The challenges of Analytics teams

Today most corporations consider it essential to have an Analytics team, regardless of the organization's analytical maturity.

Wherever these teams sit in the org chart, their challenge is twofold: starting the data science journey and driving a cultural change that increases competitiveness through data and rigorous thinking.

These teams usually start by hiring data scientists or quants, mostly young and eager to show the power of analytics.

What defines the success of an Analytics team is the flow of relevant business questions and their answers.

Analytics is much more than applying deep learning, systematic computational analysis or statistics. It is about discovering, interpreting and communicating meaningful patterns in data, and applying those patterns to effective decision-making.

Analytics aims to answer the right, necessary and high-impact questions of the operation. This is achieved by building interdisciplinary groups of experts for each topic, who in turn spread the analytics culture across the organization.

The goal is to demystify the belief that analytics teams will systematically uncover hidden patterns that immediately change the company's revenue, like someone searching the sky for an unknown constellation.

In short: analytics is about answering high-impact business questions using all of the organization's data. In the early stages, the answers are rarely found in a surprising hidden pattern. The process is to first rediscover the obvious things that are not happening, and only then go looking for the Big Dipper.