This blog will attempt to highlight how companies can make smarter business decisions using analytics (which I define as the 'collation, summarization, mining and analysis of data').
Why this blog?
Most companies generate and collect a lot of data in their business...but don't use this data enough while making business decisions. (This may sound cliched but it is true!). My hypotheses on why this happens are:
- Data is stored across functional and divisional silos across the company. E.g., Surveys done by the marketing team may not be available to the customer service team
- It requires a lot of effort to clean and update data required for analysis. Corporate IT is often short of resources for maintaining analytical databases. E.g., Many B2B companies don't have a single view of a customer across all their internal and third-party databases
- Analysis often requires ad-hoc queries of complex databases. Companies don't have enough skilled resources to query these databases
- Some advanced analysis techniques require significant expertise (statistics, operations research, etc), computing power and time. Some managers believe it is important to take half-correct decisions quickly rather than better decisions with more time.
What industries will this blog cover?
This blog will initially focus on business problems in the retail, consumer goods, telecoms, banking and insurance industries (because I am most interested in these industries). Of course, I will include business issues from other industries if I find them interesting and if I feel I am competent enough to write about them.
What kind of business problems will this blog discuss?
I plan to write about a wide variety of business problems ranging from marketing, merchandising to operations (supply chain, logistics) to fraud detection.
Of course, I welcome comments on what topics readers would like to discuss in the blog.
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