Professional Documents
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Analytics Consulting
Contributed By
Prasanna Parthasarathy
Currently with Infosys Technologies as Associate Consultant –
Business Intelligence-Enterprise Solution
Alumnus of Bharathidasan Institute of Management
Analytics Consulting
In such a scenario focus is back on how to improve upon the elusive ‘Net Profit’
figure. The answer probably lies not in ‘volume selling’ but in ‘intelligent selling’
and a host of other initiatives called together as ‘Analytics consulting’.
After Finance and Manufacturing industries Retail is one the biggest spender on
IT. Present size of Retail industry worldwide is XXX bn USD and with an
estimated spending of Y% of revenues on IT, it turns out to be sizeable ZZ bn
USD. Though data is not readily available to ascertain the pie of Analytics
consulting from this, rough estimates for Business Intelligence spend provide a
figure of AA mn USD. It is to be noted IT organisations can look forward to gain
10% of this in near future.
Also, please note that Analytics consulting is only the area suggested by us to
begin with to be a player in much bigger area of opportunity known as Analytics
Consulting.
2. Targeted Market
Retailers across the world.
3. Service Idea
“The key in business is to know something that nobody else knows.”
— Aristotle Onassis
“To understand is to perceive patterns.”
— Sir Isaiah Berlin
Analytics consulting is sometimes described as the ‘Complete Thought’
involving both the ‘Left Brain’ (Logical, objective; sees the details) and the
‘Right Brain’ (Intuitive, subjective; gets the big picture).
Customer Product
Workbenches can be used to build applications when the retail problem is not
well-defined or when there are many problems. The predictive modeling
workbenches such as SAS Enterprise Miner, SPSS Clementine, IBM
Intelligent Miner For Data, Insightful Miner and ANGOSS are a good fit
under these circumstances - when an enterprise will confront a diversity of
opportunities or when the problem is not well defined in advance - as well as
when the team does not want to code directly in the underlying statistical
language such as SAS, SPSS or S-Plus.
Differentiators
In data warehousing, the analyst asks a question of the data set with a predefined
set of conditions and qualifications, and a known output structure. This is the
traditional data cube - what customers are buying or using what product or service
and when and where are they doing so? Typically, the question is represented in a
piece of SQL against a relational database. The business insight needed to craft
the question to be answered by the data warehouse remains hidden in a black box
- the analyst's head.
Data mining gives us tools with which to engage in question formulation based
primarily on the "law of large numbers" of classic statistics. Predictive analytics
has introduced decision trees, neural networks and other pattern matching
algorithms constrained by data percolation. It is true that, in doing so,
technologies such as neural networks have themselves become a black box.
However, neural networks and related technologies have enabled significant
progress in automating, formulating and answering questions not previously
envisioned. In science, such a practice is called "hypothesis formation," where the
hypothesis is treated as a question to be defined, validated and refuted or
analytics. Breakthroughs often occur in the application of the tools and methods
to new commercial opportunities.
Recommendations
Enterprises should look for tools that offer a wide variety of high-performance
statistical functions for data preparation and analytic algorithms for predictive
modeling and inference. Enterprises should take a cross-functional approach to
predictive analytics. In particular, enable collaboration between business owners,
IT data preparation and deployment, and statisticians in order to gain the benefits
of predictive analytics in incremental revenue opportunities.