Let’s Help Business Executives Understand Business Analytics

I’m a business intelligence and analytics vendor and I have a problem.  Small and medium sized business leaders – and executives from some very large businesses – don’t understand what I do or why they need my services.  I’m okay with having to build a market, but with all the buzz in the business media about big data and analytics, I didn’t expect to have to work quite so hard.   Now, I don’t have hard data on this (shudder!), but based on a couple years of client conversations, I can offer my opinion and a few suggestions about how we can help clients understand what we do and why they should invest in analytics. 

Proposal 1:  Let’s agree on what analytics software and services vendors are selling

Research firms like IDC believe that the big data and business analytics marketplace will be worth $50 billion by 2016 – and I believe that they are right.  So do a lot of other people if you read the right publications.  But I’m not always sure what services are lumped into those estimates, and I’m an expert.   So here goes – this is my opinion about constitutes business analytics solution and services:

• Reporting and statistical analysis software and services like those offered by SAP BusinessObjects, SAS, and Tableau;
• Data integration software and services, bringing together data from custom operations databases and off-the-shelf applications like Microsoft CRM, SAP R/3, or Quickbooks;
• Big data software and services like Hadoop and massively parallel in memory appliances offered by Teradata and others;
• Predictive modeling and explanatory analysis services like customer segmentation, profitability analysis, and work flow optimization studies from analytics service firms like my own, Deloitte, Accenture, etc;
• And of course, all business strategy consulting that goes into helping clients decide what to analyze and how to do it.

That’s a lot of stuff.   (And the box is getting bigger as we add hosted analytics to the mix).

Proposal 2:  Let’s agree that analytics techniques are not voodoo – or trade secrets

I suspect that some in our industry believe analytics techniques to be trade secrets, and that our clients couldn’t handle the detail even if we shared it.  Hogwash.

The techniques analytics practitioners employ have been taught in business schools and computer science programs for YEARS.  Data warehousing.  Data cleansing.  Dashboarding.  ANOVA.  Decision Trees.  Segmentation.  Regression.  Linear programming.  The nuts and bolts aren’t new, and the techniques are pretty commonly understood by MBAs and programmers.

I also think analytics vendors worry about going over their clients’ heads and “blinding them with science.”  At this point, every small or mid-market client I speak to knows full well what databases house their operational and accounting data, and have a pretty good idea what that data looks like.   And every client I’ve spoken to thus far knows enough math to understand that averages can be misleading and that probabilities win out on the long term.  As an analytics vendor, it’s up to me to find ways to explain what I do – clearly, simply, and in ways that highlight potential return on investment to my clients.

Proposal 3:  Let’s be way more concrete about expected business results of analytics projects

The entire point of business analytics initiatives, including data integration and reporting, is to help our clients earn more and spend less at lower risk.  It’s that simple.   I intend to spend a lot of time over the next few months helping my clients understand what is possible, primarily through this blog.

Here are a few quick examples.