurement and supplier due diligence processes reveal potential problems, including data issues and process breaches, and help focus the efforts of audit and other investigative staff.

Inquiry:

How can we measure the lift from coupons used and what’s the best way to deploy the models to do it? We know we have lift coming in from various combinations of promotions, but we need a more granular view. Unfortunately, we don’t have access to web data, although we can track the coupons used in our brick-and-mortar stores. What do you think?

Inquiry:

How do other companies perform A/B testing at scale for their mobile apps? We’d like to work on optimizing user experience performance.

Inquiry:

We have a small, centralized data science team that performs machine learning (ML) analysis for marketing insights into our various brands. Our data scientists are overwhelmed with their workloads. Do you have any organizational or Azure architectural tips that could help us to help them? Also, for marketing activities, how can we improve our individual targeting?

Inquiry:

We have a wide variety of systems that create and store customer data. What’s the best way to bring these records together to improve the customer experience?

Response:

Each year, the International Institute for Analytics ends the year with a look at the latest analytics trends and the most pressing analytics challenges currently facing organizations. Our predictions are based upon our day-to-day work supporting and advising analytics leaders and organizations. We take advantage of the breadth of expertise and cross-industry perspectives we encounter every day from our clients, partners, and members of the IIA expert network. This is our 10th annual look toward the upcoming year, and our annual Predictions and Priority research brief and the associated webinar have become among IIA’s most popular content of the year. This year, we’ve stuck with our approach of augmenting each of our predictions with a specific priority for leaders to focus on as they attempt to address that prediction. As a result, each priority provides specific guidance as to how to best prepare for, and adapt to, its corresponding prediction.

Inquiry:

We’re charged with expanding our customer data program. We have an initial framework for the platform itself, but now we need to think about our product offerings and the skills set required so we can build out the program. Do you have any advice?

Inquiry:

We’re in the process of starting a customer data program that will include real-time data from marketing campaigns and digital activities. What is the best way to get started?

The vast majority of people building analytics and data science processes have every intention of being good and ethical. As a result, most potentially unethical and evil processes arise in situations where that wasn’t the intention. The problem is typically that proper focus and governance is not in place to keep analytics and data science processes on the side of good. On top of that, what is good and what is evil isn’t nearly as clear cut as we’d wish it to be.

The data warehouse revolution began in 1991 when Bill Inmon published Building the Data Warehouse. Inmon observed, early in that book, that every organization has a naturally occurring information economy, and that most naturally occurring information economies were inefficient, duplicative and prone to produce suboptimal decisions.