Author: DMAIPH

Analytics Expert and President & Founder of DMAI.

Learnings from a friend’s “Elements of a Losing Culture”

http://fortune100coach.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/elements-of-a-losing-culture/#comment-202

I just read my good friend and mentor Bjorn’s blog post and it made me think about how closely tied a business culture is to the analytics used in that business. Bjorn posted, “Success leaves clues and so does its opposite. Reality checks are important so we can tell where we are and properly assess what needs to be done. When we can’t seem to find the clues indicating a successful culture it’s time to look for its opposite.”

Let’s look at that comment from an analyst’s prospective. One of the clues I look for in a successful organization is an understanding of how decisions are made. Are they top down? Are the inclusive? And most importantly to me, how much data is analyzed prior to making decisions. For the most part great companies make great decisions and this feeds a successful and healthy culture. When decisions are made off the cuff, with little input from the ranks and without the benefit of good data… you get a recipe for a losing culture.

Bjorn mentions several other indicators of a Losing Culture. I want to add some data driven perspectives to them as well.

1. Lack of clear target, vision, etc. Having good metrics to monitor progress. Setting goals and then reporting and communicating them. There are key ways you can measure if a business has a healthy focus.

2. Lack of alignment. People don’t know how to compare themselves or even worse improve themselves. There is no sense of the big picture and little effort to work across business lines or help other teams. You need a lot of visualization of data and analysis to show how it all fits together. Dashboards and internal web sites, using visualizations like info graphics and data visuals can help people feel aligned and give them a sense of where they fit in.

3. Lack of authenticity. Know if your customers care. Knowing if your employees care about your customers and each other. Knowing if you stack up well with the competition. Knowing what about your business causes others pain and what causes satisfaction. Using surveys, focus groups and other tools to gather feedback will help your business be authentic to your customers and your employees. You cant really have loyal and engaged customers if you don’t come across to them as authentic.

To learn more about Bjorn and his consulting business, you can follow him here: http://fortune100coach.wordpress.com/

Big Data and Analytics: How to avoid going the way of the Dinosaur!

jurassic_parkhttp://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130822181033-251829763-big-data-blurring-risk-and-uncertainty

“More than 99% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. The causes of species extinction include the predictable — predator-prey relationships, for example — to the unpredictable, such as an asteroid collision. Similarly, 90% of Fortune 500 companies since 1955 no longer exist. Businesses, like species, face perils that range from identifiable risks to true uncertainty or unknowns. Uncertainties pose unknowable and hence unmanageable threats. Risks, however, can be explicitly accepted, avoided, or transferred. Organizations that are fully exploiting big data are actively uncovering and converting uncertainty into known risk as well as addressing and exploiting competitive vulnerabilities.”

The following three big-data analytics keys are critical to supporting a proper understanding of risk versus uncertainty — and ultimately leveraging risk for competitive advantage.

1. Healthy Analytics Culture. The first key to using big data analytics to survive is empowering business owners and leaders with the ability to use data to drive decision-making. There is so much data to analyze, so using cutting edge analytics tools and employing curious and proactive analytical professionals help maintain a healthy culture.

2. Segmenting Risks. The second key is know how to identify and classify risk. When you come across a risk in your business you have to assign the right team or person to investigate the risk. To understand if it should be accepted, avoided or somehow transferred. Accepting risks means you have to monitor it and make sure its controllable. Avoided risks require changes in strategy or process, often needing people to lead a new way to do things. Transferring the risk means you need to trade-off things or hiring someone else to take the risk from you. Big Data analytics allow you to investigate, assess and segment risks.

3. Accept, Avoid or Transfer Risks. Once you have decided how to segment risk, then you need to take action. You need to set up a mitigation strategy, you need to monitor the risk and you be capable of re-segmenting the risk if it changes.

Businesses that can access their big data, that can analysis it and that use it to drive decision-making will survive. Ones that do not will go out of business, be acquired or just go the way of the dinosaurs.

An Analyst’s Take on Five Simple Steps to Digital Marketing

555293_579974032048154_626723703_nMy good friend and trusted business partner, Boom san Agustin recently shared an info graphic on Facebook about the five key steps to marketing a business online. As you can see it a simple, yet powerful plan to get your business in front of not only a bigger audience, but a more engaged audience.

Besides actually following this recipe step by step, I thought it also important to add what kind of analytics you should have behind each of the steps.

1. Design and launch a website to establish your brand. I see two-way to do some solid analysis here before taking step one.

Frist, do an assessment of what you want to do with your site. There are hundreds of free or inexpensive tools to design and launch a web presence. It’s easy to through a site, but how much will it cost long-term, who will maintain it, do you plan on processing transactions thru the site? Your website should be at the center of your strategic plan and should be a living part of your business.

Second, unless you use a hosting service that provides analytics internally, look into google analytics. Its is one of the most powerful analytics tools out there. Make sure your hosting service is compatible as the free web site analytics tools Google offers are quite powerful. You need to pay a lot of attention to the metrics behind your site. What pages aren’t getting the traffic you suspected? Where do browser spend the most time? Which pages do they leave your site from?

2. Create a blog.

Ideally you can combine the two so your website and your blog are either the same or are easily connected so you don’t have to double your workload in sharing content. Again, I strongly suggest you look for hosting sites and/or blog sites that have built-in analytics. WordPress has some very strong analytics tools built into the free blog hosting site. You want to quickly and easily know what posts are the ones that generate the most engagement.

3. Get followers.

Having easy ways to get followers is important. Most web site and blog site platform have widgets that allow you to get followers via Twitter, Facebook, etc. Maximize these. And then set up a strategy. Try and post your blog on certain sites at certain times. For example if you target market for your business is students.. .then posting your blog during the middle of the school day is not a good plan. Instead set up your posts (either manually or with an auto post feature) to make sure the content is delivered when they are most often online… late afternoon or early evening.

4. Select Media.

You need to really think again about who your market is and what media they use the most. There are again very powerful analytics tools built-in to Facebook, YouTube, etc that will tell you the demographics of who is following you and who is viewing and most importantly sharing your posts. Your social media sites should complement each other and you can use social media management tools like Hootsuite to make sure your message is consistent.

5. Engage your community.

This is where you need to really pay attention to the data. You can easily see which types of content attract the most attention. And you want to encourage feedback and sharing. Make sure you enable your followers to become your unofficial sales force or brand ambassadors by allowing them to talk about your business more than you do. And make sure you set goals to drive traffic and then offer incentives. You can really start getting a sense of your ROI (return on investment) when you have solid analytics take come from your core business users.

As you can see, having a good digital marketing strategy is one thing, but having one that is data-driven and that takes full advantage of analytics tools is 10x better!

Please follow my friend Boom and his company Our Knowledge Asia!

https://www.facebook.com/ourknowledgeasia

Analysts Can Be Leaders Too!

MSP24321b65h584fd76h9i00006996g957h01de5g6Borrowing some of this from the Blog Post “Are you an Analyst? Here is something that could impress your boss.”
August 18, 2013 4:21 pm Published by Cory Bray

“Business Intelligence tools increase the value of analyst contributions while making work more interesting.
A common strategy these days for growing companies is to hire financial, sales, or operations Analysts to help find ways to better accomplish corporate goals. The job description for these types of roles often includes some type of report design and development, analysis of these reports, and planning around the decisions to be made as opportunities are uncovered as a result of the analysis. I know numerous people who hold these rules, and most of them have one thing in common: They spend a tremendous amount of time on tasks that are not necessary given the technology available today.”

This is so very true in the Philippines. So few people with the word analyst in their title or analysis in their job description are truly empowered to be critical thinkers. They are not generally enabled to let their curiosity lose and discover things that can be significant business opportunities. Most analysts are simply left with running reports and passing these reports off to management or doing basic encoding or fixing things when they break.

Bray continues, “Many people who supervise Analysts were once analysts themselves. However, these supervisors likely worked in a different technological era, and they may not be aware of some of the ways that those long nights of building Excel models and PowerPoint presentations can be made more efficient with modern tools.
Any Analyst who spends 20+ hours a week in front of Excel, relies on IT to gather data to be analyzed, or works with tools that require any type of programming to generate simple reports should be briefed on the new wave of Business Intelligence.”

In a lot of organizations in the Philippines you still see analytics in the realm of IT and not embedded in various business lines like Marketing, HR & Recruitment, Business Development or Strategy. The end users of analytics are not the ones dreaming about what they need, creating the analysis and zeroing in on exactly what they need. Modern Business Intelligence tools like Tableau, Qlikview or Yellowfin among others, allow analysts to:
• Spend less time gathering and structuring information, which allows for more time to conduct analysis and make decisions. This crucial to enable quicker decision-making so that its timely and relevant.
• Conduct analysis that physically cannot be done in tools like Excel, which leads to more valuable insights. Excel is still the primary tool of 95% of analysis and so many insights are being missed.
• Eliminate roadblocks and minimize the need to wait for others to take action.

DMAI is leading the charge to empower analysts to be proactive. Take the initiative and get out on the cutting edge by using free tools and resources like Tableau Public or Piktochart to visual data, provide deeper analysis and lead business towards more data-driven decisions!

Follow our various social media sites and be part of the analytics revolution that will soon sweep the Philippines!

> Facebook >>> https://www.facebook.com/dmaiph
> YouTube >>> http://youtu.be/blx8IuHsmCA
> LinkedIn >>> http://ph.linkedin.com/pub/dan-meyer/4/771/675
> WordPress >>> https://dmaiph.wordpress.com/
>Twitter >>> https://twitter.com/BPOElite1

The Philippines is Going Beast Mode! 3 of 3

Philippines and ChinaSharing my thoughts on some great Bloomberg visuals my good friend Justin Calderon used in a recent story he put together.

http://investvine.com/charts-outlining-the-philippines-economic-trajectory/

Beast Mode is an American Football term for a player who singlehandedly dominates a game. This is the third of three visuals I will breakdown and comment on.

This slide is quite interesting both because of the data behind it and the significance that can be distilled from it. The data shows a truly remarkable moment in for the Philippines, if you asked 100 people (Filipinos, Chinese Americans, anyone) if they thought it was possible for the growth of the Philippines economy to match the growth rate of the Chinese economy, you’d be lucky to find 1-2 people who would believe it.

Of course you have to keep the size of the economies in mind as the Chinese economy is many times larger in total GDP than the Philippines economy. But still, it’s a remarkable achievement for an economy that has not such a lot of positive trends in many, many years.

Now for the significance of it… the fact that it surprises is where the real power is. Its and OMG moment for Filipinos to take pride in the country and to try to go even further. To push accountability within the government, to reinvest in and reinvent education, and to help their fellow countrymen to rise up and push this trend of being a new economy of significance onward and upward.

So take the three slides we have reviewed; (1) the economy of the Philippines is growing significantly faster than its ASEAN neighbors, (2) demographics favor almost unlimited potential and (3) the story of the economic growth is something that will make people stop and take notice. And that is the power of data visualization.

The Philippines is Going Beast Mode! 2 of 3

ASEAN Demographics

Sharing my thoughts on some great Bloomberg visuals my good friend Justin Calderon used in a recent story he put together.

http://investvine.com/charts-outlining-the-philippines-economic-trajectory/

Beast Mode is an American Football term for a player who singlehandedly dominates a game. This is the second of three visuals I will breakdown and comment on.

This slide tells me so much. Based on this I am convinced that its time to revamp my plans for training fresh grads in analytics. Look at how much younger the Philippines is then its neighbors! Combine this remarkable demographic datapoint with other factors like the investment being made in the BPO/Call Center industry, the education system geared to produce American style English, and the size of the talent pool.

When you do that you see what I see, an amazing opportunity to be in the middle of all the training, skill building and mentoring that will be needed to prepare this population boom for the jobs of the next 10-20 years.

In the previous post, it was noted how quickly the Philippines economy is accelerating and here you see a snapshot of the future. There are still so many potential detractors and possible hindrances ahead, so you have to pay them mind. However, its data points like that, backed up by analysis and on the ground intelligence that have me convinced its time to go back and jump in!

The Philippines is Going Beast Mode! 1 of 3

ASEAN Economies

Sharing my thoughts on some great Bloomberg visuals my good friend Justin Calderon used in a recent story he put together.
http://investvine.com/charts-outlining-the-philippines-economic-trajectory/

Beast Mode is an American Football term for a player who singlehandedly dominates a game. This is the first of three visuals I will breakdown and comment on.

Over the past couple of years I have been talking a lot about how the economy of the Philippines is quickening. The overall trajectory for the economy is rocketing ahead for several reasons including geography, history, political climate, and demographics. There are dozens of stories published all the time about why, how, and what this means for both the Filipino people, for the ASEAN countries and for the global marketplace. There is so much economic data out there, its like an analytics playground.

One of the most significant and often used economic data points is GDP (Gross Domestic Product). GDP is of course is the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time. Thanks Wikipedia for that definition.

As you can see the Philippines is the only economy of the seven countries being measured that is not only trending upward, but the trend is accelerating. If we were looking at mid season performance of a sports player being compared to other players in it’s division… we’d be saying the Philippines is in Beast Mode. Check out the YouTube video below and imagine #24 is the Philippines economy right now.

Sharing Some of My Favorite LinkedIn Groups about the Philippines

Here are some of my favorite LinkedIn Groups that relate to living in and running a business in the Philippines. I try to follow the discussions and actively post comments and new discussion several times a week. LinkedIn is an amazing tool to stay current on things important to you and your business.

Philippines Call Center Professionals – lots of good info about current trends and issues
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=2130497&trk=anet_ug_hm

EXPAT PHILIPPINES – a great place to network and learn how to deal with common challenges
http://www.linkedin.HR Philippines com/groups?home=&gid=1483687&trk=anet_ug_hm

HR Philippines – an excellent source for recruitment and HR trends and hot button topics
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=992347&trk=anet_ug_hm

Filipino Professionals for 1stWorldPhilippines.com Movement – The name Says it all!
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=21601&trk=anet_ug_hm

The Philippines Sourcing Council – A good combination of contributors
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=96615&trk=anet_ug_hm

Philippine Society for Learning and Performance – A great group of professional opinions
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=3897230&trk=anet_ug_hm

Why the Philippines? Q+A

539735_206746759470775_461235919_nRecently I received a LinkedIn message regarding my blog series about my 13 months living and setting up a business in the Philippines. The message contained some pretty good questions so I thought the best way to answer it would be to share the conversation with you.

Q: I’m always curious to hear why people have chosen the Philippines over other countries to start a business in?

A: From my perspective, the Philippines is a truly phenomenal place to be right now. I ask everyone is there any country today in a better position to make such significant and long lasting positive changes in the very fabric of the country? Being the home of some many overseas workers and their remittances, being the call center capital of the world, be positioned close to some of the biggest markets in the world and blessed with a unique connection to the United States are just some of the reasons. Its on the verge of something truly special. You can feel it where you are there. So for professional reasons that’s why I decided to move there and set up a business. There are even more personal reasons why I love the Philippines, but that’s a different question.

Q: Even given some of the press around about the difficulties with traffic, weather, corruption?

A: They are all significant challenges that can indeed hinder growth. However, I think the Philippines is being forced to evolve as a nation by some key demographics that make its growth unavoidable. The average being 23, the level of English taught and used, the culture of embracing work either coming from or going to the rest of the world. The traffic is a nightmare in Manila, but you are seeing a lot of growth in the provinces as a result. The weather is a problem, but the county is big enough and the important economic drivers are diverse enough to weather major calamities. Corruption is a huge problem, but its getting better. It is being addressed at all level of society and progress is being made. I survived getting stuck in traffic on EDSA, caught in flood waters up to my waste and forced to pay a fixer to get some things done faster and none these things lesson my confidence in the Philippines.

Q: From a business perspective, I see a growing trend in being able to provide customized types of products and services. Are niche businesses offering customized products and services viable?

A: When I compare the challenges of setting up a small business and taking your product/service to the market, its 10x easier than it is in the U.S. There challenges are very different. In the Philippines your success will depend on who you know and how your business identity is perceived. You have to but a lot more effort into making connections and making sure everyone is happy and engaged. There is a lot of bureaucracy that goes with setting up a business there so it’s key to have the right connections to smooth things out.

Q: I am looking to recruit some people to do some web design work. Is it better to look for established workers or go with college age students.

A: I tend to go with younger, less proven talent in most cases. This goes against conventional wisdom in the Philippines. I have noticed that in general Filipinos place a higher value on certifications and accomplishments than most. And the school systems push out a lot of graduates with similar training and skills sets. Conformity and coloring within the lines is expected for most white collar jobs. The more time spent in this rigid system the harder it is to find someone who thinks outside the box. So going with the whole I prefer to train a blank slate versus having to untrain someone who is already programmed. However, the flipside is they will probably need more supervision and direction then someone with experience.

Q: I would love to hear more about which things you would do differently second time around.

A: To quote one of the most quoted saying of all time… “I shall return!” And when I do I will make these three significant changes in my approach. (1) I will be more hands on with the people I hire. I will not micromanage like many do, but I will be more active in empowering and teaching successful work habits to the people on my team. (2) I will be more frugal in my expenses. I overspent a lot on things because I was charged foreigner prices. Having a Filipino negotiate things for you is key. (3) I will live more like a Filipino and less like a foreigner. By the time I left I took Jeepneys and Buses more often than taxis. I was eating more Filipino food from small vendors and avoiding high priced meals at chains in the mall. Things like that go a long way in both making you fit in a little more and saving you a lot of money.

I am always happy to share my insights and experiences. I hope that helps!