Â©2015 Copyright Fractal Analytics, Inc, all rights reserved

Transcription

©2015 Copyright Fractal Analytics, Inc, all rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary Information of Fractal Analytics Inc. Fractal is a registered trademark of Fractal Analytics Limited.
Selecting the right analytics partner
Introduction
With the explosion of analytics (poised to reach over $59B by 2018) and
widely publicized lack of analytics talent (McKinsey report estimates that by
2018, about 140,000 to 190,000 big data jobs will be unfilled due to a lack of
applicants with expertise and experience), many enterprise organizations—
from IT to Marketing—are turning to analytics service providers for help.
Leaders seeking to build a competitive advantage, as well as drive their
personal career development, are now asking how to evaluate and select the
right analytics partner. This decision can’t be made lightly as the
consequences can easily make or break a critical initiative, or career.
Analytics service providers range from tiny niche boutiques, to midsized
established consulting firms, to massive organizations embedded inside
larger consulting or platform providers. Offerings range from single point
solutions or projects, specialty industry expertise or retained teams with
broad and/or deep expertise.
Which provider you select depends on the following factors:
1) The complexity of your business problem(s)
2) The nature of the desired solution
3) How you are currently addressing the issue
4) The depth and level of service desired
IDC’s Worldwide Business Analytics Software 2014–2018 Forecast and 2013 Vendor Shares
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=249926
2011 McKInsey report – Big data: The next frontier for competition
http://www.mckinsey.com/features/big_data
©2015 Fractal Analytics, Inc., all rights reserved | Confidential
Contents
• Analytics provider landscape ---------------------------------------------------
1
• Evaluating an analytics partner ------------------------------------------------
2
•
Problem requirements ---------------------------------------------------
3
•
Current approach ----------------------------------------------------------
5
•
Solution requirements ----------------------------------------------------
7
•
Provider requirements ---------------------------------------------------
9
• Conclusion ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
12
• Author ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13
• About Fractal Analytics -----------------------------------------------------------
14
Analytics Provider
Landscape
1
Before you can evaluate an analytics partner, you need to understand the
types of providers that offer analytical services and what they offer. The most
common examples of analytics service providers are described in the chart
below. You will want to consider a number of factors when selecting the type
of partner.
If you have the budget and well-trained analytics team, you may opt to work
with a management consulting firm to create a roadmap for your internal
team to build the solution. If you want to limit your focus to solve one specific
issue and don’t need to fit your specific decision process, then an out of the
box point solution provider may work well for you.
If you want a strategic partner for the long haul who will build and
operationalize analytics over an enterprise wide roadmap, then a pure-play
provider could be your best bet.
Analytics provider landscape
Description
Pure play analytics
providers
Broad range of flexible and customized analytics services or products
Platform providers
Analytics services augment hardware/software sales
Point solution providers
Solve one specific problem- often designed for a specific industry; typically one size
fits all
Management
consultants
Business consulting with focus on strategy- ‘what’ to do with limited support to build
or implement
In-house analytics
Internal teams with institutional knowledge
A wide range of companies offer analytics services to suit any situation.
Evaluating an
Analytics Provider
2
Once you’ve decided the type of analytics engagement you seek, and
selected the kind of provider, there are a number of evaluation criteria you
can apply to find the right analytics partner for your initiatives.
These are the selected criteria you might want to consider when evaluating
analytics providers.
Analytics provider landscape
Key considerations
Problem
requirements
•
Degree of
•
complexity
•
•
Current analytics
•
sophistication
Provider
requirements
Desired analytics
•
Capabilities
sophistication
•
Team structure
•
Engagement
Degree of
•
Types of data
•
Innovation
experience
•
Data sources
•
Scale tradeoffs
Organizational
•
Industry and
•
Customization
•
Process
problem expertise
•
Data security
•
Skills and training
•
Implementation
•
Culture
•
Operationalizing
•
Results
scope
•
Solution
requirements
Current approach
Timing
Finding the right analytics partner requires many considerations across several dimensions
approach
3
Problem requirements
Is your problem well-defined or ambiguous? Your answer will determine the
solution approach and depth of problem-solving experience you will need
when working with your analytics provider.
The types of considerations when evaluating your analytics provider include:
•
Degree of complexity – If your initiative is simple and
straightforward, you can look for a simple and out of the box
solution. If your initiative is massively complex, then consider a
broadly experienced provider with consulting skills that can help you
navigate your organization’s processes to define the problem, gain
stakeholder buy-in, build a solution, and collaborate across
departments and other providers to pilot and implement an
enterprise-wide approach.
•
Degree of experience – If your organization has a lot of experience
solving a similar issue, you probably won’t need as much consulting
or implementation support. You may opt to select a provider to
manage the nuts and bolts to develop the analytics and hand off to
your internal teams to integrate the solution into your existing
environment.
If you are looking to address a new approach, you may want more
help defining the problem as well as help you define how the
solution will be operationalized within existing decision processes, or
define and implement a new process.
4
•
Organizational scope – Where you seek to address a single
department’s needs, you may find a point solution fits the bill. A large
enterprise-wide initiative requires careful consideration and planning
of the end-to-end process for a wide range of user needs. In this
case, you may opt for a full service provider who will partner with you
and your stakeholders to ensure the solution is optimized to support
each business user’s needs.
•
Timing – When you need to address a temporary or periodic issue,
consider a point solution or provider who can deliver a specific
project. Where you have many short-term projects or decision
processes that need to be updated regularly, consider partnering with
a provider who can streamline processes for speed and efficiency
and deliver analytics on a regular schedule.
Example questions or proof you should ask from candidate providers:
1. “What approach do you use to collaborate on problem definition?”
2. “How do you propose delivering accurate forecasts on a monthly basis?”
3. “What experience do you have scaling an enterprise-wide analytics program?”
5
Current approach
How extensive are your current analytics and Big Data capabilities? Your
answer will determine the gaps your analytics partner needs to fill to augment
your current approach.
•
Current analytics sophistication – Whether you seek to implement
visual story-telling or advanced analytics, consider any gaps within
your internal team or current providers to sufficiently generate the
depth of insights or analytical rigor required to meet your needs. You
may need support building the infrastructure to assess or pilot
analytics or you may need to acquire to leverage a partner that has
experience with licensed enterprise tools such as reporting and data
discovery, or modelling software.
•
Types of data – Data comes in many types of forms so identify gaps
in your team’s ability to manage and process the size and types of
structured, unstructured, or streaming data you have. If your team
has less experience with unstructured or large-scale data, your
provider should demonstrate they can fill the gaps.
•
Data sources – In addition to different forms, the more robust
solutions require a combination of data across internal and external
sources. Many analytics initiatives require working with new data
sources so your analytics partner will likely need to have experience
organizing, cleansing, integrating and interpreting different data
formats across 3rd party aggregators that your team may not yet be
familiar with.
6
•
Industry and problem expertise – If your internal team has a lot of
institutional knowledge on how your organization and industry does
business, you may opt for a more generic or industry-specific
solution provider and expect to coach them to define the solution
and user requirements. Where you lack in-house industry expertise,
you should consider a consulting-oriented partner to collaborate and
guide you through the problem and solution definition, as well as
help you build the implementation roadmap.
1. “Can you demonstrate expertise in the range and depth of my internal and external data?”
2. “What experience do you have building analytics with ABC data aggregator, customer and
social media data?”
3. “Can you explain how we could automate data preparation to allocate more time in model
building and insights?”
7
Solution requirements
The solution you need will depend on the type of analytics you need to build,
how they will be operationalized and whether you need ongoing support.
•
Desired analytics sophistication – Analytics can generate
substantial value in many ways. Consider whether you want to
advance the adoption of analytics in your organization by
automating simple business intelligence, or take the plunge and shift
to advanced analytics offered by machine learning and artificial
intelligence.
•
Innovation – Where you seek a proven approach, you may opt to
find an out of box solution or a pre-configured approach that can be
quickly tailored to the way you do business. If your goal is to crush
your competition through innovation, you need to be more
adventurous, and push the envelope to partner with a provider with
a lot of experience building and implementing a bleeding edge
approach.
•
Scale tradeoffs – Driving value through analytics can be
accomplished along different dimensions. You may opt to focus on
driving faster and consistent decisions and tradeoff accuracy initially
and then refine as you go. Or, you may choose to keep the scope
limited with a pilot and then scale across business units and
countries. Either way, your analytics partner should have experience
developing an approach that allows you to make these tradeoffs and
be flexible in refining their approach until your vision is fully realized.
8
•
Customization – In some cases what you need is readily available
out of the box, and in other cases your organization needs a solution
that is tailored or completely customized to specific business users,
customers or decision processes. Consider the experience your
analytics provider has in delivering the degree of customization
required on a timeline and reliable basis.
•
Data security – Many companies are required to comply with local
and regional regulations where data security and privacy are
paramount to safeguard proprietary and customer data. Your
analytics partner should be able to demonstrate they are able to
meet your data management and security protocols and certification
requirements.
•
Implementation – Great analytics cannot generate value if they
aren’t implemented and integrated throughout your decision
processes. Your analytics provider should have experience
connecting with your platforms, data connections, and decision
processes.
•
Operationalizing – In addition to ensuring analytics are
implemented, they need to be developed and delivered in way that
supports the way users make decisions. Analytics can be very
sophisticated and complex in their development but business users
need analytics to be delivered simply. This means your analytics
provider should have capabilities in developing business rules,
visual storytelling, and optimization flows.
1. “Can you demonstrate expertise in building and operationalizing machine learning?”
2. “What experience do you have complying with xyz regulatory requirements?”
3. “How do you deliver analytics optimized for the way business people make decisions?”
9
Provider requirements
Once you have defined the problems you want solved, identified gaps in your
current approach, and set the parameters of your desired solution, you are
prepared to define the type of partnership that will best fit your needs. Are
you seeking a short-term project solution or a long-term partnership that will
scale and position you and your enterprise-wide initiatives for highly visible
success?
•
Problem-solving capabilities – Your analytics partner should be
able to prove that their capabilities are aligned to your solution
requirements as defined in the previous section such as: advanced
analytics, ability to scale with the right tradeoffs, support of desired
customization, and operationalizing analytics for a range of business
users. Consider the experience you need to fill in and proofs your
provider can share for data management, insight development,
predictive modeling, machine learning, automation, visual storytelling, business rules, or systems integration.
•
Industry experience – When you face a challenge that is similar to
what others face in your industry, or requires substantial industry
expertise, look for a provider with a lot of experience developing
solutions to address the same types of issues. When you want to
break out from your competitors to truly innovate, you want to look
for an analytics partner with a range of experience in other
industries to cross-pollinate leading edge thinking from other
industries.
•
Team structure – Where you seek a team of analytics
professionals, make sure they understand how to structure a team
of analysts, consultants, data scientists, and Big Data engineers, in
a flexible way that quickly adapts to your analytics roadmap.
10
•
Engagement approach – Where you have large-scale and longterm initiatives, consider a strategic partnership with a retained team
who can tailor their engagement approach and scale with you. In
this case, your provider should have experience collaborating and
engaging executives, business users and technology organizations.
For short-term or time bound projects, consider a partner who can
deliver an out of the box solution quickly and efficiently.
•
Process – When evaluating analytics providers, consider their
approach to building and improving processes throughout the
engagement. Your provider should be able to define how they work
with you to define a problem, gather solution requirements, how they
define and manage milestones, their approach to resolving
outstanding problems, and how they measure client satisfaction.
•
Skills and training – When working with analytics providers on a
long-term basis, you want a team of well-trained professionals that
have a strong penchant toward continuous education to hone
consulting skills and keep pace with the latest analytical techniques
and tools.
•
Culture – Business is often personal and your initiative rides on how
well your analytics partner complements your values and work-style.
In most cases you want to ensure your provider is flexible enough to
shift with changing priorities, is reliable and supportive, and has a
strong client service orientation to go the extra mile when you need
it. Your provider should be open and candid about what they can
realistically do and when.
11
•
Results –Ultimately, it’s results that count. Your analytics provider
should be able to demonstrate case study examples of impact, insight,
and innovation delivered.
And of course, you will want references and a check for ethical business
practices. Some companies seek business at any cost and the sooner you
know you can trust your provider, the better. Test your provider with hard
questions that challenge their integrity and run for the hills if outright lie or
promise the moon. This wrong choice can dearly cost you and your company.
1. “What can you tell me about your employee engagement and how you attract, train and retain
the best talent?”
2. “How would you structure your delivery team to support our needs as we evolve?”
3. “Can you share case study examples where you delivered insights, impact and innovation?”
Conclusion
12
Market leading companies recognize that analytics is now an imperative to
forge lasting relationships with their customers, employees and suppliers.
Embracing analytics is the key to driving corporate success as well as
individual leadership in today’s Big Data world.
How you choose the right partner depends on:
1) The complexity of your business problem(s)
2) The nature of the desired solution
3) How you are currently addressing the issue
4) The depth and level of service desired
Site Visit
The best way to learn about your analytics partner is to conduct a site visit.
You should meet people in different roles and should learn a lot about their
culture and how they run their business. Plan a full day and be sure to ask
about their vision, management and people philosophies, data management
and security, and how they work behind the scenes to support you. They
should be open and transparent, allowing you to meet people who do the
work.
Apply these tips to evaluate your options and select the right analytics partner
to propel your initiative and career.
Author
13
Careen Foster is the Chief Marketing Officer at Fractal Analytics and leads
Corporate Marketing to raise awareness of Fractal Analytics brand as a
leading provider of business analytics. Throughout her career, she has been
on the forefront of Big Data analytics space as the head of product
management and partner marketing at FICO’s Scores division (Fair Isaac),
and product management and operations for risk management solutions at
TRW (now Experian).
Careen Foster
Chief Marketing Officer
Fractal Analytics
Careen holds an MBA from the University of California, Irvine, Paul Merage
School of Business and a Bachelors in Psychology, from the University of
California, Irvine.
Her analytics interests are to shape the future of human evolution by enabling
the global mind to enable new ‘senses’ such as virtual telepathy and
telekinesis by connecting people through data, technology, and analytics.
About
Fractal Analytics
14
Fractal Analytics is a global analytics firm that serves Fortune 500 companies
to gain a competitive advantage by providing them a deep understanding of
consumers and tools to improve business efficiency. Producing accelerated
analytics that generate data driven decisions, Fractal Analytics delivers
insight, innovation and impact through predictive analytics and visual storytelling.
Fractal Analytics was founded in 2000 and has 800 people in 13 offices
around the world serving clients in over 100 countries.
The company has earned recognition by industry analysts and has been
named one of the top five “Cool Vendors in Analytics” by research advisor
Gartner. Fractal Analytics has also been recognized for its rapid growth, being
ranked on the exclusive Inc. 5000 list for the past three years and also being
named among the USPAACC’s Fast 50 Asian-American owned businesses
for the past two years.
Learn more at www.fractalanalytics.com
For more information, contact us at:
+1 650 378 1284
[email protected]
Follow us:

Â©2015 Copyright Fractal Analytics, Inc, all rights reserved

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