Shivanker Kumar for class of Mar 14th 2015

WHAT IT MEANS TO PUT ANALYTICS AT WORK

An IT company’s marketing manager reports to his Vice president that all 12 seminars across the states were successful and they got full participants in all of these. This doesn't state much about how successful was the seminar. VP asks below questions to understand how successful the seminars were

a.       How many attendees were existing customers and how many were prospects?

b.      Were there attendees from every customer within the geographic area?

c.       Which attendees were high growth prospects?

d.      How many attendees also attended company’s annual conference?

This brings Analytics in picture; more such questions are asked more is the need for company to analyse data.

Some benefits of Being Analytical

a.       Help manage and steer the business in turbulent times.

b.      Know what is really working. It is a desired change in business outcomes or random statistical fluctuations.

c.       Leverage previous investments in IT and information to get more insight, faster execution and more business values in many business processes.

d.      Cut costs to improve efficiency.

e.      Manage risks by applying greater regulatory oversight.

f.        Anticipate changes in market conditions.

g.       Have a basis for improving decisions over time.

Analytics – “The use of analysis, data and systematic reasoning to make decisions.”

Key questions addressed by analytics. All questions what is answered by analytics are organized across two dimensions:

Time frame – Are we looking at the past, present, or future?

Innovation – Are we working with known information or gaining new insight?

	Paste	Present	Future
Information	What happened? (Reporting)	What is happening now? (Alerts)	What will happen? (Extrapolation)
Insight	How and why did it happen? (Modeling, experimental design)	What is the next best action? (Recommendations)	What’s the best/worst can happen? (Predictions, Optimization, simulation)

Analytics for rest of us – Not all the companies want to become analytical competitors rather they want to more towards analytical maturity. They believe that making decision on facts and analytics is beneficial, but they do not necessarily want to build their companies and value propositions around doing so.  

Time to put Analytics to work – Most companies today have massive amount of data at their disposal, the data may come from transaction-oriented applications such as ERP systems software vendors like SAP and ORACLE, scanner data in retail environments, customers loyalty programs, financial transactions, or clickstream data from customers web activity(eBay does a lot)

Analytics application – Analytics can help transform just about any part of your business or organization. Many organizations start where they make their money – in customer relationships. Segmentation or customers, identifying their behaviour, predict their needs and wants and offering fitting products and promotions. Also helps to identify risk of customers’ attrition and intervene to try to keep them.

Analytics not practical in below situation –

a.       When there is no time, decision needs to be made faster.

b.      When there is no precedent, we can still do some analysis on random data sample.

c.       When history is misleading.

d.      When the decision maker has considerable experience.

e.      When the variable can’t be measured.

Typical decision making errors

Logical errors

a.       Not asking the right question

b.      Making incorrect assumptions and failing to test them

c.       Using analytics to justify what you want to do

d.      Failing to take the time to understand all the alternatives or interpret the data correctly

Process errors

a.       Making careless mistakes like transposed numbers or mistake in a model

b.      Failing to consider analysis and insights in decisions

c.       Failing to consider alternative seriously

d.      Using incorrect or insufficient decision making criteria

e.      Gathering data or completing analysis too late to be of any use

f.        Postponing decision because you are dissatisfied with the data and analysis you have already done

Analytics – Combination of Art and Science  - Analytics will continue to be critical in financial services and all other industries, so the best decision makers will be those who combine the science of quantitative analysis with arts of sound reasoning. Such arts comes from experience, conservative judgement, and the savvy to question and push back on assumptions that do not make sense.

Why Do Some Clocks Use Roman Numeral IIII as opposed to IV?

Out of various explanations available below makes more sense visually and logically.

Reason to use IIII is that it creates more visual symmetry with the VIII opposite it on the clock face than IV does. Using IIII also means that only I is seen the first four hour markings on it, V is only seen in the next four markings, and X is seen only in the last four markings, creating radial symmetry.