Over the years, we have seen analytics professionals struggle with bringing analytics to business strategy. Almost as much, if not more than business professionals struggling to bring business strategy to analytics.When we started our journey, this was one “problem” that we wanted to keep at the centre of how we work with our clients. And so, we came up with something to adapt our approaches by, and keep learning –
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There are many familiar components here. But we started paying additional attention to four components that are absolutely essential for the business success of an analytics engagement –
- Framework quantification – While there are hundreds of business frameworks that one can adopt (value chains, process framework, P&L structures, issue trees, etc.), analytics needs to convert these frameworks into a quantified structure – something that is measurable and finite, and depends on data!
- After following the analytics pathways from hypotheses to data definitions, instead of the more academically robust structure of iterating on the problem with different approaches, business success requires a higher degree of handshaking. Hence, the need to have
- Rapid Analytics Iterations – getting the stakeholders aligned for rapid insight reviews, setting capsule sized meetings, adjusting the finer points of the analytics path, and working towards a joint outcome – are supremely important for helping the business organization consume good analytics outputs
- Business Review Plans – to drive the point further, no analytics is successful in isolation. It needs business, operations, stakeholders to take the insights and deploy them in the field. And hence, the business reviews for validation, viability testing, and adoption are more important than the r-squares or Gini coefficients of a great model. Keep time aside, and plan in advance for them.
- Framework Recalibration – Finally, it’s important to keep some room for business errors. The quantification of business framework that we started with may need to be updated frequently based on these business reviews so that the outcome is a shared and relevant one – across business and analytics teams.
We have seen some teams across organizations do it, not many. For us, this is at the core of how we approach an engagement.Want to discuss more? Write to us.
Our accelerators and products vision is to completely transform mobile analytics, right from the ability to bring alternate data to business (Algo360), to bringing robust analytics to businesses (AppSights), to bringing analytics solutions (MuSeD – micro-segmentation for individualization of app based marketing/ Predix1 – Recommendation engines for contextual recommendations) to businesses whose focus, rightly, is business. If you need putting your alternate data strategy in place, Algo360, a 360-degree view of the customer, might be the way to go. Just give us a shout, and we will happily bring you your dose of alternate data. Algo360 SDKs are easy to integrate, and our analytic data feeds generous to the point of being overwhelming.