The Importance of Data Analytics in Delivering Value in a Business Analytics Project

Background

In the article What’s Your Data Strategy from Harvard Business Review, the author points out that as big data is revolutionizing most industries in recent years, the ability to manage torrents of data is critical to a company’s revenue growth and success. However, even with data-management functions and chief data officers, most companies remain badly behind the curve. According to marketing surveys, on average, less than 50% of structured data is used in making decisions. Also, less than 1% of an organization’s unstructured data is analyzed or used at all. More than 70% of employees have access to data they should not, and 80% of analysts’ time is spent simply discovering and preparing data. Data breaches are common, rogue data sets propagate in silos, and companies’ data technology often can’t manage all this.

It’s time to reevaluate the importance of data analytics, especially in delivering value in business analytics projects.

As a candidate in the Master program of Business Analytics at UC Davis, I have been working on a practicum project where our team is helping Bowles Farming, one of the largest farming companies in California, to improve their crop rotation and planning based on data analytics. However, the project is not proceeding very well although our team and the client have been making great efforts into it. One of the most significant reasons, from where I stand, is that we didn’t put data analytics at the center of our communication and analysis. In other words, data analytics should be the starting point of everything in the project, because we won’t set any clear goal, reach any satisfactory solution, and make any practical delivery without data analytics.

No data analytics, no goal

At the beginning of the project, our client shared with us more than 30 spreadsheets, with no database and no data dictionary. All the data that we needed to analyze stores in a couple of Microsoft Excels and there wasn’t clear relationship among the spreadsheets. But this is the real world, and we should always be ready to get hands dirty.

Unfortunately, our team didn’t spend enough time digging to the data, gaining an understanding of it and performing exploratory data analytics, which led to inefficient communication with the client and failure of setting a clear goal. Instead, we put the data aside and rushed to discuss what business problems the client would like to cope with. As it turned out, we were ‘swimming underwater’ without a clear direction. There were so many times when our team and the client found it hard to convey thoughts to each other and reach an agreement. Clearly, no goal could be set without sufficient understanding of the business problem through data analytics.

If we had put more efforts into data analytics, thus developed a deep understanding of available datasets, we would not have wasted too much time and efforts to work on multiple irrelevant goals and failed client’s expectations.

No data analytics, no solution

As we proceeded with the project, the client raised some challenging problems that they are facing and our team worked together to tackle them. We made great efforts to understand the business problem and background, but we made another big mistake. We promised the client too much and failed to get things done. Without a clear understanding of the available data, how much data we need, what other types of data we should use, for instance, we promised great solutions to difficult problems which we could not handle in that situation.

In China, there’s a widespread belief that empty talk endangers the nation, practical work brings prosperity. There’s no doubt that our team talked too much but acted too little. We should have spent more time on data analytics to answer client’s questions, make future plans, and most importantly, provide desired solutions.

It’s a good lesson to us that we should always keep humble and honest with clients regarding what we could do and what we could not. Action speaks louder than words and we should have done more than we promised. After all, in a business analytics project, solutions can only be found through data analytics, not merely promises without gaining sufficient understanding of data.

No data analytics, no delivery

As we’re approaching the end of the project, we plan to make an interactive Excel worksheet, which works better to our client, as our final delivery. To make the worksheet more attractive and user-friendly, we’ve been working hard on interface design. However, the core value of the Excel worksheet should not be the interface but the story that the data tells. It’s obvious that the worksheet could be totally useless if the data is wrong or it leads us to make worse decisions, no matter how fancy it looks.

Therefore, we won’t make the same mistake as we did before this time. Our team is working tirelessly on data analytics, including data cleaning, data integration, data modeling, and data visualization. We are putting data analytics at the center of our final delivery and exerting all our efforts to help the client to extract business insights from it and make better decisions. Hopefully, our data-focused delivery could answer some of the most challenging problems for the client and create more values for them in the future.

Conclusion

The article What Great Data Analysts Do — and Why Every Organization Needs Them explains the importance of different roles in a team, such as data analyst, data scientist, project manager, and software engineer, and also emphasizes the dangers of under-appreciating the values of data analytics, which makes a lot of sense in the real business world.

In the real world and our practicum project, we’ve been suffering too much from blind modeling and statistical inferences to set unclear and unachievable direction or goal. We’ve been suffering too much from promising a lot but delivering a little without really looking into the data. So our team will definitely place data analytics at the core from now on and work together to present a final delivery.