Idea 11: Your data analytics consulting services partner
“If you don’t know what’s happening with your organisation or customers, it’s hard to improve performance.” This comment by Teangi Shoesmith, Senior Consulting Developer at Idea 11, is all the more relevant now as business data grows exponentially.
For many SMBs, huge amounts of essential data often sits idle and untapped – never reaching its full potential. Whether it be sales, customer or critical staff input, having the ability to dissect and analyse this information is key to helping you get value from your data as quickly as possible.
For those with little or no access to this analytic expertise, how exactly can you extract the information you need and transform data into a valuable corporate asset?
That’s where external data analytics consulting services come in.
From improving the customer experience and supporting long-term growth, to increasing efficiency, productivity, and overall profitability, modern data and analytics capabilities have changed the way we do business.
Let’s explore how.
The key drivers for data and analytics capabilities
For businesses across a range of industries – including construction, education, finance and the public service – the ability to make informed business decisions requires looking at data as a whole, not just within individual and decentralised data silos.
This can be difficult to do on your own.
By leveraging the right tools and data analytics consulting services, organisations can gain greater insights into previously murky territory. It’s this unrealised and underutilised information that provides all businesses with greater visibility into data storage, formatting, governance, and ongoing costs.
This newfound clarity is essential for addressing challenges with staff performance and budget constraints as well as discovering improvements in areas such as collaboration, projected ROI and other industry insights.
Types of data analytics
So for those who might require the support of advanced data & analytics, which type of analytics will help you make the most accurate decisions?
When extracting value from data, these three types of data & analytics will get you where you need to be.
- Descriptive: The most common type of analytics. These are basic reporting capabilities that provide you with a surface level insight into your business functions.
- Predictive: Predictive analytics correlates existing data patterns to help make accurate predictions – vital for identifying trends and streamlining future planning.
- Prescriptive: Once future outcomes have been predicted, prescriptive analytics determine the potential solutions to these outcomes, giving you a competitive advantage that simply wasn’t possible before.
“The first part of the journey is to understand the current state with Descriptive Analytics,” says Teangi. “Once you’ve got that, you can do more of the predictive and prescriptive tasks. However, all three work together,” he adds.
Starting the data and analytics journey
“With new clients, the first thing we do is identify what they’re trying to achieve, whether it’s general or for a specific purpose,” says Teangi.
Regardless of your desired outcomes, the same process is followed.
- Discovery - Input the raw data
- Implementation - Filter, sanitise and enrich data
- Reporting - Build curated data sets
Discovery
The first step is to identify different data sets in the organisation and determine which are of most interest.
“Many customers come to us saying they have maybe ten data sets. But we find they may have hundreds, and we can help them identify which of those are useful.’ explains Teangi.
In fact, identifying relevant data is one of the biggest challenges facing organisations today, as it’s often too big a job to be done by in-house IT staff who lack the skills or expertise to do it well. This is where finding expert support becomes vital.
Ultimately, if this step isn’t done thoroughly and correctly, the following steps become near impossible.
Implementation
Next, it’s critical to prioritise which raw data is to be ingested and complete this in stages as to avoid ending up with an unwanted data overload. Once this is complete, our sanitising process ensures all of your data is exact and relevant, allowing you to gain the most accurate overview of your whole data set.
Reporting
Creating curated data sets ensures data is fit for purpose, removing the need to complete the same calculations over and over again.
For example, a curated data set might include three to four different types of data needed to deliver specific insights as part of a specific report. Done with the right data and analytics capabilities, a considered and curated data set can now also be used for multiple reports, giving you a clearer picture of your organisation’s ins and outs.
As part of our advanced data & analytics consulting services, we build these reports as standard. Generally, Microsoft PowerBI is the reporting tool of choice since most clients already have Microsoft licences. However, clients have the flexibility to explore other reporting tools. Dashboards are a feature we can also offer upon request, to provide wider access to information.
A flexible approach is paramount
For some of our clients, they have teams of data analysts that simply require self-service tools. For others, a lack of time, skills and resources can result in analysts who are unable to bring all of their data together in a meaningful way.
Others again may have the technical know-how to build an effective data lake but are unsure about best practice and are understandably apprehensive to move forward on their own.
A flexible approach is key to accommodating any and all requirements.
Thankfully, as one of Australia’s leading data & analytics partners, we’re happy to do the design for them, reducing the chance of heartache down the line if a particular direction proves to be unsustainable.
“Over the years, there have been dozens of competing data lake technologies, and we have experience in many of them,” says Teangi, “we see ourselves primarily as an enabler, helping our clients get the most value out of their data, and we’re willing to go the extra mile to keep our clients happy”.
The right tools make all the difference
As a long time Databricks partner, our expertise in this analytics powerhouse allows us to process, transform and explore large amounts of data all on one cloud platform supporting the three key roles in data management:
- Data engineers who input data and process it
- Data analysts who interrogate the data and find insights
- Data scientists who focus on predictive analysis
“We’ve built a number of data lakes and identified common challenges of flexibility and scalability across organisations,” says Teangi Shoesmith. “But our Databricks partnership is able to address those challenges, reducing the effort to change or update data pipelines. We haven’t seen another service that does it as well as Databricks,” he adds.
Move fast with the Data & Analytics Accelerator Program
A unique feature of our data analytics consulting service is its Accelerator Program. After many years of working with clients across a broad spectrum of industries and projects, we’ve discovered many common problems and contributing factors to stalled and untapped data analytics. The Accelerator Program recognises issues sooner and gets results faster.
“Our Data & Analytics Accelerator Program helps clients to get value more quickly than going down the classic discovery and design path before implementation,” says Teangi.
When organisations use discovery and design, it will often take two weeks just to formulate an approach. With the Data & Analytics Accelerator Program, Idea 11 can build an end-to-end data and analytics solution from ingestion to reporting in the same amount of time.
The rapid speed is made possible by controlling the initial scope of the solution and using standardised building blocks. Clients can then road test it and decide if they want to adjust or expand on it. That’s easy to do because it’s specifically designed for scale.
Tap into the full potential of your data
“The main reason I enjoy data and analytics is because it’s often very little effort to get a huge gain, whether it’s financial, organisational or anything else. It’s exciting because you can get amazing insights to make better decisions,” says Teangi.
A good example is his current project for an influential Queensland organisation. They have a lot of data, and Idea 11 is helping them leverage it.
Using insights gained from the information, this organisation will be able to determine trends, and assess the best plan of action to grow their sales.
Endless possibilities with Data Analytics Consulting Services
Data and Analytics are the path to an informed future, offering you the chance to make better and faster decisions about all aspects of business.
No longer just the privilege of multinationals and the world’s largest corporations, using data to drive better business performance is within reach of everybody. By leveraging advanced data analytics software and an expert data & analytics consulting service, even small to medium businesses can take advantage of their cloud infrastructure to start gaining crucial insights.
Thanks to our industry leading Data & Analytics Accelerator Program, you can begin extracting value from data in two weeks – opening up a whole new horizon of business possibilities that simply weren’t possible before.
To empower your organisation, and harness untapped data to make meaningful business decisions, get in touch about our Data & Analytics Accelerator today.