Sam Winstanley’s Blog

Have you ever had the uncomfortable task of assembling an expense report? You really want a number, but to get to that number you are trawling through paper receipts, bank statements, line items on phone bills and so on. All to arrive at what you deem to be the answer.. 1 number that you can call accurate.

When analysing markets or business performance, analysts and researchers are faced with this kind of task all the time. Forced into a position to be able to give a certain figure for whatever the KPI in question is, this number I will call 5.6 just for consistency, it matters little what 5.6 is it could be a measure of anything. For instance “on a scale of 1.7 the average overall customer satisfaction was 5.6 for the last quarter” it can be a pretty important number this 5.6….

If the Answer was 5.6 what was the question…..

For a long time in the world of survey research arriving at such a number was a simple task relatively speaking.. you would run a survey, perform some data processing and somewhere probably in a cross tab report clearly stated there was the Overall Satisfaction question with a Mean score of 5.6.

However things are changing, the source of 5.6 is getting spread out, here are some of the things that could be considered now as evidence that “on a scale of 1.7 the average overall customer satisfaction was 5.6 for the last quarter” based on the world as it looks now (and this list is not exhaustive):

• The responses to several surveys quite possibly surveys that don’t exactly match some from in-house research, some bought in from outside sources.
• Research from actual performance in CRM and mining what was said in emails and conversations between the company and its customers. For instance if based on 1000 respondents the overall satisfaction was 5.6 but based on 10,000 calls to customer service, 85% of people said “I hate this company and I never want to do business with it again” its hard for an analyst to ignore this data if its available when arriving at 5.6.
• What is said on the internet about a business in social networks and online communities can and more frequently is being listened to as evidence of 5.6.

Where’s My Data?

Given that 5.6 is considered important, possibly even life changing from the point of view of an analyst or researcher, its pretty important the the evidence supporting it is very solid. So solid that if somebody different were asked to reproduce the number 3 years down the line after the life changing decision they can do.

Relating back to the expense claim, its traditional to write down all the line items which amount to your number in a spreadsheet, and sometimes even scan all the evidence supporting those numbers and attach it.

How to Know Where your Data is and PRofit?

An initial part of any kind of analysis to arrive at 5.6 usually involves getting all of your data into 1 place and somehow normalising it to make it comparable. If 5.6 was the only answer you needed then probably making a spreadsheet and doing some analysis in Microsoft Excel would be quite okay. Unfortunately 1 number is never enough and 1,000’s 5.6’s are usually needed.

To produce this kind of information quickly and efficiently either on demand via a Dashboard or online report, or distributed in a periodic report you have to build a process to support it along with the technology to support that. You need a common repository or warehouse to put all of your data in to enable you to get it out in a structured way.

At forgetdata we’re pioneering a type of data warehouse that allows data from diverse sources to co-exist, that enables these worlds to meet and we’re building the tools around that to support the getting the data in, analysing it and reporting from it.

There’s lots of general benefits to having a warehousing system in place that I’ll try to discuss in future articles, but its clear that making wide use of this kind of warehouse system enables lots of new possibilities both in terms of analysis and efficiency.