Tag: stakeholders

Data analytics lifecycle

What is the data analytics Lifecycle?

The scientific method helps give a framework for the data analytics lifecycle (Dietrich, 2013). According to Dietrich (2013), it is a cyclical life cycle that has iterative parts in each of its six steps:

  • Discovery
  • Pre-processing data
  • Model planning
  • Model building
  • Communicate results
  • Operationalize

However Erl, Buhler, & Khattak (2016), suggested that it is divided in nine steps:

  • Business case evaluation
  • Data identification
  • Data acquisition & filtering
  • Data extraction
  • Data validation & cleansing
  • Data aggregation & representation
  • Data analysis
  • Data visualization
  • Utilization of analysis results

Prajapati (2013), stated five steps:

  • Identifying the problem
  • Designing data requirements
  • Pre-processing data
  • Data analysis
  • Data visualizing

Between these three different lifecycle versions, there is a general pattern that emerges, but it also suggests that the field of data analytics is still too nascent to pin down an exact data analytics lifecycle.  For the purpose of this discussion the lifecycle that will be used is from Services (2015), which uses the Dietrich (2013) lifecycle. Note that both Services (2015) and Dietrich (2013) model is iterative and not static steps.  This lifecycle model allows all key team members to conduct planning work up front and towards the end of the data analytics project to drive success (Dietrich, 2013).

When is it beneficial for stakeholders to be involved?

If following an agile development processes the key stakeholders should be involved in all the lifecycles. That is because the key stakeholders are known as business user, project sponsor, project manager, business intelligence analyst, database administers, data engineer, and data scientist (Services, 2015).  Some of the benefits of applying the Agile development processes to this lifecycle is because it allows for iterative feedback for speed-to-market, improved first-time quality, visibility, risk management, flexibility to pivot when needed, controlling costs, and improved satisfaction through engagement (Waters, 2007).  Allowing the stakeholders to participate in most of these steps can allow the following work to be done to their specifications.

For the first step, discovery, the business learns its domain and its relevant history with lessons learned from previous projects (Services, 2015). Before proceeding ask: “Do I have enough information to draft an analytic plan and share for peer review?” (Dietrich, 2013; Services, 2015). Pre-processing data, also known as data preparation is where a copy of the data is placed in a sandbox (not the original), where the data scientists and team can extract, load and transform (ELT) the copied data (Services, 2015). In this stage, data could also be cleaned, aggregated, augmented, and formatted (Prajapati, 2013). Before proceeding ask: “Do I have enough good quality data to start building the model?” (Dietrich, 2013; Services, 2015). Model planning is when the data scientist and team determines the appropriate models, algorithms, workflow of the data, which helps identify hidden insights between the variables (Services, 2015).  Before proceeding ask: “Do I have a good idea about the type of model to try? Can I refine the analytic plan?” (Dietrich, 2013; Services, 2015). Model building helps sets roughly about 2/3 of the data for training the model and 1/3 of the data for testing the model for production purposes and discovering hidden insights (Prajapati, 2013; Services, 2015). Before proceeding ask: “Is the model robust enough? Have we failed for sure?” (Dietrich, 2013; Services, 2015).   Communicating results could be done visualization of data to the major stakeholders to see if the results are a success or failure (Services, 2015).  Visualization is done in this step is supposed to be interactive with all parties involved in this project (Prajapati, 2013). Finally, the operationalize step is when the data is ready to provide reports, documents, on a pre-defined time interval such that key decision makers could receive the vital data needed (Services, 2015).

References

Business Intelligence: Data Warehouse

A data warehouse is a central database, which contains a collection of decision-related internal and external sources of data for analysis that is used for the entire company (Ahlemeyer-Stubbe & Coleman, 2014). The authors state that there are four main features to data warehouse content:

  • Topic Orientation – data which affects the decisions of a company (i.e. customer, products, payments, ads, etc.)
  • Logical Integration – the integration of company common data structures and unstructured big data that is relevant (i.e. social media data, social networks, log files, etc.)
  • Presence of Reference Period – Time is an important part of the structural component to the data because there is a need in historical data, which should be maintained for a long time
  • Low Volatility – data shouldn’t change once it is stored. However, amendments are still possible. Therefore, data shouldn’t be overridden, because this gives us additional information about our data.

Given the type of data stored in a data warehouse, it is designed to help support data-driven decisions.  Making decisions from just a gut feeling can cost millions of dollars, and degrade your service.  For continuous service improvements, decisions must be driven by data.  Your non-profit can use this data warehouse to drive priorities, to improve services that would yield short-term wins as well as long-term wins.  The question you need to be asking is “How should we be liberating key data from the esoteric systems and allowing them to help us?”

To do that you need to build a BI program.  One where key stakeholders in each of the business levels agree on the logical integration of data, common data structures, is transparent in the metrics they would like to see, who will support the data, etc.  We are looking for key stakeholders on the business level, process level and data level (Topaloglou & Barone, 2015).  The reason why, is because we need to truly understand the business and its needs, from there we can understand the current data you have, and the data you will need to start collecting.  Once the data is collected, we will prepare it before we enter it into the data warehouse, to ensure low volatility in the data, so that data modeling can be conducted reliable to enable your evaluation and data-driven decisions on how best to move forward (Padhy, Mishra, & Panigrahi,, 2012).

Another non-profit service organization that implemented a successful BI program through the creation of a data warehouse can be found by Topaloglou and Barone (2015).  This hospital experienced positive effects towards implementing their BI program:  end users can make strategic data based decisions and act on them, a shift in attitudes towards the use and usefulness of information, perception of data scientist from developers to problem solvers, data is an immediate action, continuous improvement is a byproduct of the BI system, real-time views with data details drill down features enabling more data-driven decisions and actions, the development of meaningful dashboards that support business queries, etc. (Topaloglou & Barone, 2015).

However, Topaloglou and Barone (2015) stressed multiple times in the study, which a common data structure and definition needs to be established, with defined stakeholders and accountable people to support the company’s goal based on of how the current processes are doing is key to realizing these benefits.  This key to realizing these benefits exists with a data warehouse, your centralized location of external and internal data, which will give you insights to make data-driven decisions to support your company’s goal.

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