Implementing An Analytics Initiative

Analytics is all about finding patterns in data and using those patterns to make effective decisions. But if you don’t have a framework for those numbers and trends then it can be hard to place them within the context of the business. Businesses that do not have this framework will not be able to leverage the truly enormous amounts of data people are generating now, and that could lead to competitive disadvantages.

Radhakrishnan is an Enterprise Data Strategy Manager at Discover, talked with a Promotable group recently about how to implement an analytics initiative in your company so that you can leverage analytics in a way that’s useful to everyone in the organization, not just for data geeks.

The Key Takeaways

Radhakrishnan identifies four key elements in an analytics initiative [11:24]: people, processes, technology, and data. The people element is all the stakeholders in the initiative, and it’s important to find out what they want to get out of the data. Which analytics are important to them and why? Analytics is ultimately a people-oriented process. It makes no sense to make an analysis that doesn’t lead to business decisions.

By knowing what people want, it will identify the processes you need to use to get that information. For some things, a simple Google Analytics report is enough. For others, machine learning may have to be used.

Once you know the process, then you can choose technologies to make it happen. Radhakrishnan says that if you are new to analytics then learning SQL should be your first priority. While it not be as shiny as some newer technologies, all the fundamentals of data and analytics start there. The language hasn’t gone out of style.

We don’t want to spoil everything, so be sure to check out the full video. If you like what you’ve learned, take a look at some of the past videos we’ve created with data experts.