It’s the results, genius! It’s the results. The purpose of any sort of data analytics or data science is to get results. It isn’t about the spreadsheet that comes three weeks after the campaign. It isn’t about sandbagging numbers. It isn’t the few slides in the Quarterly Business Review. It isn’t even data entertainment. It’s the results. Great! So what’s the deal? Why is so much time expended on activities that don’t directly tie to getting results? Analytics Maturity It’s because of maturity, or the sum of experiences that an organization/culture chooses to remember. Very good models of analytics maturity exist. Stephane Hamel has a great one. Stances inform tools and tools cause experiences. Where you stand affects which, if[…]
Author: Christopher Berry
Planning is preparation of the mind. It’s impossible to quantify every variable, every assumption, and every potential future state. Attempting to do so will simply boil the ocean and frustrate everybody around you. Analytics leaders tend to be very specific types of folk. Here are a few heuristics that might be useful for us in particular. Backcasting Backcasting is primarily an expression of preferences. The exercise almost always begins with an enunciation of a preferred, desirable, future state. Consider the following statement: “By 2016, we will be a 1 billion dollar company.” Such a statement, be it vision statements, stretch goals, or just goals, are typically not based on any sort of forecast. It’s entirely possible, and very likely, that[…]
Ben Firshman ported a Super Nintendo emulator to javascript. JSNES has a few games (ROMS) ported over too, included Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda 2. That’s pretty cool. Quite a few people grew up with the Super Nintendo. Some of us even looked into going to school to code for it. The code was a form of assembly. It wasn’t abstracted behind a layer of nice language. But I suspect that quite a few shops had kits to make development easier. Developers usually had to manipulate memory directly. They had to. They only had a few memory busses and 21MhZ to work with. No clean garbage collection for them. All of this can now run in a[…]
Forrester’s own David Cooperstein wrote a tour de force in competitive strategy in the age of the consumer. If you have a subscription, it’s well worth a read. The high level summary is that the economy has evolved from competing on factory size, to competing on distribution, to competing on information, to now, competing on consumer. The way that competitive successes will be generated in the future, during this age of the consumer, is by competing on the consumer. You don’t have to buy the thesis to think about it. Here are a few points to consider: Sometimes it really is the thought that counts Identical items, packaged and marketed differently, cause difference in preference, loyalty, and retention in the[…]
A charrette is an intense, collaborative session, that enables designers to draft a solution to a very complex problem. It’s a technique first used by artists. Then designers picked it up. And then later still, urban planners. And then a few brave souls wisely invited stakeholders in on the process. Finally, this approach would evolve into software development and web development. It is very applicable to solving analytical problems. First, consider the natural law below. In analytics, the proportion of what we don’t know always grows as more knowledge is added. The more imaginative the analyst, the steeper the curve. Get three or more analysts into a room together[…]
The fact that Google is looking for an alternative to 3rd Party HTTP Cookies isn’t such a surprise. The cookie retention curve has been under assault for a very long time. What is a surprise is that it made news. Google makes most of it’s money from advertising Google makes the most money from advertising. It’s a giant arbitrage play between you, your attention, and what advertisers want you to pay attention to. Google may collect a lot of data about many things, but the most important data is about you, and the versions of you expressed through browsers and operating systems. The HTTP cookie was an important source of that information for a long time. It’s been expanding it’s[…]
Does it scale? That’s the number 1 question for analytics leadership in 2014. Three Trends Against Our Favour Devices are proliferating and their categorization is blurring. The neat division between desktop and cellphone has blurred into a continuum of browser based experiences and native experiences. This results in an acceleration of new interactions and instrumentation challenges. There are more people entering digital than are effectively trained in digital. Traditional areas of the economy are dying and people are following some of that money into digital. Normally this would be in our favor, but far more people are entering digital that have been, or can be, trained up in a reasonable period of time. It has been September for a long[…]
A Data Strategy is a set of choices that reinforce each other, that are difficult for competitors to replicate, and that generate a sustainable competitive advantage. A Data Strategy is set of choices about data. The benefits are the short-run outcomes. A sustained competitive advantage is a medium to long-run outcome. This post is about the alternatives and outcomes involved in a data strategy. Alternatives Alternatives can be really obvious. The most obvious ones involve fiddling with the settings on instruments that are available to you. In the face of falling intelligence, you can chose to increase the number of spreadsheets, or decrease the number of spreadsheets. And that’s really obvious. Because data, in most organizations, lives in spreadsheets. Less[…]
Are you a member of the Digital Analytics Association? Are you interested in Peer Reviewed Journals? Would you be interested in writing a review? Here’s a selection from the May Wave. Advertising and Consumers’ Communications (2013). The authors model how social media causes strategic considerations for identity brand marketers. Brand identities are tightly connected with market segments. Consumers can cause (unwanted) changes to those brand identities. It’s now long past cliche to say that web 2.0 caused brands to lose control. This paper puts forward some rigorous modelling to quantify those effects, and how the firm might respond. Economic Value of Celebrity Endorsements: Tiger Woods’ Impact on Sales of Nike Golf Balls. (2013) Evidence that celebrity endorsement increases actual sales, not just[…]
Someone asked, at the Digital Strategy Conference Vancouver, what the top 3 analytics tools were. Repeating the answer here: 3. The Bullet Point It’s a powerful communication device. Keep it short. Because people read short bulleted lists. 2. A statistical tool, like R or something else, that can tell you about the relationships among the variables. Understanding the relationships among variables is important for making many decisions. Most tools can’t see outside themselves; or tell you anything about the relationship among variables. R is free; others are not. 1. Your own brain. You use it to understand the world. You use it to make decisions. There is, as of yet, no substitute tool on the market for your own brain.