Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

HUMAN CAPITAL

Implementing analytics effectively requires a dynamic multidisciplinary team to be in place and available, in order to achieve the ultimate goal of executing the plan and achieving your business objectives. Talent is a requirement to deliver on every phase of the business analytics solution. Depending on the goals for each of your initiatives, your business analytics implementation team for each project may need to include the following skills:

• Project management
• Data modeling
• Data programming in SAS, SPSS, R, SPlus, and so on
• Database extraction and manipulation
• Multivariate statistics
• Data mining/exploration
• Data visualization
• Machine learning
• Marketing analytics
• Web analytics
• Unstructured data analytics
• Marketing research
• Competitive intelligence
• Data quality/governance

It may not be necessary for you to hire people with all of these skills into your organization full time. You may be able to hire independent contractors for some of this expertise, using analytics vendors or individual consultants. Either way, it’s important that you map out the skill/capability needs of your organization, based on your critical business goals and corporate culture, so that you may make key analytic staff hires accordingly. Analytical talent is in demand, so it is also extremely important that you offer a clear and compelling career path within your organization for analytics staff members so that they remain engaged and have the opportunity to be rewarded for their performance ...