The Ugly Truth about Analytics and Data Analysts

[LisaA]

Everything you see and read positions analytics as this high-profile, business changing initiative; however, as with all things in life, theory and reality don’t always align. The ugly truth is glamourous, bottom-line changing analytic projects that industry analysts, media and others flippantly throw around often fall short, beaten down by the daily grind of analytic bureaucracy and red-tape. Slow analytic processes of ticket queues; requirements document submissions; data access and controls; scalability issues; skill gaps and more bog down analytic initiatives. And, most often, data analysts and specialists spend large parts of their day working as data janitors, cleaning up data messes, trying to tidy up regular reports, putting out insight fire drills. This is a waste of an analyst’s time and skill, as well as the kiss of death for most analytic initiatives organizations want to take on. But, this isn’t just opinion, the proof is in the pudding...

• Data prep efforts account for approximately $22,000 worth of a data analysts’ yearly time*
• Analytic inefficiencies are costing 37% in missed sales opportunities, 25% reduced return on investment, 18% increased costs, 9% lost out on competition**
• A single analyst spends approximately 500 hours a year prepping data*

But with great adversity comes great achievement. Visionary analysts, analytic leaders and organizations are finding ways to achieve the ideal in a less than ideal analytic world. Here are a few of those analysts and summary of their stories.

Jason Mack, Vice President of Customer & Marketing Analytics, JPMorgan Chase & Co

The analytics process at JP Morgan Chase required specialized programmers or required analysts to write requirements, get approval, funding, and get resources assigned — often taking weeks or months before any actionable information was available.

To streamline the process and enable decisions, the Marketing Analytics team at JPMorgan Chase turned to Alteryx to provide best in class self-service data analytics, and up level their Tableau investment. With Alteryx, Jack and the Marketing Analytics team has been able to harness the full value of their marketing and customer data residing databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, Pivotal, and Hadoop, as well as connect to all Excel files where data resides. Then, turn that data into actionable insights without having to wait on other departments, or requiring the analytics team to learn how to write code.

“By giving our analysts the tools they need to connect directly to the data and deal with it on their own, they’re able to get much more done.”

See Jack’s presentation or view his slides to learn the full details of his story.

Justin Winter, Manager, Supply Chain Analytics, Chick-fil-A

Chick-fil-A has reams of transactional data from stores in Amazon Redshift and Oracle, but in order for the actual data analysts to actually scale value from that data, it required complex SQL and hierarchical queries.  This often required them to turn to IT for assistance or spend numerous hours patchworking various tools together to try and answer any questions. They were struggling to connect the skills that the analyst had with the capabilities of their existing systems.

By combining the use of Alteryx, Tableau, and Amazon Redshift, the analytics team at Chick-fil-A, were able to answer more questions and create new Tableau dashboards in minutes to hours, versus the six-month-development cycle it took with IT. By leveraging the capabilities of Alteryx, they were able to automatically refresh their data, processes and visualizations, enabling the analytics team to deliver more real-time information, which required less analyst time, empowering them to focus efforts on the creation, rather than on the refreshing of insights.

“Alteryx has been huge in-- not just in professional, but also just in personal, making sure that there's balance and ability to scale and those both aspects to me are really important.”

See Justin’s presentation or view his slides to hear the full details of his story.

Patricia Small, Descriptive Analytics Supervisor, Ford Motor Company

Alan Jacobson, Director, Global Data Insight & Analytics, Ford Motor Company

Adam Blacke, Lead Data Scientist, Global Data Insight & Analytics, Ford Motor Company

The analytics team at Ford was working towards building a new ecosystems to manage all of the various data they have from around the globe, to democratize analytics for all business users. The problem they faced was being able to effectively come up with a common solution that could bring the work of data scientists, analytics professionals, and business professionals together in an easy, effective way.

Leveraging Alteryx to help maximize their analytic infrastructure of Hadoop, R, Tableau and Qlik now provides analysts the flexibility to bring everybody together, and speaking the same language.  A process that used to take months in their team, now is completed in hours, and the analysts have been able to automate and standardize key insight processes, and move away from being reactionary in order to take on strategic analytic projects.

“...everybody understands a flow chart essentially. And that's the way Alteryx lays it out for you, because they have that flow chart, everybody can speak the same language. It doesn't matter if I'm a developer, or I'm an operations, or a purchasing guy, I can work. And I can understand that flow chart. Our eyes don't glaze over because you are showing them SQL code, or Java code, or whatever your whole processes were.” — Adam Blacke, Lead Data Scientist, Global Data Insight & Analytics, Ford Motor Company

See Patricia’s, Alan’s and Adam’s presentation or view their slides to hear the full details of their story.

* Blue Hill Research, Attaching Dollars to Data Prep

** Lack of Data Blending Capability is Costing Time and Money

[MarkWall]

Thank you so much, Lisa, for the article, it really helped me. Getting others' opinions is very important in business and as I read those three summaries of stories I became a better someone in Analytics and Data Analysts. on the first story by Jason Mark, I really liked what he said that "By giving our analysts the tools they need to connect directly to the data and deal with it on their own, they’re able to get much more done," that is very true, it works; applied on Entrance , a Houston-based software consultancy firm for best data management and analytics the results are outstanding.

[Ken_Black]

Lisa,

Where did you acquire those awesome writing skills?  I loved that opening paragraph. I wanted you to continue.

I can only tell you that I have experienced the issues that you raised in that paragraph. What you wrote is so true. I wish I could tell you the details about my most recent experience in this regard, but I can't.

Suffice it to say that the work I did in Alteryx in a couple of weeks would have to be expanded to a monumental number of hours for a group of people to reproduce it using different software tools. It was an exemplary example of why Alteryx is so staggeringly efficient. There is nothing that can beat the efficiency I achieve using this tool.

As I tell my 5 year-old just about every day - "I hate wasting my time. Please don't make me waste my time. "  We are not wasting our time when we make bracelets but we are wasting it if he spills the beads off the table!

All Alteryx does for me is save my time and my sanity, both of which are great things to have!

Please write some more insightful articles because you are good at it,

Ken

https://3danim8.wordpress.com/2016/11/09/teaching-jett-about-charitable-giving/