Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Wells and Kathy Chiang. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750–8400, fax (978) 646–8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748–6011, fax (201) 748–6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762–2974, outside the United States at (317) 572–3993 or fax (317) 572–4002.
Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:
ISBN 978-1-119-35624-0 (Hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-119-35626-4 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-1-119-35625-7 (ePub)
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © SergeyNivens/iStockphoto
Kathy Williams Chiang:
To my parents, Si and Patty Jean Williams, who have believed in me longer than anyone else.
Andrew Roman Wells:
To my loving wife, Suzannah, who is a constant source of encouragement, love, and positive energy. And to my parents, Diana and Maitland, who instilled in me a love of numbers and a spirit of entrepreneurship.
The purpose of this book is to enable you to build monetization strategies enabled through analytical solutions that help managers and executives navigate through the sea of data to make quality decisions that drive revenue. However, this process is fraught with challenges. The first challenge is to distill the flood of information. We have a step-by-step process, Decision Architecture Methodology, that takes you from hypothesis to building an analytical solution. This process is guided by your monetization strategy, where you build decision matrixes to make economic tradeoffs for various actions. Through guided analytics, we show you how to build your analytical solution and leverage the disciplines of UI/UX to present your story with high impact and dashboard development to automate the analytical solution.
The real power of our method comes from tying together a set of disciplines, methods, tools, and skillsets into a structured process. The range of disciplines include Data Science, Decision Theory, Behavioral Economics, Decision Architecture, Data Development and Architecture, UI/UX Development, and Dashboard Development, disciplines rarely integrated into one seamless process. Our methodology brings these disciplines together in an easy-to-understand step-by-step approach to help organizations build solutions to monetize their data assets.
Some of the benefits you will receive from this book include:
This book is not about selling your internal data to other companies or consumers. Nor is it a deep dive into each of the various disciplines. Rather, we provide you with an overview of the various disciplines and the techniques we use most often to build these solutions.
For Andrew, one of your authors, the process of building monetization solutions started in 2003 when he was the Director of Business Intelligence at Capital One. The standard of that era was to provide analytics that were informational in nature. Whether the reporting was for marketing or operations, the information was automated with the gathering, grouping, and aggregating of data into a few key metrics displayed on a report. What Andrew did not know then, was that these reports lacked the intelligence and diagnostic framework to yield action. During this era, the solutions he developed were assigned an economic value to the analysis as a whole, but not to each individual action to drive quality decisions. Over the past decade, he has worked to refine the analytical solutions brought to his clients that have culminated in many of the methods and techniques prescribed in this book.
Kathy, your other author, over her many years in business planning and forecasting, was continually frustrated by the inability to trace business issues to their root cause. The high cost of IT infrastructure at the time constrained the delivery of analytic information through reporting systems that aggregated the data, losing the ability to explore the character and relationships of the underlying transactional data. She began her journey through the wonderful world of big data in 2009 when she signed on to help the Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago (TSTT) develop a strategic analytics system with the goal of integrating transactional data into business planning processes. Through this assignment, Kathy learned the power of data visualization tools, like Tableau, that connect managers and analysts directly to the data, and the importance of developing analytic data marts to prevent frustrating dead-ends.
Over the course of the past several years, both Kathy and Andrew have worked together to build a variety of solutions that help companies monetize their data. This includes solutions ranging from large Fortune 500 companies to businesses that have under $100 million in revenue. When we first started tackling this problem, one of the key challenges we noticed was the siloed approach to the development and distribution of analytic information. The analyst was using a spreadsheet to do most of their analytical work. The data scientist was working on bigger analytical problems using advanced statistical methods. The IT team was worried about distributing enterprise reports to be consumed by hundreds or thousands of users. Small analytical projects that often lead to the biggest returns for the organization would fall into the gaps between the silos, unable to compete for organizational attention.
As we were building our solutions, we noticed several gaps in the current methods and tools, which led us to develop our own methodology building from the best practices in these various disciplines. One gap that is being closed by new tools is the easier access to data for managers. Where in the past, if a manager wanted to build an analytical solution, they were often limited to analysis in MS Excel or standing up an IT project, which could be lengthy and time consuming, today, data visualization and analysis tools such as Tableau, QlikView, and Power BI give the average business user direct access to a greater volume and scope of data with less drain on IT resources.
This move toward self-service analytics is a big trend that will continue for the next several years. Much of the IT role will transition to enterprise scale analytics and building data environments for analysis. This new paradigm will allow for faster innovation as analysts become empowered with new technology and easier access to data.
As the tools have gotten better and business users have direct access to more information than ever before, they are encountering the need to be aware of and deal with data quality issues masked by the cleansed reporting solutions they accessed in the past. Users must now learn data cleaning techniques and the importance of maintaining data standards and data quality.
One benefit that has come with the increased capabilities of these tools is better User Interface (UI) and User Design (UX) functionality. The usability of an analytical solution is often dictated by the ability to understand and interface with the data. We see prettier dashboards now, but not necessarily geared toward usability or guiding someone through a story. As more analysts and managers begin creating their own reporting solutions, they often build an informational solution that helps them “read the news” versus building a diagnostic to help them manage to a decision that drives action.
Another gap we noticed centers around Data Science and Decision Theory, which are not well deployed in analytical solutions. We began integrating these disciplines into our practice several years ago and they are now integral components. These techniques include: choice architecture, understanding cognitive bias, decision trees, cluster analysis, segmentation, thresholds, and correlations.
Few solutions provide monetization strategies allowing the manager to weigh the economic value tradeoffs of various actions. In adding this method to our solutions, we noticed a considerable uptick in quantifiable value we delivered to our clients and an increase in usage of these analytical solutions.
Closing these gaps and putting it all together was a process of trial and error. Some things worked in some situations and not others while some things we tried did not work at all. After several iterations, we believe our methodology is ready for broader consumption. It is truly unique in that it brings together a varied set of disciplines and best practices to help organizations build analytical solutions to monetize their data. We humbly share our experience, tools, methods, and techniques with you.
We owe a large measure of gratitude to everyone who has helped contribute to the development of this book and to those who have helped us along our life's journey.
Thank you, Michael Andrews, for welcoming us into your store, walking us through the business of Michael Andrews Bespoke, and serving as an outstanding case study. The way you strive for excellence and provide white-glove customer service is an inspiration to all of us.
Thank you to Amanda Hand, Lloyd Lay, and Jeff Forman for your assistance in developing and editing several of the chapters and conducting the survey. Your guidance and counsel was invaluable.
Thank you to Jason Reiling, Doug McClure, Alex Clarke, Dev Koushik, Alex Durham, and countless others who participated in the interview and survey process. We appreciate the time and energy that you gave to help us understand the current environment and issues that you are encountering.
Bill Franks and Justin Honaman, thank you for your advice and wisdom in the book-writing process and opening up your networks to provide us with an insider's perspective on what it takes to write a great book. In addition, many thanks to the team at Wiley for taking a leap of faith in us.
We would like to thank many of our clients, including: The Coca-Cola Company, The Home Depot, RGA, Grady Hospital, AT&T, TSTT, Genuine Parts Company, Carters, Cox, Turner, SITA, and Macys. We would like to give special thanks to the team at IHG for their support: Quentin, Alex, Tae, Ryan, Jia, Michelle, Ivy, Lisa, Joe, and many others.
Kathy would like to say a few words:
None of us achieve anything of import alone. In the immortal words of John Donne, “No man is an island.” And so, in writing this book, I, too, stand on the shoulders of those who went before me, those who mentored me and encouraged me to do my best, to strive for more, to find my own way in the world. It is impossible to name everyone whom I have traveled with but I remember each and every one in my thoughts. I would like to mention a few who have been particularly helpful in my journey. I would like to thank my mentors, AJ Robison, Kinny Roper, John Hartman, Robert Peon, Carl Wilson, Trevor Deane, Linda McQuade, and Stuart Kramer, who believed in me, saw my potential, and invested in my development. I would like to thank my loving husband, Fuling Chiang, who has stood by me from the beginning and makes my coffee every morning. And finally, I would like to thank my children, Sean and Christine, who lovingly accepted their fate with a working mom without complaining.
In addition, Andrew would like to thank the following people:
Thank you to my fellow members of Young Presidents Organization for igniting a spark that gave me the idea and confidence to write a book and the invaluable friendship and advice I received from so many of you. Thank you to Aaron Edelheit and JP James for being an inspiration that anything is possible.
Thank you to the entire Aspirent team for your expertise and hard work every day to deliver outstanding solutions to our clients. In addition, thank you for your help in writing this book and creating our monetization website and collateral.
Thank you to my family, Diana, Jen, Rick, April, Ada, Ayden, Adley, and Wanda. And finally, and most importantly, thank you to Suzannah for supporting me during the many nights and weekends that it took to write this book. I appreciate your loving patience and understanding.
Andrew Roman Wells is the CEO of Aspirent, a management consulting firm focused on analytics. He has extensive experience building analytical solutions for a wide range of companies, from Fortune 500s to small nonprofits. Andrew focuses on helping organizations utilize their data to make impactful decisions that drive revenue through monetization strategies. He has been building analytical solutions for over 25 years and is excited to share these practical methods, tools, and techniques with a wider audience.
In addition to his role as an executive, Andrew is a hands-on consultant, which he has been since his early days building reporting solutions as a consultant at Ernst & Young. He refined his craft in Silicon Valley, working for two successful startups focused on customer analytics and the use of predictive methods to drive performance. Andrew has also held executive roles in industry as Director of Business Intelligence at Capital One where he helped drive several patented analytical innovations. From consulting, to startup companies, to being in industry, Andrew has had a wide variety of experience in driving growth through analytics. He has built solutions for a wide variety of industries and companies, including The Coca-Cola Company, IHG, The Home Depot, Capital One, Wells Fargo, HP, Time Warner, Merrill Lynch, Applied Materials, and many others.
Andrew lives in Atlanta with his wife, Suzannah, and he enjoys photography, running, and international travel. He is a co-owner at Michael Andrews Bespoke. Andrew earned a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration with a focus on Finance and Management Information Systems from the University of Georgia.
Kathy Williams Chiang is an established Business Analytics practitioner with expertise in guided analytics, analytic data mart development, and business planning. Prior to her current position as VP, Business Insights, at Wunderman Data Management, Ms. Chiang consulted with Aspirent on numerous analytic projects for several multinational clients, including IHG and Coca Cola, among others. She has also worked for multinational corporations, including Telecommunications Systems of Trinidad and Tobago, Acuity Brands Lighting, BellSouth International, and Portman Overseas.
Ms. Chiang is experienced in designing and developing analytic tools and management dashboards that inform and drive action. She is highly skilled in data exploration, analysis, visualization, and presentation and has developed solutions in telecom, hospitality, and consumer products industries covering customer experience, marketing campaigns, revenue management, and web analytics.
Ms. Chiang, a native of New Orleans, holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry, summa cum laude, with University honors (4.0), from Louisiana State University, as well as an MBA from Tulane University and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Mensa. Among the first wave of Americans to enter China following normalization of relations, Ms. Chiang lived in northeast China under challenging conditions for two years, teaching English, learning Mandarin Chinese, and traveling extensively throughout China. Over her career, she has worked in the United States, Caribbean, UK, Latin America, and China.