Strategic Business Consulting - Focus on Software/IT Systems Integration

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From the course by Duke University

Business Metrics for Data-Driven Companies

5042 ratings

Duke University

Business Metrics for Data-Driven Companies

5042 ratings

Course 1 of 5 in the Specialization Excel to MySQL: Analytic Techniques for Business

In this course, you will learn best practices for how to use data analytics to make any company more competitive and more profitable. You will be able to recognize the most critical business metrics and distinguish them from mere data. You’ll get a clear picture of the vital but different roles business analysts, business data analysts, and data scientists each play in various types of companies. And you’ll know exactly what skills are required to be hired for, and succeed at, these high-demand jobs. Finally, you will be able to use a checklist provided in the course to score any company on how effectively it is embracing big data culture. Digital companies like Amazon, Uber and Airbnb are transforming entire industries through their creative use of big data. You’ll understand why these companies are so disruptive and how they use data-analytics techniques to out-compete traditional companies.

From the lesson

Working in the Business Data Analytics Marketplace

Welcome! This week, we will meet some great people - all former students of mine - now working at super-interesting and exciting jobs as business analysts, business data analysts, or data scientists. We’ll explore what they do, how their role relates to big data, and the skills they needed to get hired! Our hope is this information will give you a better understanding of the type of data-related job you might apply for once you've completed this specialization, and a sense of the type of company you would find most appealing to work for. By the end of this week, you will be able to: differentiate among different job roles within a company that work with data; identify how each role works with data; and describe the skills required to perform each job role. You will differentiate how different types of companies relate to big data culture, and rank any company according to a 20-item checklist. You will also learn to differentiate how different types of companies relate to big data culture. Included in this week’s materials is a 20-item checklist to rank companies. This week also includes in-video polls so you can see how others are ranking their businesses.

Strategic Business Consulting - Focus on Software/IT Systems Integration3:49

Hardware and Software Companies7:52

Digital Companies5:45

Meet the Instructors

Daniel Egger
Executive in Residence and Director, Center for Quantitative Modeling
Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University
Jana Schaich Borg
Assistant Research Professor
Social Science Research Institute

A second type of strategic business consulting firm,

focuses on offering advice about changing business processes.

That includes recommendations for the consultant to help the client build and

install new information technology infrastructure.

IT focused consulting companies are a small segment but they are one

of the most important forces driving the worldwide adoption of big data culture.

They need some business data annalists but even more they need data scientists and

teams of experienced software engineers.

The world leader in this market is Ireland-based accenture,

with $32 billion in revenues.

An example of the kind of large-scale IT project accenture takes on,

is its 5 year, $563 million year contract awarded in January 2015 by

the US government to run the new and formerly quite poorly managed

federal health insurance website healthcare.gov.

Other examples of companies in the same space include Palantir based in Palantir,

California and Opera Solutions based in New York City.

Palantir founded in 2004 Generated

an estimated $500-580 million in revenues in 2014.

Palantir is growing rapidly and is one of the three most highly valued privately

held companies in the US, having raised over $1 billion in equity investment.

With a most recent evaluation estimated to be over $15 billion.

In it's own words, Palantir specializes in analysis, but

we don't actually do the analysis ourselves, we write software that enables

experts in their respective fields to extract insight from information, unquote.

Opera Solutions, also founded in 2004, in its own words, quote, applies

advanced analytics to big data flows to extract predictive patterns, unquote.

Opera does not disclose revenues and is clearly on a somewhat smaller scale than

Palantir, but it has raised over 120 million in venture investment and

has over 500 employees worldwide.

Stepping away to look at the big picture.

What information technology consulting firms do,

is introduce the technologically newest methods for achieving competitive

advantage into a particular vertical market, such as retail grocery stores.

They identify one company in that market with an early adopter culture.

A company willing to take some risks in return for

the potential advantage of having new technology implemented first.

Let's say that first company does successfully implement some form of better

data driven decision making and

it starts to generate higher revenues or better profit margins.

Now, that company's direct competitors have no real choice but

to upgrade their own IT systems or face disruption.

The same strategic consulting firm that helped the first company

now has a much easier time selling the same type of technology solution

to the first companies direct competitors.

Soon all surviving companies in a sector have roughly the same type of information

technology capability and the endless cycle of upgrades repeats.

Buzzwords tend to surround these upgrades and

big data is the biggest buzzword of all, but in this case the hype is justified.

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