By Hannah Evans
Sound familiar?
All businesses have data. But whether it is used to drive business value is another question entirely. Traditionally, technical analysts have made decisions about data technology, without truly understanding the business challenges beforehand, meaning that uses cases are retrospectively fitted in order to demonstrate return on investment. Increasingly, there is a requirement for organisations to align both business and technical stakeholders to ensure the business challenges are translated to the right technical solution from the outset.
To demonstrate this, let’s use the example of Mr Claus in the North Pole. Mr Claus is the largest toy manufacturer and distributer in the world, ‘Christmas Inc’. Each year Mr Claus has to deliver gifts to 700 million children worldwide in one night; a task that does not come without its challenges. To make his life (and his elves’) lives easier, Mr Claus would like to start analysing datasets collected from the grotto to optimise his ecosystem. Rather than investing in a large scale technology platform, like Hadoop, Mr Claus wants to ensure the ‘data insight’ he gets, answers all his business challenges –the business challenges will ultimately dictate the technologies the technical elves set up in the workshop.
So what are Mr Claus’ business challenges? They range from HR to supply chain logistics, to customer profiling and demand forecasting. By asking questions in the right way, the technical elves will be able to translate the business question into an appropriate technical solution and subsequently define the relevant business processes. Mr Claus draws upon a data scientist from Mango to facilitate this discussion between business and technical elves.
1. What are the current stock levels of each manufactured toy that I make?
2. What are my elf productivity levels today?
3. How many days are there until Christmas?
4. How many children have sent me letters …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com