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Business Tip 26
Embedding Usability in Analytics to Develop Best Practices
The Challenge
Your organization, no doubt, has some great thinkers - people who can conceptualize and create insightful and elegant analyses that drive your business forward. Unfortunately for most organizations, these people are in short supply. In a perfect world, you would have these thought-leaders in every client-facing engagement. The reality is that you cannot, and instead, must come up with a way to provide the best practices that your thought-leaders develop to every member of the team, in any situation.
The Solution
If you think about most of the analyses you perform, there are two major components that can be viewed separately:
- The Conceptual Analysis The Conceptual Analysis is the fundamental structure of the problem you are trying to address. For instance, at the heart of every single share slide you've ever developed is the very simple algebra Share=[(Value of a member of a group) / (Value of the whole group)]*100. This equation never changes, whether you're looking at market share of a retailer, share of a category, or some other share calculation.
- The Business Application The Business Application is the process of taking the Conceptual Analysis and using it to solve a real-world problem. Staying with the Share example, it is easy to see how the same calculation could be used to answer any of the following questions: "What is my product's dollar share of the category?", "What is my customer's volume share of the New York Market?", or "What is my top sales team's share of product sales across the USA?"
The few people in your organization who are capable of combining these two components to drive unique insights are your thought-leaders. At the front lines of your organization are individuals who face real business issues every day that call for the Business Application of Conceptual Analytics. Instead of trying to put your best analyst in every engagement or trying to convert your sales team into analysts, take a step back and leverage your thought-leaders to develop Conceptual Analyses that can be handed to the front-lines of the organization and easily applied to many different business situations. The confluence of innovative analyses and hands-on business acumen yields a true Best Practice, and ultimately a Competitive Advantage.
Example
Let's take a look at the Source of Volume Analysis. This is an example of a Conceptual Analysis. Basically, this analysis aims to dissect the total volume of an item by the factors that contribute to that volume with the end goal of identifying opportunities for improvement. Typically, this type of analysis is displayed as a bubble chart like the one below:
The Source of Volume Analysis can be applied to many different business solutions, depending on the data points fed through it. Take a look at the following three examples, where this Conceptual Analysis is used for three very different Business Applications:
Source of Volume Analysis by City
Source of Volume Analysis by Product Type
Source of Volume Analysis Consumer Focused
In this case, XP3 was used to create a single analysis (complete with findings, formatting, etc.) and iterated out across different business situations and data sets. XP3 offers a second-generation system for business templates that allow thought-leaders to define flexible Conceptual Analytics, and provide them to end-users for use with any set of data, for any business situation. Whether you are using cutting edge technology like XP3, or performing analytics the old-fashioned way, try to create and distribute true best practices and you will see significant improvements in the productivity of your organization.
The data, products and accounts depicted in this example are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual data, products or accounts is purely coincidental.
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