Making a business impact

1. Making a business impact

Hi, and welcome to this course on forming analytical questions. My name is Konstantinos, and I'll be your instructor.

2. The data-driven path to success!

I'm sure that you have heard many times that data-driven decision-making is the path to business success. Business decisions made wholly based on intuition or prevalent theory can lead to poor decision-making due to false assumptions or biases. Data analytics can help companies better serve customers and optimize processes through stronger evidence to support decisions. But, how do we ensure that we focus on the right areas? And how do we select the right solutions that maximize the value from analytics?

3. The "Value from Analytics" workflow

To help achieve a strong impact from analytics initiatives, I would like to present to you a simplified six-step workflow that focuses on understanding what the goals of the business are, defining the business questions, translating them into analytical problems, and finally, finding analytics solutions that solve these problems. We will call this the "Value from Analytics" workflow. Now, let's go through these steps in more detail.

4. Know the strategic business goals

Companies typically have strategic business goals. These are simply predetermined targets that companies want to achieve over a set period. Just like a compass provides direction and helps navigate a path, business teams are aware of these goals which give purpose and direction on where to focus their efforts.

5. Define the business questions

Step 2, define the business questions that need to be answered. Usually business teams drill down further to focus on team-level goals that will ultimately impact the strategic goals. Subsequently, these team-level goals will result in business questions that need to be answered or problems that need to be solved. For example: Why is customer churn increasing? or How can we increase the product sales of existing customers?

6. Form the analytical questions

The business questions often don’t provide enough direction to allow the analytics team to perform analysis. Hence, these questions should be further translated into analytical questions so that the analytics team can generate hypotheses. Questions that will allow them to use data and analytics methods to address the business problem. This is the step where we are moving from the business environment to the analytical environment through the translation process. An example of an analytical question is: What are the main drivers of customer churn based on the past sales data?

7. Select the analytical solutions

Step 4, Select the analytical solutions to answer the analytical questions. Once the analytics questions are clearly set, then it is important to select the right analytical approach or solution to answer these questions. The best solution is selected by considering the type of analytical question but also other factors such as data availability and the technical skills of the team. Some examples of analytical solutions include Regression analysis, Time-series analysis, and forecasting.

8. Develop & deliver the analytical solutions

In step 5 the analytics team develops the analytical solutions, and in Step 6, they deliver the analytical solutions to the business teams. This could come in the form of presenting the results through data storytelling or model deployment. In the end, these solutions are translated back into the business language and contribute towards better decision-making.

9. Our focus for this course

In this course, we will deep dive into steps 3 and 4. That is, we will focus on practices to understand the business questions, and practices to translate them into the analytics world or otherwise into well-formed analytical questions. Then, we will go a step further to discover techniques to select the right solutions based on the analytical questions. Solutions that solve the business problem and subsequently create value for the business.

10. Let's practice!

There's a lot to cover, so let's get right to it and check your understanding!

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