1. Most people use statistics the way a drunkard uses a lamp-post, more for support than illumination.- Mark Twain

2. Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. – Albert Einstein

3. Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me, and I may not remember. Involve me, and I’ll understand. –  Native American Saying

4. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. – Steve Jobs

5. Know where to find the information and how to use it – That’s the secret of success.  – Albert Einstein

6. Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. – Eleanor Roosevelt

7. A million times a day, data that could change the world is not used, because everyone thinks its hard to get to, hard to use and hard to explain. –  Christian Chabot – Tableau Software CEO

8. To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education – literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills. – Alan Greenspan

9.  A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers. – Plato

0. Answers are all around us, we just have to recognize them when we seem them and be ready to use them to make intelligent, data-driven decisions. – Dan Meyer (that’s me) hehe

http://www.evergreensearch.com/9-entrepreneurs-chime-in-on-daily-struggles/

Came across an interesting article about some of the struggles well known entrepreneurs say they face everyday. It got me thinking that this would be a good exercise the next time I train a batch that is heavily made up of small business entrepreneurs and business owners. Here is my two cents on each of the struggles listed:

1. Time. For me time management remains a strength, but at not as much as it used to be. The further away from the structured, routine life of corporate America i get, the harder it is to budget my time wisely. Working virtually, without an office is a big challenge when it comes to developing good time management skills. To counter this, I try and work from client offices and use places like Starbucks when need be to keep me motivated. I also sometimes turn of my e-mail/chat so I can focus on getting important things done without interruption. If on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being highest I would rate myself a 7 on Time, but I used to be a 9… so I need to find ways to get back to that.

2. Focus. So many opportunities, so many people I want to work with, and so many choices to make everyday. I have a good habit of refocusing myself every few weeks. I take at least one Sunday morning a month to sit somewhere in solitude with no distractions and work on strategy. Trying to get back to the important things that will have both short and long term impacts. I think I give myself a 7 on this, but I want to be a 9 here.

3. Building A Great Team. I consider myself a good evaluator of talent. I tend to surround myself with people who take initiative and can step up in clutch situations, but I still find myself wondering why I can’t inspire them to do more, to aim farther and to have more confidence in themselves. Like with many leaders , my drive can be a double edged sword where it can both inspire and intimidate, lift up and pin down, and motivate and frustrate. Communication, being open minded and doing the right thing are never an issue… it’s the empowering the team to be a amazing as I think they are that keeps me have having the great team I dream about. I’d say I am a 6 here and need to be at a 10.

4. Emotion. Some people (including my son) see me as the Hulk sometimes. I get so intense and focused, that it can come across as frustration and anger. Others sometimes see me as too cold and unemotional like Spock. While others only know me as fun, social and inspiring person. Somewhere in the middle lies the real me and my inability to keep my emotions in check sometimes get the best of me. This is the biggest challenge I’ve had an entrepreneur… being more like a Jedi and less like the Captain of the Enterprise. I give myself a 5 on this scale and hope that’ll surrounding myself with the right people who compliment me and help smooth over my weaknesses can get me to a 7 or 8.

So where do you score on these key challenges facing entrepreneurs?

 

Friends and Family, here is the introduction to my book I’ve been working on entitled Making Data-Driven Decisons!

Making Data-Driven Decisions is one of the mottos I live by. It simply and powerfully sums up what I believe in as an analyst. In order to make intelligent decisions in all aspects of a business, you need to have the right data at the right time. That is what analytics is all about.

Whether you dream of being an analyst, aspire to be a better analyst or hope to surround yourself with people skilled in analytics, you have to strive to be different. You have to look at data as having the answers and analytics as the key to determining which answers are the ones you need.

My love for analytics comes from many places. When I was a kid I used to collect baseball cards and memorize all the statistics on the back of the cards. When I got into college I took a lot of courses on student developmental theory and learned a lot about why people are the way there are. I combined that with classroom teaching experience and then corporate training experience. During my time with Wells Fargo I was always the data guy or the reports guy, long before I had even heard of the term analytics. All of these experiences have prepared me for what I do today, teach people about analytics and how to use analysis to make data-driven decisions.

The idea behind this book is to serve as an introduction to analytics.  However, this book is not just for first timers but also for senior leaders who can use it to assess where their organization is.

The basic flow of this book is to first define analytics and explain what analysts do. Then we will look at the need for more analytics training and more analysts, especially in the BPO Industry in the Philippines. We will briefly review the BPO Industry in the Philippines for a common understanding of the size and scope of things.

Then we will move into basic analysis, then how to use data to drive decision making. We will look closer at key components of business intelligence and demonstrate the power of business dashboards and data visualization.

Next we will focus in specifically at analytics in the BPO environment, first broadly and then look at a few examples in functions like recruitment, sales & marketing and workforce management. The book will also touch on Six Sigma and Lean. We will then look at analytics in Social Networking.

We will begin to wrap things up with learning about the concept of Enchantment. Finally we discuss how to analyze your own business and we will conclude with the solutions BPO Elite can provide to help you and/or your business make more data-driven decisions.

We will provide plenty of real world examples, exercises and resources. We will introduce new methodologies and technologies to help achieve a strong analytics culture in your workplace.

The full book will be available soon! To get an advance e-copy of the book,  be one of the first ten people to e-mail me @ danmeyer@dmaiph.com with free book in the subject line

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Are you an undergraduate but wish to have a good paying job? Or are you a graduate but still in difficulty to get a job in BPO because of inadequate training? Don’t worry because Kalibrr and BPO Elite is now here to help you. This two companies become partners to help Filipinos on the training that is specifically designed to address the needs of these “near hires” in the industry who have almost all the skills needed to work in a call center, but need some additional training to pass all the entrance requirements. By their combined effort, they can help Filipinos not only find jobs, but start their careers. They both has a common goal and that is to help Filipinos find careers and to be part of the movement to push the Philippines forward as it becomes one of the top economic powers of the world.

Having a degree is important because it shows the person was able to finish something they started. However, there are thousands of people who got partially through school and had to quit for family or financial reasons. With training like ours, it can serve as a bridge to help them overcome the college degree requirement

We might be wondering what is Kalibrr & BPO Elite? Kalibrr is a training company that created an online learning platform to teach Filipinos for free the skills they need to snag a BPO job. While BPO Elite is the only company that specialized in analytics training. Others offer technical training or educates on specific types of analysis work, but they are the only ones doing a type of empowerment based approach. Because of the emerging trend and demand of bpo in the country, they’re doing the best they can. And over half have found work in the BPO industry.

Do you know what it takes to have a top caliber training in Kalibbr? And elite training in BPO Elite? Well, after the initial two day training, many of the trainees enroll in extended training program. It is kind of like an apprenticeship program for analysts. Well, its too early to tell how secure they are in their jobs, but great feedback has been received from the employers. So far so good. And yes, the trainees have been endorsed via letters of recommendation or being a reference. As soon as training has been done, graduate of this two can have a job. Some of the jobs are call center agents or tech support, but there is an ever increasing number of back office and analytics jobs that don’t require one to be on the phone or work in night shift.

By Celeste Marcelo

This is from a LinkedIn discussion thread and I found it worth sharing!

Can you give me a 160 character business case for business analytics?
The challenge, could you make the business case for business analytics in a tweet?
Here are some of the comments:
 BA reviews your promise to stakeholders- Growth in financials for shareholders, efficiency in operations for customers and talent management for the employees
 BA allows you to make business decisions based on insight gained from company data analyzed with appropriate statistical methods.
 Who would pass up chance to gain edge & grow value w/ new & better means of predicting risks, adapting trends, & helping customers? BA offers all this & more.
 BA =TimelyRelevantInfoToolsBusinessGrowthBetterPredictionsHappierCustomersBiggerProfitMarginsQualityEnhancementsOperationalImprovementsLegUpOnTheCompetitionWheee

And of course BPO Elite’s own..
 BA empowers managers and leaders to make data driven decision making!
The right decision at the right time is often the difference between success and failure!

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/09/what-to-obsess-over.html

I find more good things to talk about from Seth’s daily blog then I do anyother place. If you are not following him, you really should be. He is marketing guru, so most of his stuff has that slant to things, but since marketing and analytics are so often tied together, just about everything he blogs about has relevance to what we are doing here at BPO Elite.

In this blog, Seth talks about the importance of not just measuring things, but making sure you do something constructive with the results. I so many managers and leaders looking at reports, but missing some of the most important stories behind the numbers. There are so many analysts jobs where you don’t really analyze anything, you just print our paper and pass it on. And I see a lot of decisions being made based on two few datapoints or the wrong datapoints.

Its so imporant to always ask why am I measuring this? What frame of reference do i have? What is a the baseline? What is an acheiveable target to work towards? If these questions where asked more often, by more people… then BPO Elite wouldn’t exist.

Fortunately for us, measuring things is never as easy or as simple as most people think! 🙂

http://analyticsindiamag.com/interview-dr-dakshinamurthy-v-kolluru-president-at-international-school-of-engineering-hyderabad/?goback=%2Egde_3875000_member_157519861

I just read this very interesting interview about how schools in India are at the forefront of teaching analytics as a subject. And it inspired me to talk about analytics here in the BPO Industry in the Philippines and how BPO Elite is leading the charge to train the next generation of analysts. Here is the transcript.

BPO Elite: We are here with our CEO, Dan Meyer. Dan, can you brief us on the current state of analytics in the BPO Industry here in the Philippines?

Dan: Absolutely. There are some business who have figured out the importance of analytics and are using cutting edge technologies and employee highly skilled people to help drive data-driven decision making. However, at the current time these are the exceptions. A lot of the smaller and medium sized BPOs have not been able to leverage analytics to really give them the business intelligence they need.

BPO Elite: What about colleges and universities? Are they teaching analytics so graduates are prepared to go out and get jobs as analysts?

Dan: Not yet. We see a lot of that type of curriculum in India and its starting to gain momentum in the U.S., but here in the Philippines, adding courses in analytics is still largely in the planning stage. There is a lot of work being done between the schools, the BPO industry and the government, but so far only a few schools have begun to pilot BPO-centric courses that include analytics.

BPO Elite: So that is where your training comes in?

Dan: Yes, we’ve demonstrated that our Introduction to Analytics training can serve as a bridge for fresh grads and young professionals who have natural analytics skills, but lack the experience to land analysts jobs.

BPO Elite: Is it really that simple? Analytics is a pretty broad subject and becoming a good analyst is not something just anyone can do.

Dan: Well, our approach is not so much to train on specific technologies or go deep into a few methodologies. Instead, we focus on what its like to be analyst and talk a lot about the kinds of challenges analysts can face. Half of our training is more on the soft skills side of things. You can be great at writing code and designing data models, but if you can’t answer they why behind the data then you will struggle as an analyst. In addition, we focus on good communication skills and demonstrate how good analysis will lead to data-driven decision making. Most approaches to analytics training I’ve come across focus only on the technical side of things. My experience is that technical skills is actually the easy part.

BPO Elite: That’s interesting, so it goes against the convention wisdom of most analytics solutions? Tell us more about that.

Dan: Sure. You hear a lot about Big Data, and data scientists and complicated solutions. That makes sense for big corporations, but we expect a lot of our trainees will end up in smaller BPOs and call centers. Where they can play key roles in workforce management, recruitment metrics, market strategy… places where you need to know more about how to solve problems and communicate results then you need to write a complex SQL query.

BPO Elite: Well, we are out of time for now. We hope that helps our audience have a greater appreciation for our mission and can see what differentiates us from other training solutions. Thanks Dan for joining us today.

Dan: It’s my pleasure. Now go out and analyze something! LOL!

I just came across a blog post by another BPO company here in the Philippines and it kind of set me off. I assume the intention of the author was to remind us that recent advances in technology have made the BPO industry as we know it now possible. It is not my goal to argue with that intention, but I do feel the need to mention that the post did not mention one actual innovative piece of the technology. After reading the post I found myself asking why they wrote it in the first place.

So in order to walk the talk so to speak, I will share a few of the coolest, most innovative technological solutions I’ve come across that can make the BPO industry even more successful here in the Philippines.

First off there are dozens of business intelligence applications that are low cost and provide fast and actionable insights into all kinds of customer, demographic and competitive data. Just to name a few, check out Tableau, Qlikview or Yellowfin. I’ve trained fresh grads to use Tableau to do some pretty amazing data visualizations in just a few hours. In the hands of an imaginative and tech savvy person, work that used to take entire IT teams weeks can be done in minutes by one person. Now that is innovation.

Second, there are dozens of CRM and ATS applications that are making fundamental and long lasting changes in the recruitment industry. Tools like Bullhorn and Silkroad can take help a recruiting team manage the entire end to end recruitment process easily and with a lot less manpower then was possible only a few years ago. They are also fully integrate social networking via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook into the recruitment process.

And third, I can think of dozens of new services and mobile apps that add all kinds of value to marketing and sharing your brand. Pintrest and Tout are two that we have begun using recently to help us spread the BPO Elite story by sharing images and videos why we are the elite analytics solution for the BPO industry here in the Philippines.

I will finish up mentioning a couple of people who I admire for taking this new technology and have been significant influences on my life. I’m sure neither Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki set out with the goal of impacting the direction of the BPO industry in the Philippines, but thanks to their blogs we here at BPO Elite can learn how to not only be on the cutting edge of branding and marketing, but also be completely enchanting at what we do. And then there is TED, which houses a lot of amazing talks by one of my all time favorite data geeks, Dr. Hans Rosling.

So there you go. Not only have I talked about how cool technology is, but I’ve also pointed you to some examples of technology and tech savvy people that are contributing to BPO Elite’s success. I guess that is what this is all about… technology is not just cool because it allows us to go faster, stronger, higher, better… but because it also allows us to do it as part of a global community.

BPO Elite is an analytics outsourcing, consulting ang training firm that specializes in analytical, data driven decision making. We offer a variety of analytics solution tailored to fit the unique needs of our clients. Here are some of the solutions we provide. Pricing is as of August 2012 and subject to change.

• Two Day Introduction to Analytics Training for Fresh Grads and BPO Professionals – This very seminar is designed for individuals looking to start their careers as analysts. Standard price is PHP 1000 per individual.

• Two Day Analytics Training for BPO Teams – This training is designed for teams that are looking to be more data-driven in their processes and decision-making. The training plan is specific to each business and will offer several analytics solutions. Standard price is PHP 7000 per trainee for a batch of 15-25 pax.

• Two Day Analytics Workshop for BPO Management and Leaders – This workshop provides decision-makers with a framework for using data to drive strategy and offers several solutions to achieve this goal. Standard price is PHP 50000 for 20 pax.

• Small and Medium Business Intelligence Assessment – This project will provide business owners and decision makers with market, competitor and customer intelligence to help them achieve tactical and strategic business goals. Standard price is PHP 15000 per project.

• Recruitment Analytics Consulting Solution – This engagement can include an analytics assessment of your current recruitment process, assistance with selection and implementation of an analytics technology solution and/or analytics staff recruitment and training. Standard price is PHP 25000 per engagement.

For more information, please send me an e-mail with a short summary of which BPO Elite Analytics service(s) you are interested in learning more about.

Sincerely,

Dan Meyer
Chief Executive Officer
BPO Elite

danmeyer@bpoelite.com
USA 925-595-4079
PHI 09157759578

BPO Elite – Making Data-Driven Decisions

BPO Elite provides analytics consulting services to small and medium sized BPO companies based in the Philippines. We specialize in providing consulting solutions to help businesses make more data-driven decisions. Our suite of solutions includes the following:
• Recruiting and training analysts to work within the business to enhance the analytics function of the business
• Conducting analytics assessments of the business to identify challenges and opportunities with data management and decision making within the business.
• Providing analytics training for decision makers and influencers specifically designed to fit the needs of the business.
• Developing and deploying analytics solutions using the latest cutting edge analytics technology available

Analytics is the discovery, analysis and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Data is all around us and the amount of data we generate increases every day.

BPO Elite can empower your business with the analytics you need to harness this data and use it to make data-driven decisions. Contact us today to learn more about this exciting opportunity to drive your business forward.