Analytics Magazine Analytics Magazine, July/August 2014 | Page 66

ANALY TIC S AC ROS S T H E E N T ERP RISE explored innovative ways to determine development expense at a detailed level, thereby addressing a problem that many thought was impossible to solve. IBM analytic teams haven’t waited for perfect data to get started; rather, they have refined and improved their data along the way. … The key is to put a stake in the ground with a commitment that analytics will be woven into your strategy. That’s how IBM does it. This approach is also effective with big data. Rather than postpone the leveraging of big data, you should embrace it, establish a link between your business priorities and your information agenda, and apply analytics to become a smarter enterprise. … with expertise in the data in that particular area of the business. A joint study by MIT Sloan and the IBM Institute for Business Value developed several recommendations. The first is that you start with your biggest and highest-value business challenge. The next recommendation is to ask a lot of questions about that challenge in order to understand what’s going on or what could be going on. Then you go out and look for what data you might have that’s relevant to that challenge. Finally, you determine which analytic technique can be used to analyze the data and solve the problem. Because most companies have constraints on the amount of money and skills available for projects, estimating the ROI can provide a better differentiator PROVEN APPROACHES for selecting the project with the highest Staying focused on solving business potential impact than relying on instincts. problems was the pragmatic start, and Estimating an analytics project’s ROI inthe other crucial element was having very volves both capturing the project costs high-level executive support from the be- and measuring the value. … ginning. From a governance perspective, those are two key levers to drive value: EMERGING THEMES focus on actions and decisions that will generate value and have high-level executive sponsorship. The ideal team to do analytics is a collaboration between an experienced data scientist, a person steeped in the area of the business where the challenge needs to be solved, and an IT person 66 | A N A LY T I C S - M A G A Z I N E . O R G Relationships inferred from data today may not be present in data collected tomorrow. The relationships that you infer from data about the past do not necessarily hold in data that you collect tomorrow. You cannot analyze data once and then make decisions forever based on old analysis. It’s important to W W W. I N F O R M S . O R G