Tag: Business Analytics

Implementing the CHED Memo on Business Analytics > How DMAIPH Can Help

In 2013, the Commission for Higher Education (CHED), the governing body for Higher Education in the Philippines, published a memorandum requiring accredited colleges and universities to establish a Business Analytics Specialization Program for Business Admin and IT students.

The objectives of the business analytics specialization track aims to provide Filipino students the skills needed for different forms of Analytics namely, Descriptive, Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics. This track enables students to identify opportunities and implement or enact solutions for which these analytics can be used to solve business problems to aid intelligence and informed business decision-making.

One of the analytics training solutions that DMAIPH offers, is partnering with schools  on curriculum and instruction enhancement.  We are also more than willing to meet with you to explore possibilities of collaboration.

The key areas DMAIPH can assist with are as follows:

  1. Consultation with Key School Administration Decision Makers
  2. Initial Faculty Training via a 1-Day hands on workshop
  3. Building Student Awareness by speaking at student events
  4. Guest Speaking in classrooms and academic events
  5. OJT Opportunities with DMAI and out partner companies
  6. Fresh Grad Training for analysts looking to start their career
  7. Provide a textbook for business analytics based on the CHED memo

DMAIPH is adapt at providing staff and students with an overview of the current trends in business analytics that drives today’s businesses, as well as providing an understanding on data management techniques that can help organizations achieve their business goals and address operational challenges.

The need for more analysts and professionals with analytics training in the Philippines continues to quicken at an amazing rate. On any given day you can see over 2,000 analyst jobs posted on jobstreet.com

The demand of analytics talent in the Philippines far outweighs the demand. Even with specialized tracks like the Fundamentals of Business Analytics starting up over the Philippines, more needs to be done.

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DMAIPH is uniquely positioned to help schools deliver on CHED’s memo and help supply the demand Filipino businesses, BPOs and Call Centers are asking for.

We have been doing analytics training, consulting and outsourcing in the Philippines since May 2012. In addition, DMAIPH has helped over two dozen companies bring more analytics into their business and have trained over 100 batches of analytics trainees.

Analytics Education – Facilitating a mastery of the fundamentals of analytics is what DMAIPH does best. As a key parnter of the Data Science Philippines Meetup Group, DMAIPH champions the use of using data.

All across the world, companies are scrambling to hire analytics talent to optimize the big data they have in their businesses. We can empower students and their instructors with the knowledge they need to prepare for careers in analytics. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly so we can set a guest lecturer date, On-the-Job Training experience or other analytics education solution specifically tailored to your needs.

The Analytics Driven Leader: Demystifying Strategy

As I prepare for spending the bulk of the upcoming year in Philippines I have several goals in mind; publish my next book, launch a new side business and spend quality time with as many of my team members as possible. And when I think of the conversations I want to have with the team, demystifying strategy and empowering more data-driven decision making are top of mind.

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Business Strategy can be a complicated thing for many reasons. First and foremost because although you can have big goals that everyone can see, the fluid nature of pushing a business forward makes it hard for many to conceptualize.

In our case we have gone from a company of 6 with one business line to a company of over 100 with six business lines in just 18 months. On top of that we have diversified from one legal entity with one purpose to three legal entities with complimentary purposes. It’s a lot to take in.

Data-Driven Decision Making can be challenging for mean reasons as well. First of all, few people on the team have a solid foundation in business analytics. Most come from companies where they either didn’t have a direct role in developing the analytics or where in companies that really didn’t value analytics. So it takes some time for people to get on board with the idea of using both data and wisdom to make decisions.

There are so many things that we can do to improve performance, enhance communication and enable more proactive thinking. Refining process flows, building better reports and having more forums for information sharing are all places to start.

My goal is by the end of the 1st quarter of 2017 we have accomplished a lot of these things. By then we will have taken some of the mystery out of our business strategy and empowered more people to look at the data as they make decisions.

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.

What Does A Business Analyst Actually Do?

For the sake of the CHED course on business analytics, lets look a little more closely at business analysts.

The International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) describes the role as “a liaison among stakeholders in order to understand the structure, policies, and operations of an organization, and to recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.”

With that in mind, the next question often asked is, “What does a business analyst do?”

This is a reasonable question, because the fact is a business analyst is not limited to doing one thing. He or she wears multiple hats. He or she will be skilled in communication, negotiation, listening, and will also need to be a good team leader. They have to be good at solving problems. This means he or she will have the skills necessary to look at data and other relevant information in order to determine where the losses are within a company. They also have to understand the technology used to capture, store and analyze the data used in their company. It takes a lot to be a good business analyst.

This is where things like deep thinking and curiosity really separate good analysts from great analysts. Of the many  essential skills a business analyst will utilize here are my top 3:

(1) – Know the data. They will compare the past facts and figures to the current numbers, this will give the analyst the information to deduce or predict failure within the company.

(2) – Know the business – A business analyst is always an objective listener. They will determine the needs that management want by speaking to shareholders. This requires the analyst to ask questions, to find out what is needed, which will more than likely lead to new discoveries that may have been overlooked previously.

(3) – Know the players – Within a business there are usually different departments. A Business analyst will seek to associate and involve them-self with the various departments. This will help them identify conflicts within the various departments, which can be used to bring departments together.

As you can see it takes a lot to be a business analyst. BAs are truly a rare breed of technology loving people, who can solve problems and work well with others.

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Why We Need Business Analysts! > The Philippines Is Quickly Becoming A Hub For Analytics

Most business leaders know that they need more analytics based decision making in their operations, however few have figured out how to obtain it as analytics software or engaging high priced consultants doesn’t suffice.

Businesses are challenged with endless streams of data of immense volume, variety and velocity coming from global marketplaces and from a multitude of social media platforms that didn’t exist until recently.

Per CHED, Business analytics is essentially about:

  • providing better insights;
  • particularly from extensive use of operational data stored in transactional systems;
  • statistical and quantitative analyses;
  • explanatory and predictive modeling;
  • facts-based management;
  • to drive decision-making for optimal results

Dictionary.com defines insight as “an instance of apprehending the true nature of a thing, especially through intuitive understanding.” Business Analytics allows a business to get the cause of something, to find an explanation or a reason that something has happened.

BA is also very useful to understand who, where, why, how and in what way customers interact with the business. BA lets us know who the customers are based on demographic breakdowns like age, sex, education level, etc. BA tells us how much of what product is bought, where the product is bought from, how often it is bought. And BA brings us insights into why the product was bought.

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Business analytics has long been used to understand things like which sales person is the most successful or which market is the most profitable by looking at the operational data stored in the transactional systems of that business.

Just about every business has at least some basic way of calculating profit, validating inventory and measuring success. These transactional data points are generally housed in a data storage system that can be accessed to view reports. This is the core of business analytics.

BA gets a lot more insightful when business decision-makers have the ability to look at statistical and quantitative analysis of that data. Often this is not only done by the decision-makers, but by analysts who can dedicate more time to discovering, investigating and analyzing the data.

Businesses that are able to employ even more advanced analytics by using data models. In the hands of a good analyst, models allow one to quickly and easily adjust the analysis based on using different variables. Building models is especially important when working with large data sets or what’s called Big Data. Models also let analysts not only look backwards at what has happened, but allows analysts to look into the future.

When you look at any successful business, odds are that they have solid business analytics in place. The leadership team is generally provided with reports that allow a fact-based management of the business. As opposed to businesses that are run based on intuition or gut feel, businesses that invest in analytics generally make better decisions.

In the hypercompetitive global market of today, even the smallest and most simple businesses need some level of business analytics to be able to make smart choices to optimize results and be successful.

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 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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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.

 

Data Analytics and Its Application in the Academic Institution

Something I will be presenting at a conference coming up in October…

Over the past few years we have seen a dynamic shift in the way data analytics as a discipline is being matriculated by colleges and universities in the Philippines. Great leaps forward in the field of data analytics is under way through a combination of government, private industry and academic partnerships.

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Participants will be provided a comprehensive overview of the current and future state of data analytics in both the education system and the Philippines as a whole. Highlights will be shared using Tableau, one of the leading business intelligence software applications available. Focus will be given to how schools, companies and training programs are empowering graduates to hit the ground running as analysts.

The facilitator for this session is Daniel Meyer, President & Founder of DMAI, an analytics training, consulting and outsourcing company based in Ortigas. Mr. Meyer spent 15 years as a senior analytics consultant with Wells Fargo Bank in the U.S. and has a Master’s Degree in Education from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. For the past three years Mr. Meyer has conducted various data analytics trainings for hundreds of businesses, university students and young professionals here in the Philippines.

Check out the website to learn more: http://www.parssu.org/