{"id":13828,"date":"2015-04-24T11:58:04","date_gmt":"2015-04-24T11:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.greenpages.com\/?p=5066"},"modified":"2015-04-24T11:58:04","modified_gmt":"2015-04-24T11:58:04","slug":"from-data-collection-and-analysis-to-business-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/from-data-collection-and-analysis-to-business-action\/","title":{"rendered":"From Data Collection and Analysis to Business Action"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.greenpages.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Azmi-CIO-Headshot.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-4906\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.greenpages.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Azmi-CIO-Headshot.png\" alt=\"Data Collection and Analysis\" width=\"120\" height=\"96\" \/><\/a>Guest post from Azmi Jafarey.\u00a0Azmi is an IT leader with over 25 years of experience in\u00a0IT innovation.\u00a0He was CIO at Ipswitch,, Inc. for the last nine years, responsible for operations, infrastructure, business apps and\u00a0BI.\u00a0In 2013, he was named\u00a0CIO of the year by Boston Business Journal and Mass High Tech.\u00a0You can hear more from Azmi on his blog: <a title=\"hitechcio\" href=\"http:\/\/hitechcio.com\/\" >http:\/\/hitechcio.com\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Here is a progression that most businesses experience in the data arena. <span id=\"more-5066\"><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You go from no data or bad data to \u201cbetter\u201d data.<\/li>\n<li>You start having reports regularly show up in your mailbox.<\/li>\n<li>The reports go from being just tables to showing trend lines.<\/li>\n<li>You evolve to dashboards that bring together data from many sources.<\/li>\n<li>You fork into sets of operational and strategic reports and dashboards, KPIs driven, with drill down.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>By this point, you have Operational Data Stores (ODSs), data warehouses, a keen sense of the need for Master Data, keeping all systems in synch and an appreciation of defined data dictionaries.\u00a0 You expect data from all functions to \u201ctie together\u201d with absolute surety \u2013 and when it does not, it is usually traced to having a different understanding of data sources, or data definitions.\u00a0 But you are there, feeling good about being \u201cdata driven\u201d, even as you suspect that that last huge data clean-up effort may already be losing its purity to the expediency of daily operations.\u00a0 How?\u00a0 Well, someone just created a duplicate Opportunity in your CRM, rather than bother to look up if one exists.\u00a0 Another person changed a contact\u2019s address locally, rather than in a Master.\u00a0 And so it goes.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, for most businesses \u201cdata-driven\u201d stops at \u201cnow you have the numbers\u201d &#8212; an end in itself.\u00a0 At its worst, reports become brochure-ware, a travel guide for the business that is \u201cinteresting\u201d and mainly used to confirm one\u2019s suspicions and biases.\u00a0 Also, at its worst, many \u201cfollowed\u201d KPIs consume enormous amounts of time and effort to come up with a number, paint it green, yellow or red when compared to a target, and then these act mainly as trigger points for meetings rather than <em>measured<\/em> response.<\/p>\n<p>I have nothing against meetings.\u00a0 I am just anxious for the business mindset to go beyond \u201cdescriptive\u201d and \u201cpredictive\u201d analytics to \u201cprescriptive\u201d analytics.\u00a0\u00a0 Thus for Sales we seem to stop at \u201cpredictive\u201d \u2013 forecasts are the holy grail, a look into the future, couched in probability percentages.\u00a0 Forecasts are indeed very useful and get reacted to.\u00a0 It is just that it is a reaction whose direction or magnitude are usually delinked from any <em>explicit<\/em> model.\u00a0 In today\u2019s world instinct cannot continue to trump analysis.\u00a0 And analysis is meaningful only in the context of suggesting specific action, tied to business results as <em>expected<\/em> outcomes.\u00a0 The data must not only punt the can down the road \u2013 it must tell you exactly how hard and in which direction to punt.\u00a0 And the result must be measured for the next round to follow.<\/p>\n<p>One of the really interesting things about data modeling, predictive and prescriptive analytics is that for all three the starting point is precisely the same data.\u00a0 After all, that is what you know and have.\u00a0\u00a0 The difference is the <em>effort to model<\/em> and the feedback loop where measurable action and measured consequence can be used to refine action and hence outcomes.\u00a0 Part of the problem is also that the paradigm in today\u2019s business world is for leaders who provide direction on actions to be farthest from those who know data well.\u00a0 Without personal exploration of relevant data, you revert to an iterative back-and-forth requesting new data formats from others.\u00a0 The time to search for such \u201cinsight\u201d can be dramatically shortened by committing to modeling and measuring results from the get go.\u00a0 Bad models can be improved.\u00a0 But lacking one is to be adrift.<\/p>\n<p>Before you begin to wonder \u201cIs the next step Big Data?\u00a0 Should we be thinking of getting a Data Scientist?\u201d start with the basics: training on analytics, with a commitment to model.\u00a0 Then use the model and refine.<\/p>\n<div class=\"feedflare\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/JourneyToTheCloud?a=QeHOg7zXGJg:JYn1czLjp-A:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/JourneyToTheCloud?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/JourneyToTheCloud?a=QeHOg7zXGJg:JYn1czLjp-A:-BTjWOF_DHI\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/JourneyToTheCloud?i=QeHOg7zXGJg:JYn1czLjp-A:-BTjWOF_DHI\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/JourneyToTheCloud?a=QeHOg7zXGJg:JYn1czLjp-A:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/JourneyToTheCloud?i=QeHOg7zXGJg:JYn1czLjp-A:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/JourneyToTheCloud?a=QeHOg7zXGJg:JYn1czLjp-A:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/JourneyToTheCloud?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/JourneyToTheCloud\/~4\/QeHOg7zXGJg\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" alt=\"\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Guest post from Azmi Jafarey.&nbsp;Azmi is an IT leader with over 25 years of experience in&nbsp;IT innovation.&nbsp;He was CIO at Ipswitch,, Inc. for the last nine years, responsible for operations, infrastructure, business apps and&nbsp;BI.&nbsp;In 2013, he was named&nbsp;CIO of the year by Boston Business Journal and Mass High Tech.&nbsp;You can hear more from Azmi on&hellip;<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.greenpages.com\/miscellaneous-it\/from-data-collection-and-analysis-to-business-action\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2397,181],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data-analytics","category-miscellaneous-it"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13828"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13829,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13828\/revisions\/13829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}