Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
While preparing our weekly topic dedicated to business intelligence and predictive analytics as a means for stepping up your marketing efforts, we encountered some terms, phrases and names that sound quite intimidating. But with the right tools, it turns out they’re much simpler to use and understand. So we thought, who better to ask to dispel our apprehension than one of the people dedicated to this field in Europe. Enter Juha Teljo, Business Intelligence Solutions Executive for IBM Europe. Mr. Teljo has 20+ years of experience in various aspects of business analytics, business intelligence and performance management. He was one of the first employees of Cognos in Finland and played a key role in the development of the business intelligence market. After IBM’s acquisition of Cognos Inc, he was appointed the Nordic Manager of IBM’s Business Intelligence and Performance Management business unit, and is currently managing business intelligence solutions at the European level.
Mr. Teljo has a wide range of experience in helping all kinds of organizations develop business intelligence and performance management solutions. He can understand both deep technical issues and strategic management issues. He has presented widely on the topics of business analytics, information management and performance management, so we decided to learn a thing or two from him.
Media Marketing: How would you rate the South East Europe companies, especially in the Balkans? Where do we stand in comparison to other countries of the world in terms of using predictive analytics?
Juha Teljo: Predictive analytics has certainly been embraced in some of the competitive industries in consumer markets like telco and retail. However, the general adoption of predictive analytics in companies is still lagging behind the US or more developed European countries.
Media Marketing: Do you see opportunities for companies in this region? Can they do better business than now?
Juha Teljo: Absolutely! It is hard to imagine an organization that would not benefit from analytics. The ability to do better business comes from being able to make better decisions faster at the point of impact. This really means infusing the power of analytics into processes. This allows organizations to scale their expertise and make every touch point with their customers matter.
Every call center agent can understand what the next best offer to make to a client is, based on a predictive model, while talking to the client. Marketing messages can reach clients with personalized content for the right device at any given time of day. Weather data or a social media pulse can be combined with sales information to create promotions at store locations in near real-time. The possibilities are endless. Many organizations have been walking the path of optimizing costs and streamlining operations for a long time and it is hard to make significant leaps through that anymore. Analytics is the next great enabler to allow leaps in business to occur.
Media Marketing: The first budget cuts are usually made in the marketing department. How can a CMO convince a CEO that predictive analytics is something they should invest in and use in their company?
Juha Teljo: It is a KPI game. CMOs need to become better at proving their value in impacting key metrics in their organizations. The CMO needs to be able to prove that it will make an impact on a performance indicator that everyone agrees moves the needle for the company. Predictive models are put in place to make a significant difference for those indicators and that change can and must be monitored. Too often predictive analytics projects are described on the basis of technical ability, like the statistical algorithms used or exotic data sources accessed. But in reality they are really business projects, the outcome of which everyone should understand.
So if a company believes that keeping customers is vital to success and a 5% change in churn moves revenue up 3m, that outcome is what a predictive churn model needs to deliver. The success of predictive analytics projects must be monitored and communicated in business KPIs that matter and of course it is often the monetary amounts that determine where the investment goes. The ability to do this is making it easier to build confidence and understanding and of course get buy in to move to new areas where analytics can make a difference.
Media Marketing: Which solutions would you recommend to a CMO, which tools?
Juha Teljo: There are many different information requirements in a marketing department every day, which vary a lot in their nature. Many of them are one of those issues that require access to various sources, old and new. Some of them may be entire programs targeting a specific business area such as cross-sell, upsell, churn etc. So the tools used must be able to scale from handling 100s of everyday questions to being able to drill into insightful discoveries from some of them. But in the end, the goal should be operationalizing analytics in the point of impact in the company. So let’s mention a couple that IBM provides:
Watson Analytics is a cloud service that allows business users to start answering daily business questions immediately. Watson Analytics is a next generation data discovery tool targeted at every business user. It analyzes data through powerful algorithms and is able to provide the user with insights that would be hard to see just by looking at the figures. Watson Analytics uses natural language (English) to let the user ask further questions from the data and gives answers in the form of powerful visualizations. It also gives access to social media content such as Twitter, as well as access to weather data and other data sources.
SPSS Modeler is a predictive analytics solution allowing users to create powerful predictive models and to deploy them. Even though Modeler provides the depth to build the most sophisticated models, it is designed for the business user. The user operates it through an easy to use graphic interface working with easy visual cues to build a model. SPSS Modeler allows the user to easily control the entire analytical stream. This scales to the entire spectrum of predictive analytics starting from infusing and manipulating data to selecting the best algorithms for the job and finally deploying results like scores, segments and clusters to the desired target application.
Media Marketing: A lot of CMOs are simply afraid of such tools, because they are not IT people. Do you need any special background to understand and use these tools?
Juha Teljo: It is true that there is too much mystery built into the discussion around analytics. Data science can easily be described as something math PHDs can contribute to. But creating predictive models cannot come from data scientists alone, it simply isn’t scalable! Business users must be included for scale, and more importantly, driving meaningful business results.
Technology needs to adapt to the user, not vice versa! Predictive modelling is a great example of this. It sounds and can be very complicated if the user needs to learn programming languages or have a degree in statistics. But with tools like SPSS Modeler or Watson Analytics, users with different technical capabilities can all become productive immediately as the tools are designed with the user in mind. This leaves the rare data scientist the resources to be able to do the really complicated analytical tasks and further optimize the work started by the business. So no need to fear – embracing analytic tools can be a pleasant experience!
Media Marketing: How and where can CMOs learn more?
Juha Teljo: IBM provides a lot of information regarding different analytical capabilities and solutions that are relevant to the CMO. Below are a few links:
Marketing use cases
https://www.ibm.com/analytics/us/en/case-studies.html#businessneed=marketing
Customer analytics
http://www.ibm.com/analytics/us/en/business/customer-analytics.html
About predictive analytics tools:
http://www.ibm.com/analytics/us/en/technology/predictive-analytics/
You can find more about data driven marketing in South East Europe here: https://ibm.biz/Bd46At
