How should an analytics consulting company be selected?
What is analytics consulting?
Data analytics consulting (or business analytics consulting) is, at its core, guidance on how to leverage data to make better business decisions.
What does an analytics consultant do?
Analytics consultants are often hired to build analytical assets for an organization, such as interactive dashboards, analyses, or data science models. In other cases, the analytics consultant might be hired to train your team on one or more analytics tools like Power BI, Python, or SQL or analytics techniques like A/B testing, regression, or machine learning. Through this training, your in-house analytics team should be able to more efficiently and effectively build analytical assets in the future. Finally, an analytics consultant could be hired to provide guidance on how to go about implementing an entire analytics transformation. In general, you could say that an analytics consultant simply provides some form of data consulting services. Clearly, there is no “one-size-fits-all” option when it comes to analytics consulting; so the first step an analytics consultant often does is work with an organization to determine the objectives of the engagement. A good analytics consultant can help you determine what’s possible and help brainstorm ways analytics projects could drive value for your organization.
Put another way, an analytics consultant job description might look something like the following:
Roles & Responsibilities
- Brainstorm high value use cases based on the organization’s challenges and opportunities and what data is available
- Help companies execute prioritized use cases through building interactive dashboards, analyses, and data science models
- Train and mentor analytics teams on advanced analytics concepts
- Guide organizations on how to take their analytics to the next level of maturity in order to ultimately make a higher quantity of higher quality decisions with data
Skills Required
- Rigorous analytical thinking skills
- Excellent interactive visualization skills in Power BI and/or Tableau
- Excellent SQL skills applied in a variety of SQL platforms
- Strong knowledge of advanced analytics tools like Python, R, and/or SAS
- Ability to create robust data science models
- Strong attention to detail
- Works efficiently to meet deadlines
- Ability to translate complex technical concepts in a way that non-technical stakeholders can appreciate
- Ability to translate analytical insights into recommended actions
As you can see, the standard for an analytics consultant is quite high and it takes years of hard work, learning, and innovation to qualify! Should you decide to work with Value Driven Analytics, rest assured that you’ll get robust deliverables and recommendations from an analytics expert.
What is predictive analytics consulting?
Predictive analytics consulting is a subcategory of data analytics consulting that focuses on building an algorithm that forecasts a future value or the likelihood of something happening. For instance, a firm might hire a predictive analytics consultant to build a model that predicts the likelihood that web visitors will purchase a product. In this example, the model might be created by using a machine learning algorithm to analyze the historical relationship between web visitors’ attributes/actions and whether/how much the visitor purchases. Another example could be a predictive analytics consultant building a time series model that forecasts future sales based on historical trend and seasonality. Whatever your predictive analytics use case is, Value Driven Analytics can help you build your model in a robust, affordable, and timely manner.
What is digital analytics consulting?
Digital analytics consulting is a subcategory of data analytics consulting that typically focuses on applying analytics concepts to website or app data, often in order to identify changes to the digital asset that could create more value. For instance, a firm might hire a digital analytics consultant to analyze historical page view patterns on the site to determine which ones lead to visitors converting to sales.
Outside of ecommerce companies, many firms have customers who may browse their website, but actually make the purchase in a physical store or over the phone. In order to perform an accurate website conversion analysis in these cases, the company must first implement digital data integration (DDI). Whereas customer data integration (CDI) involves unifying offline customer interactions into a single record per person/household, digital data integration (DDI) involves unifying online customer interactions into a single record per person/household and, in some cases, even linking to offline purchases.
If your organization is looking for rigorous dashboarding, analysis, or modeling applied to your website or app data, Value Driven Analytics can help identify and execute analytics projects that will optimize conversion on your digital asset.
What is the difference between an analytic consultant and a data analyst?
While an analytics consultant would work for a separate company that specialized in analytics, a data analyst would work directly for your company. Both an analytics consultant and a data analyst would be seeking ways to use data to drive value for the organization. One unique thing about an analytics consultant is that they typically get to work with many different companies each year; so they have a lot of exposure to different ways of setting up and performing analytics across industries and companies, which can help provide good context. On the other hand, as an in-house employee, a data analyst usually comes to know their industry, company, and data very well since they’re always working on projects within the same company.
Some might ask if a data analyst can be a consultant. We believe the answer is yes. An in-house data analyst may currently be working for one firm, but that analyst could have worked for several companies and across several functional areas in the past, which provides them with that varied experience that is more similar to an analytics consultant. The answer also lies in how the data analyst works. Does the analyst typically wait to be asked to work a specific project by stakeholders? This is more in line with a “data analyst” role. On the other hand, if the internal data analyst is proactively identifying and pursing analytics projects and discussing ways to help their stakeholders with analytics, this “data analyst” is indeed acting very much like an “analytics consultant”.
What position is above data analyst?
The position that comes after data analyst ultimately depends on the organization. Some organizations might have a data analyst II role that would be a level up from a data analyst. Others might go straight to a senior data analyst role. Getting to a level 2 or senior level would generally indicate that the analyst has proven to have strong analytics skills, able to independently create accurate analytics projects in a timely manner. Some might even eventually call the data analyst a data scientist if they’ve proven to be able to rigorously build data science models. At smaller organizations in particular, none of these may exist and the next step for data analyst might be a team lead or manager.
How is data analytics consulting for small business different?
When it comes to small and medium-sized businesses, data analytics consulting solutions could be especially attractive because the company may not have the budget for a dedicated full-time analyst. With Value Driven Analytics, these companies can get a rigorous analytics product at an affordable price without being locked into an analyst’s salary. Read more about what makes Value Driven Analytics different.
Where is data analytics used?
These days, data analytics is used in every industry and in nearly every functional area (sales, marketing, operations, etc..) at nearly every company. It is no longer something that just technology companies are using, although they tend to use the most sophisticated forms of data analytics. With so many companies using data analytics to make better decisions, firms who are not using much analytics today may decide to hire an analytics consultant to help them simply keep up with the competition.
But could data analytics actually be a competitive advantage for your firm, even while so many other firms are already leveraging analytics? At Value Driven Analytics, the answer is a resounding yes! Even though nearly every company is already employing some form of analytics, very little (often less than 50%!) is actually value driven analytics. That is, organizations are spending a majority share of their analytics resources on projects that don’t end up driving value. This is where the opportunity to make data analytics a competitive advantage comes in! If your organization can take a disciplined approach to prioritize analytics projects that are truly actionable and consistently conduct these projects in a rigorous way that actually leads to identifying optimal decisions, analytics would indeed be a competitive advantage. While this is much easier said than done, Value Driven Analytics can help your organization with both of these aspects.
