Tag: Analytics

Understanding Business Analytics Outline

I’m scheduled to speak to do a workshop on Understanding Business Analytics in mid February. I will be followed by a 1 hour Analytics Overview with a couple hundred students. Pretty excited about this!!

And to make it even more awesome… its in Cebu!

Scope:

(1) Provide a 6 hour presentation on Understanding Business Analytics to 15-20 faculty members (Core Group).  (2) Provide a 1 hour presentation on an Overview of Business Analytics to a student group. Both presentation will include exercise and discussion in addition to the lecture.

Timeline:

  1. The presentation with the Core Group will be from 9:00AM- 3:00PM.
  2. The student overview about Business Analytics from 3:00PM- 4:00PM.

Core Group Content:

  1. An orientation about the concept of Business Analytics (60 minutes)
  2. Current Trends in Analytics for the Philippines (60 minutes)
  3. Analytics Group Exercise: Let’s Find Some Data (60 minutes) – will need internet access via smartphones, tablets and/or laptops.
  4. Lunch
  5. Discussion about Descriptive Analytics, Predictive Analytics and Big Data (60 minutes) – will need internet access
  6. Demonstration on how to use Tableau (30 minutes)
  7. Questions and Answers (30 minutes)

Student 420Group Content:

  1. An quick orientation Business Analytics (15 minutes)
  2. Analytics Group Exercise: (15 minutes)
  3. Demonstration on how to use Tableau (15 minutes)
  4. Questions and Answers (15 minutes)

My absolute favorite thing to do in the world is to get college students excited about analytics careers!!!!

Breaking Bad Data Habits

It’s a common mistake to get creative with your data in excel to such an extent that its next to impossible to use that data effectively.

The concept of keep it simple stupid is hard to follow as once a person has some data they tend to spend far more time formatting and decorating it then they do analyzing it. Its just human nature.

However when we don’t keep data in clean and easy to access formats, we pretty much make that data useless to anyone else who really wants to play with it.

The best and really only way to keep data useful is to have it in a simple column with 1 header row format. From that we can use numerous tools to both format and analyze the data like pivot tables and Tableau.

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How DMAIPH Uses Analytics > Doctor’s in Houston

I love public data mining projects like this…

Here is what we need:
A list of primary care, internal medicine, general medicine, and geriatric physicians in the Houston area who have written prescriptions for the atypical antipsychotic class of medications.

Specifically:

  • These physician specialties (primary care, internal medicine, general medicine, and geriatric physicians)
  • In these cities in the Houston MSA (Houston, Texas City, Pearland, Friendswood, Clear Lake, Missouri City, Sugarland, Katy, Cypress, Spring, The Woodlands, Tomball, Conroe, Cleveland, Kingwood, Porter, Humble, Baytown, Pasadena, Beaumont)
  • Can we get this mapped into an Excel spreadsheet with the following columns of data:
    • Separate columns for last name, first name
    • Specialty
    • Address
    • Overall volume of Medicare claims for all of the antipsychotic medications (quetiapine fumarate, Seroquel, Seroquel XR, risperidone, Risperdal, Abilify, olanzapin, and Zyprexa).

If you find research projects like this interesting, then DMAIPH is the place for you! 🙂

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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.

Word Of The Day: Cohesive

From Jim Collins, Good to Great, “Organizational Health is about making your business function more effectively by building a cohesive leadership team, establishing real clarity among those leaders, communicating that clarity to everyone within the organisation and then putting in place structures to reinforce that clarity on an on-going basis”

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Full Definition of COHESIVE from Webster’s:  exhibiting or producing cohesion or coherence <a cohesive social unit> <cohesive soils>

Examples of COHESIVE

 Their tribe is a small but cohesive group.

Religion can be used as a cohesive social force.

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Being more cohesive. That is my goal for January 2015.

Let’s take this team of experienced and well intentioned individuals and mold them into a more effective force for the development of the business.

Lack of structure is can be the death knell of even the best companies.

Our structure needs to be more defined and transparent.

Let us commit to getting on the same page and demonstrating that from top to bottom.  After all, Homies help homies, always!

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The key challenge is coming up with metrics to measure the cohesiveness of your organization.  I have figured that out, so if you need help, connect with me and I will show you how.

Analytics Leadership – 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. 

Achieving Better Results Through Analytics: What’s Your Analytics Strategy?

Just put together a pitch deck for a potential in-house corporate training.

Here’s some of the highlights…

You need an analytics strategy.

Making data-driven decisions is key to success in any business.

Having the right data at the right time makes all the difference.

Data-driven decision-making, as well as improved productivity and better overall outcomes begins with analytics.

Some of the benefits from a good analytics solution include:

  • Provide timely and targeted coaching/training to agents.
  • Ensures that the right materials are assigned.
  • Optimizes process of following agent improvements, leading to skill development and job mastery.
  • Eliminates the need for e-mailing countless excel spreadsheets
  • Schedules coaching/ training at an appropriate time.
  • Optimizes the follow up process to review impact of training and identifies when agent performance requires management attentions.
  • Give’s Management a High Level Overview of important KPIs.

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Business Strategy with Analytics – Aligning a business strategy to drive an organization forward requires a robust analytics solution. Businesses who have good analytics tend to be much more profitable and efficient then ones that do not. DMAIPH has helped dozens of companies in both the U.S. and the Philippines with adding more data analysis in their business strategy.

That’s why we have joined up with our key business partner PMCM Events Management to showcase our solutions at #TechToniPH in July 2017. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to find out what we can do to help you align your business strategy with analytics.

 

A Data-Driven Approach To Networking

Starting today, I am going to go into full networking hyper mode. My goal is to find a new outsourcing client here in the U.S. to add to my roster of DMAI clients who are using our services based in the Philippines.

I will also be looking for a few more consulting gigs here that are simple data analytics or market research projects that I can pass on to my intern teams. I have interns both in the U.S. and the Philippines.

So how to make my networking efforts more impactful. Using primarily LinkedIn, I will share blog posts, contribute to groups, add new connections and re-connect with existing ones to share with them updates on DMAI and what we offer.

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I will track all these efforts using a simple Excel spreadsheet. Using excel will help me set and meet daily quotas for new connections, shared articles and sending email messages to existing connections. Just this simple and easy to set up approach will make my networking 10x more impactful because each day I have a clear idea of what’s ahead of me.

For new connections, I had some interns make a list of over 200 companies in the U.S. who posted jobs on indeed.com . I will search LinkedIn to see who 2nd and 3rd connections at these companies are and who might be involved in business strategy, outsourcing and/or analytics and try and add them. I will not just send the standard add me connection request, but one of several canned intros I have prepare depending on job level, company type and how I think DMAI can help them. I will personalize each one. My goal is to do 20 connection requests a day for 10 days. Form that I hope to get about 5 hot leads to work on.

For sharing, I will repost and/or link to various blog posts I have written or will write over the next two weeks. My goal is to post to 10 groups a day. So in two weeks I will have shared my story over 100 times to a variety of analytics and outsourcing focused groups. From this effort I hope to get 2-3 more leads.

Finally, for re-connecting, I will send 10 emails a day to connections who might either be interested in our services or sharing our story with their connections who might. These will not be hard sell e-mails, but more an update on what I have been doing and how DMAI has grown since the last time we talked. I can export a list of my connections from LinkedIn that includes e-mail address of all my connections. I’ll then sort it by company and focus on connections with companies involved in analytics and/or outsourcing. Again a half dozen or so leads should come out of this.

So over the next two weeks, I plan on spending about 2 hours a day networking with 400 points of contact and hope to get 20 or so leads that will end up bringing me 1-2 clients.

And I will use an analytics approach to track my progress towards my goals and in the end give me a bunch of data to use to see where to refocus future networking efforts.

I will let you know how it goes. And if you ever want help doing something like this, DMAI has helped clients in the past with similar approaches!

Analytics Returns $13.01 for Every Dollar Spent

Business Analytics Returns $13.01 for Every Dollar Spent, Up from $10.66 Three Years Ago, Nucleus Research

Finds > http://www.sys-con.com/node/3189704

This is not surprising to someone who has spent the better part of a decade learning about everything possible related to analytics.

Over the past couple of years I have successfully consulted and partnered with a number of small call centers based in the Philippines. Most of my assistance has come in the form of analytics training and consulting, with a focus on making more data-driven decisions and optimizing reporting processes.

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Please Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/dmaiph to see what our team members and customers say about DMAI.

You can also follow my blog at http://www.dmaph.wordpress.com to learn more about our mission and purpose… to empower better decision-making through analytics.

For a free consultation, please connect with us via the above channels or send an email to analytics@dmaiph.com

Internet Research Tips

About to do a training for some of my team on how to master internet research. Here are some of the excellent tips on how to optimize Google searches that I will be sharing:

1. Use unique, specific terms – It is simply amazing how many Web pages are returned when performing a search. You might guess that the terms blue dolphin are relatively specialized. A Google search of those terms returned 2,440,000 results! To reduce the number of pages returned, use unique terms that are specific to the subject you are researching.

2. Use browser history – Many times, I will be researching an item and scanning through dozens of pages when I suddenly remember something I had originally dismissed as being irrelevant. If you can remember the general date and time of the search you can look through the browser history to find the Web page.

3. Don’t use common words and punctuation – Common terms like a and the are called stop words and are usually ignored. There are cases when common words like the are significant. For instance, Raven and The Raven return entirely different results.

4. Set a time limit — then change tactics
Sometimes, you never can find what you are looking for. Start an internal clock, and when a certain amount of time has elapsed without results, stop beating your head against the wall. It’s time to try something else:
> Use a different search engine, like Yahoo! Bing, Startpage, or Lycos.
> Ask a peer.
> Call support.
> Ask a question in the appropriate forum.
> Use search experts who can find the answer for you.

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The Internet is the great equalizer for those who know how to use it efficiently. Anyone can now easily find facts using a search engine — assuming they know a few basic tricks.

Never underestimate the power of a skilled search expert.

Three Keys To A Successful Virtual Team

I’m borrowing this idea from an article called “Going Virtual: Hiring the Right Team for Remote Work”
Going Virtual: Hiring the Right Team for Remote Work

Among other things DMAIPH has a side business focusing solely on building and managing virtual analytics teams, based in the Philippines, for small and medium US based companies. In the past year we have set up three teams and the lessons we have learned about how to be successful validate the three points in the above article.

Key #1: Hire only people with significant work experience. I love working with fresh grads as they are mostly blank slates who you can empower and educate to fit your own vision. However, our experience here is that the best virtual employees are ones with significant office based experience.

One of the great benefits to setting up a virtual team in the Philippines is the large pool of former call center agents who have significant industry experience but have left due to family commitments. Tapping into that talent pool has been a huge boon for DMAI.

Key #2: Make every hire a trial hire until you determine fit. Attrition with virtual teams is by default pretty high as employees can have a lot less loyalty to a person they never meet. In addition, coaching and mentoring are challenging to do effectively online so its really important to find the right fit before entering into a long term partnership.

Another plus of doing business in the Philippines is that its standard to bring staff in on a six month temporary contract. After the six months they are evaluated and either released or picked up. We offer a standard pay increase at six months when a contract employee is normalized. Its really helped us build a core team of people who will be with us a long time while at the same time not forcing us to keep people around who really don’t want to be here.

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Key #3: Put barriers in the process of hiring new people. As we have evolved the virtual business we have become better and better about building screens that really do optimize the talent pipeline process. Like most companies we have a number of minimum requirements that help target the right applicants and we also mix in assessments that require the applicant to show some of the analytics skills we need.

The combination of experience, having them walk a mile in our shoes and making it kinda hard to get hired has really lead us to providing top end talent for a reasonable price.

Analytics Jobs – DMAIPH hires, refers and connects Filipino analytics talent. The Philippines is at the center of the action when it comes to solutions to the global need for analytics. Working with DMAIPH to find work, hire analytics talent or set up analytics teams will ensure you are tapped into the best of the best when it comes to analytics in the Philippines. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to find out how to take advantage of this booming opportunity.

Business Intelligence Buzzwords = Nosebleed

http://www.analyticbridge.com/profiles/blogs/kill-the-buzzwords-the-real-meaning-behind-popular-bi-terms

In the Philippines, “Nosebleed” is the common response for having to deal with a challenging problem, whether it be speaking a lot of English or trying to understand a complicated business problem.

When I read the attached article, it made me think of the number of times I get the Nosebleed response when I talk about analytics terminology.

In any talk I give on analytics, I make sure to always start with a definition and then build up a glossary of terms and definitions to make sure everyone is on the same page. I also like to show the audience that things aren’t usually as difficult as they seem, they just need to get past the nosebleed inducing buzzwords.

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Big Data is kinda scary because it sounds complicated and expensive.

Data Visualization is very broad and difficult to visualize if you aren’t familiar with the concept.

Data Scientist sounds like someone who doesn’t even exist in the Philippines yet.

But when you take a minute to step back and see that big data just means the data universe in your business that you are already using every day, that data visualization is charts and maps and graphs, and that a data scientist is really just the data guy you already have, then its not so nosebleed inducing.

Once you have the baseline to start from then you can go back and show the complexity of each buzzword without losing the audience.

If you or your business is suffering from nosebleed because the buzzwords in your analytics solutions sound too expensive and too complicated, then give me a shout out. I can help simplify it for you.