Category: Analytics Consulting

Why The Philippines?

I am often asked why leave a great job for the biggest bank in the U.S. to set up my own small call center business in the Philippines?

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To the average person that might seem like going against conventional wisdom. However to a person who is knowledge about world affairs and has some insight into the global economy, betting on a B2B solution in the Philippines, is absolutely the right thing to do.

The Philippines has been gifted with three things that will continue to propel its B2B forward economically; a youthful population, a fairly well-developed system of higher education, and its wide scale use of an American style of English.

Across the globe, many industries are coming up short when it comes to finding talent to fill jobs. This global demand for talent puts the 18-30 year old, college educated, American style English speaking Filipino in the sweet spot for future opportunities.

Business who can hire and train this population for work with businesses abroad are in the middle of a huge boom with no signs of slowing down.  That’s why I did what I did. B2B opportunities in not just the Philippines, but across Asia makes that side of the Pacific the place to be.

Mastering The Art Of Account Management

I have been thinking a lot lately about what its take manage the relationship we have with our clients.

A long time ago, I learned that to be a good account manager you need a rare combination of professional and personal characteristics, some of which can’t be taught. To me account management is the art of representing my business to clients and vice versa.

The job requires skill, advocacy, diplomacy, leadership, expectation setting, intelligence, method, heart, patience, experience, and wisdom. It is not easy and it is something I am constantly trying to improve at.

With this concept top of mind, I thought I’d share some of my tips for being an effective account manager.

  1. Under Promise and Over Deliver. I have always strived to under promise and over deliver. Most people get it wrong. They promise to something they cannot deliver and things go downhill quickly from there. Losing your client’s trust is a surefire way to doom your company.
  2. Do What They Want, Not What You Want. We often get so busy we think we have to do it the way we are doing it. Even when it’s clearly not what the client wants. This is another way to doom yourself and your business. They are paying you to do what they want, so don’t expect them to keep paying you to do what you want.
  3. Communicate Bad News Early. It is far, far better to tell you client you will be late on a deadline, or you can meet the requirement or you have to modify what you promised then it is to go silent. Not communication bad news early, or worse to communicating the bad news at all is another strike against you and your hard work, not matter what you intentions.
  4. Be the Expert. When it comes to dealing with a client, they are expecting you to know every answer, sometimes even before they ask it. They are paying you for your expertise. So you need to be the one to find problems before they are problems, fix things before they break and always have a solution at hand. If you are not an expert on what you are being paid for, they will find someone else.
  5. Always Have the Most Data. When your client tells you there is something wrong because they saw it in a report, then you know you have pretty poor analytics. You are doing the job, so you should be the one churning out the reports, championing the sharing of information and setting the agenda for the next meeting.

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That’s just a few of the things that come to mind when it comes to being a good account manager.

And just in case I need to remind anyone, and not trying to brag… but I am pretty awesome at this.

Being good at account management is without a doubt one of the key reasons I have thrived throughout my career is keeping the clients happy.

DMAIPH has successfully set up Filipino analytics teams for over a dozen U.S. based businesses. Offering both virtual and office based teams that specialize in problem solving using data, new technology and analytics techniques is our strength. Finding and empowering analytics talent is increasingly challenging, but we have it down to a science.

DMAIPH specializes in arming the Data-Driven Leader with the tools and techniques they need to build and empower an analytics centric organization. Analytics leadership requires a mastery of not just analytics skill, but also of nurturing an analytics culture. We have guided thousands of Filipino professionals to become better analytics leaders. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to discuss a uniquely tailored strategy to ensure you are the top of your game when it comes to Analytics Leadership.

IBM’s Six Ways To Use Analytics To Manage A Workforce

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ibm/2015/04/06/6-ways-to-use-analytics-to-better-manage-a-workforce/

Interesting article about how to use more analytics in areas that are traditionally data rich, but not a focus of most enterprise analytics solutions.

Right now in the BPO industry in the Philippines, two of the bullet points really got me thinking.

Using analytics in HR to predict if and when employees might leave is a pretty cool concept. Their is plenty of historical data to look at resignation and termination patterns and segment the data in various buckets to see if any meaningful patterns jump out.

This goes hand in hand with higher employee expectations for work life balance and having a strong sense of community within the work place.

Both are things that might require a lot of unstructured analytics as well… although it blurs employee privacy issues, Facebook and Twitter can be an excellent place to glean insights into employee mood and their intentions.

I am curious to see how deep analytics can go into looking at data and trying to predict employee loyalty and stickiness.

The recruitment and retention of top talent is the biggest challenge facing just about every organization. DMAIPH is a leading expert in empowering HR & Recruitment teams with analytics techniques to optimize their talent acquisition and management processes.

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DMAIPH also specializes in arming the Data-Driven Leader with the tools and techniques they need to build and empower an analytics centric organization. Analytics leadership requires a mastery of not just analytics skill, but also of nurturing an analytics culture. We have guided thousands of Filipino professionals to become better analytics leaders. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to discuss a uniquely tailored strategy to ensure you are the top of your game when it comes to Analytics Leadership.

Five Tips To Make A Great Dashboard > DMAI Analysts Master These Skills

A business dashboard allows decision-makers to better manage their business, and thus improve sales and profits. Here are five tips to make a successful business dashboard:

1) Personalize. Tailor your dashboard to the role of the user, designing it around metrics specific to the individual. Accommodate your users no matter where they are located.

2) Self-sufficient. Dashboards should guide business users to relevant insight without help from IT. Dashboards should be intuitive and provide simple access to business data using menu filters and drill-down functions. Also, users should have access to FAQs, help ­files, how-to videos, and an online user community so they can feel con­fident when using their dashboard.

3) Interactive. Dashboards are not a static experience. Users should be able to apply filters and adjust values on a chart, for example, to plan for various scenarios. They should also be able to write-back to the data source if permitted. Drill-down capabilities are particularly useful because users can delve into charts to get further details with just one click. Interactive dashboards keep users engaged and focused.

4) Dynamic. Static dashboards rely on historical data, neglect your organization’s present performance and set you up for failure, warns Forrester Research. Successful dashboards are dynamic and reflect the real-time changes of your business’ performance. They also offer ad-hoc capability so users can manipulate variables for further analysis and drill-down functionality so users can find root causes.

5) Accessible. Dashboards should be accessible from any device so users can view their data anywhere, anytime. Mobile dashboards are easy to deploy if your BI system supports web apps, which can be developed once and deployed anywhere – on any PC, smartphone, or tablets.

The bottom line is that dashboards should be analytical tools, not just pretty pictures. The ultimate measure of dashboard success is adoption. When users come to see their dashboards as indispensable, you know you’ve done well as a dashboard designer.

DMAI specializes in designing business dashboards, training staff to use them effectively and in providing staff who can build, manage and enhance business dashboards

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Five Uses For Business Dashboards > DMAI Can Build You One Or Provide You Support To Build Your Own

Research from Aberdeen Group shows the average company that uses business dashboards enjoys triple the revenue growth and double the profit growth of companies that don’t.

Why?

Because with the right dashboard:

  • Businesses make more intelligent business decisions
  • Managers have complete, real-time visibility into their organization
  • Leaders manage their business more effectively

5 Key Benefits of Business Dashboards

Business Dashboard gives business executives numerous benefits including the following:

  1. Visibility: An executive dashboard provides great visibility and insight. Decision-makers know exactly what’s going on in all aspects of their business, allowing to see connections and correlations.
  2. Continuous Improvement: One of Peter Drucker’s most famous quotes is, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Dashboards allow leaders to measure performance throughout their organization and thus improve it.
  3. Time Savings: Many executives spend countless hours logging into business systems and running reports. Conversely, the right dashboard always shows managers the latest results from each report they need. This saves precious hours each month.
  4. Plan vs. Performance: Many executive spend time creating a business plan for their organization to follow. However, that’s just the first piece to success. The second is making sure their company is performing to the plan’s expectations. Dashboards can automatically show progress towards goals from the business plan versus actual, real-time results.
  5. Employee Performance: When employees know their performance is being judged in a dashboard, and can see their results, they innately start to improve their work.

DMAI specializes in designing business dashboards, training staff to use them effectively and in providing staff who can build, manage and enhance business dashboards

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The Not So Elusive Unstructured Data – Part 2

Historically people have been talking about data within the firewall, document management or collaboration information that is not structured, such as video, photos, documents and diagrams.

However now that we are at a tipping point: There is as much value in unstructured data in terms of what customers are thinking on the web and what businesses can derive from other organizations’ data

Good Analysts know how to identify, inventory and integrate unstructured data right along side the structure business data they have always had.

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Recently, BI and warehousing suppliers have been adding support for unstructured data management to their tool sets.

Many IT organizations have built their own platforms for converting unstructured data into structured records, for example, through knowledge management systems.

And new businesses are popping up to offer unstructured data collection, storage and analysis options that are integrated into the enterprise analytics solution.

Companies who get unstructured data will have a huge competitive advantage. DMAI can give you the training, consulting and analytics talent you need to stay ahead of the pack. #GrowMoreDMAI

The Ever Elusive Unstructured Data – Part 1

Per Wikipedia, Unstructured data (or unstructured information) refers to information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, numbers, and facts as well.

This results in irregularities and ambiguities that make it difficult to understand using traditional programs as compared to data stored in fielded form in databases or annotated (semantically tagged) in documents.

As a result the traditional model of business analytics no longer works.

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Recent discussions about Big Data are showing that about 80-90% of data currently being captured by businesses is unstructured. Just two year ago it was 50% and five years ago about 20%. The boom is unstructured data storage is fundamentally changing business analytics as we know it.

Businesses across all industries are gathering and storing more and more data on a daily basis. But when it comes to assessing the benefits and challenges of big data, sometimes it is easy to overlook one key point: Most of the business information in use today does not reside in a standard relational database.

So how do we overcome these challenges?

DMAI has the answer!

#GrowMoreDMAI

Finding The Right Data To Help A Business Is The Key To Being A Great Analyst

Knowing where to go to find the data you need is one of the most important keys to being a successful analyst.

There are three basic areas where you can go to find data:

  1. Private Company Databases and sources
  2. Public Databases and sources
  3. The Internet

Each company treats its data a little different, but you can expect them to store their data in data bases that fall into the following couple of categories:

  1. Proprietary Databases. All of the data used for analysis is kept in databases that are built and maintained by an internal IT team. They may use heavily personalized commercial software.
  2. Off the Shelf Databases. Most data is housed in a commercial database solution like Oracle, Teradata, MS Access, etc. where IT team often work in partnership with the database manufacturer.
  3. External Databases. The company does not have its own IT team and receives its data from external resources. Usually analysis is conducted via a connection to the data through the vendor.

In addition to using internal data sources, you may also find yourself surfing the web to find data for your analysis.

A lot of time it takes a combination of internal business data and things from the web to give you an overall picture.

In my experience there are three places I generally go to in search of publicly available data on the internet. I generally find what I need from either:

  1. As a general starting point for just about anything you can begin with a Wikipedia search.
  2. Google Search. To pull together press releases, news articles, images, and other pieces of data that are not statistically driven, Google is your best bet.
  3. Government Databases. The are billions upon billions of datasets out there on just about every kind of public data in terms of demographics, government spending, monetary flows and many, many other type of data.

So when you look to provide a well-rounded and detailed analysis of any business problem, the first step is always knowing where to go to get your data.

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Finding Data For A Case Study In Outsourcing

Taking a business projects I did a few years ago and turning it in to a case study exercise for a group of students.

Project Goal – To determine the viability of outsourcing 3-5 engineering jobs (Project Engineer and Draftsman) from the home office in Rotterdam to the rep office in the Philippines.

Current Situation – There is currently a rep office in Makati that has the space to add at least 3-5 engineering jobs. This study will determine if outsourcing these positions will result in cost savings as well as add value to the overall company operations.

This study will provide answers to three questions:

Is Makati an viable outsourcing solution?

What is the average salary for talent in Makati?

Is anyone else outsourcing along similar lines?

Recommendations – We recommend the following actions to ensure the overall success of an outsourcing transition.

  1. Conduct a thorough cost-benefit analysis comparing current and future salaries and benefits of staff in Rotterdam and Manila.
  2. Post a job listing to see what kind of candidates apply and screen them as future hires.
  3. Market to OFWs as they return from aboard as they are the most likely pool of experienced candidates.
  4. Contract a local Subject Matter Expert who can be hired as the Team Lead who can take the lead in filling out the staff.

Analytics Outsourcing – DMAIPH has successful set up Filipino analytics teams for over a dozen U.S. based businesses. Offering both virtual and office based teams that specialize in problem solving using data, new technology and analytics techniques is our strength. Finding and empowering analytics talent is increasingly challenging, but we have it down to a science. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to learn more about how to set up an analytics-centric team in the Philippines.