Your organisation’s first analytics project

In my last blog, we looked at the investment an organisation needs to make to get started with analytics. In that article I explained that building an analytics platform and hiring a data science team was a big commitment. Instead, a ‘quick-win’ analytics project that partners with experienced practitioners can bring value forward while slowly scaling up the investment.

Getting started on your first project is where prior experience of running and implementing analytics projects is invaluable. Developing the future technical architecture is a ‘must-have’ before embarking upon that first project. The advent of cloud solutions, particularly the Microsoft Azure suite of offerings, allows a cost-effective and scalable analytics platform to be deployed.

Determining the first project should be a fusion-decision between the data that is available, and the challenges the business is currently experiencing. Also, there should be no concern over the type of analytics that will be deployed, as many of the projects with the biggest return on investment, do not necessarily need a complex machine learning algorithm.

The diagram below shows a sample prioritisation model for sifting through the potential projects you might be considering.

• the data available and its quality
• effort to complete
• skills required (and availability)
• ease of implementation (including technology and training).

With the advent of cloud solutions, such as Microsoft Azure, analytics can be concentrated, scalable, and deployable across geographies and teams relatively cheaply and easily. Those same cloud solutions enable analytics as a transformation exercise to be managed more efficiently and effectively. Ownership from business managers, who will ultimately benefit from the analytics is key here. They will likely need to implement changes to processes and KPIs resulting from the analytics, therefore change management will also need to be considered.

Breadcrumb Digital has the experience, knowledge, and skills to help organisations of all sizes successfully define and implement an analytics strategy and analytical projects (including that important ‘quick-win’ project). What that implementation looks like will vary depending upon each individual case, but it will not require a huge up-front investment, and it will accelerate you on the path to value in your organisation.