If you have ever participated in a sports team, academic team or a club, or volunteered with a group of individuals, then you experienced the power of coming together to work on a common goal. A Community of Practice (CoP) is a lot like a team-based activity, and this paper discusses how to establish a CoP within your organization and why it’s an important activity to consider as an analytics leader.

When to Consider a Catalyst:

• Is your organization or team realizing your full potential from your analytics efforts?

• Are analytics models making it to production and adding quantifiable value?

• Is leadership trusting the results from the investment you’ve made in Data Scientists, Data Wranglers and Data Engineers?

• Are internal and external customers delighted in the solutions presented, or for that matter, is it even being measured?

Complying with the Long-Duration Targeted Improvements standard presents major challenges to the business processes and information systems of insurance companies. At the same time, it offers them the opportunity to make rapid progress in modernizing those processes and systems to deliver management insight of unprecedented value. To explore the two sides of the LDTI coin, IIA interviewed Naxine Chang, FSA, MAAA, North America Insurance Strategy Head at SAS Institute.

The world of money laundering and other financial crimes – and they do span the globe – continues to reshape rapidly. The amount of money laundered is estimated at between 2 and 5 percent of global GDP. The midpoint of that range has over $3 trillion in illicit funds moving annually through the financial services industry. That’s several million dollars a minute. If the money laundering “industry” were a country, it would have the fourth or fifth largest GDP in the world…Today, continuous and sometimes radical improvement has become a business imperative. Institutions must rethink and accelerate their processes, become both more efficient and more nimble, and react faster to the changing schemes of financial crime.

Project prioritization is one of those activities that seems simple and straightforward on the surface, but scratch at it just a little and hidden complexities are quickly revealed. While there is general agreement that “good” prioritization contributes to the overall effectiveness of an analytics function, rarely is any effort taken to define “good” and map out an agreed-upon approach to get there. The obvious outcome of a prioritization process that lacks intentionality is general chaos — analytics teams are overwhelmed and expressing a need for more resources, business leaders are frustrated that their needs aren’t being met, the loudest voice often gets his or her way, and the enterprise isn’t optimizing the return on its investment in analytical talent.

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.

This is our 11th annual look toward the upcoming year. We are pleased that our annual Predictions and Priority research brief and the associated webinar have become among IIA’s most popular pieces of content of the year. This year, we’re once again augmenting each of our predictions with a specific priority for leaders to focus on as they attempt to address each prediction. As a result, each priority provides specific guidance as to how to best prepare for, and adapt to, its corresponding prediction.

From its early days in the 1970s as a pioneering discount brokerage, Charles Schwab has grown into one of the largest asset managers in the world, with over $6 trillion in client assets and 28 million brokerage accounts. A market innovator from the start, Schwab credits its continued success to its relentless commitment “to put the client first” and “to champion every client’s goals with passion and integrity.”

Cleveland Clinic is one of the nation’s premier health care institutions. With over 66,000 employees, including over 4,300 physicians and scientists, it operates 18 hospitals in Ohio, Florida and Nevada, as well as Abu Dhabi, China and U.K. Annual operating revenue is about $10 billion, and operating margin is 2.5%. As is common across the industry, financial performance is very volume sensitive, and in early 2020, patient and service volumes were in for a shock.

An analytics capability road map (ACR) defines the development of competencies and technologies over time to address known and expected business needs in a future state.