New Analytics Talent Assignment Billie Morris is the BI Director at Love You, a
ID: 3862166 • Letter: N
Question
New Analytics Talent Assignment
Billie Morris is the BI Director at Love You, a large manufacturer and distributor of upscale cosmetics products for women. Love You sells directly to department and beauty product specialty stores, who then sell the products to consumers. While at Love You, Billie and her staff have implemented an enterprise data warehouse, an effective reporting system, dashboards, and several analytical applications. Over the last two years, Billie has seen the hiring of people with advanced analytical skills (i.e., data scientists) into the various business units. For example, marketing hired a person with a PhD in statistics to develop forecasting models and is in the process of hiring another person with advanced skills to do social media analytics. Finance hired a PhD in econometrics to develop corporate forecasting models. People have joked that they are popping up like mushrooms after a heavy rain. The managers in these business units are very pleased with the results they are getting from the use of advanced analytics. Billie sees great value in bringing these people and skills into Love You, but is concerned that there is the need for some structure around them and their work. For example, one of them is using SAS Enterprise Miner, another one R, and a third an open-source data mining product. She knows that one product won’t meet everyone’s needs, but does everyone need a different product? The money isn’t coming out of her budget, but still …. However, she is being impacted by their needs for data. One of chewing up considerable cpu time in the warehouse and another is always requesting downloads, sometimes for data that is not easily supplied. And surely, there must be some best practices that can be shared.
Billie needs advice on how to proceed.
2. If “yes,” how should she proceed? Is she the right person to start the conversation? Who should she have the conversation with?
Explanation / Answer
Billie is the BI director and hence must start the conversation. Mentoring needs to be provided to the data scientists. Communication with various business heads must be done to come up with organization-wide strategy.
BI Director must have vision and strategy to optimize the already implemented analytical applications, reporting systems, data warehouse, etc.
Best practices in BI
1. Take stock of current BI investments. Knowing precisely what is already in the organizations and how it can be used is important.
2. Involve stakeholders: Business promoters, management and BU heads must be involved in the strategy making as BI initiatives must be aligned with the organization vision.
3. Internal training and knowledge sharing sessions can be started - let us say every Friday afternoon. Various Data Scientists can share their knowledge and compare the tools to help determine what resources from current investments can be used and which common new product can be purchased.
Each business unit can have some key user(s) who can be trained to take care of their unit requirements and implementation.
4. Agile BI roadmap can be prepared so that organization can see incremental results and give suggestions on the next deliverables.
5. Support self-service: Business units should be able to generate their required analytics done by the data scientists. BI Director should work as enabler, the details of the implementation should be carried out by business units.