Our Five Step Process

STEP 1. IDENTIFY THE GOAL

Every good initiative begins with a well defined end goal. Organizations that want to move ahead and develop better processes need to take time to determine what they want to get out of their data.

What are your key, pressing questions regarding your organization that could best be answered by data? Some of these questions could be related to:

Profitability
Effectiveness of Sales and Marketing
Program Effectiveness
Product Quality
Regulatory Compliance
Customer Satisfaction
Employee Satisfaction

Whatever your questions we can help you to determine the right data to answer the question and the right dashboard and visualizations to keep answering the questions for years to come.

STEP 2. EVALUATE DATA SYSTEMS

Part of the process is identifying all the places where your organization is storing data. A surprising amount of data in any organization is stored outside traditional data systems.

This could include:

Excel Spreadsheet
Access or other departmental databases
Google Docs
Dropbox/Cloud File Storage
Salesforce

We will work with you to either adapt your existing data systems or identify other ones that might better suit your needs. Developing a successful data strategy means identifying those data stores and determining a way to make them more robust and to share the data with other parts of the company.

STEP 3. IMPLEMENT DATA ARCHITECTURE

Sometimes it makes sense to build a centralized repository for your data that gets loaded regularly with your key data elements. The design of such a system and its key parameters are driven by your vision and end goal.

This could include:

Data Marts
Data Warehouses
Data Lakes
SQL Server
Postgres
Amazon Redshift
Google BigQuery
Snowflake

Once we have a design for storing your data, it's time to build the highways to bring that data into your system. This often involves creating batch jobs to run on a regular basis to access the underlying APIs of your systems, extract and verify data, and load it into the data warehouse, or reconfigure data to be in a format that best supports your reporting requirements.

STEP 4. CREATE VISUALIZATIONS AND DASHBOARDS

Having the data in one place enables us to build out the dashboards required to answer your key questions. Our key philosophy is that data visualizations need to be simple enough that at a glance you can get the answer to the question you want, but rich enough that you can drill down to find more information to answer the question in a fuller way.

During this phase we will consider the types of reporting systems that might best suit your needs: an existing software package such as Tableau. or a custom-made product tailored on your specific needs.

Some of the technologies we have worked with include:

Tableau
Power BI
Looker
Jupyter Notebooks

STEP 5. ENVISION THE FUTURE

Over the course of working with your new data dashboard you will determine other things that you need - perhaps some of your data analysis will raise other, related questions, or perhaps your organization will grow and new concerns will come to the forefront.

We are not the type of organization that leaves a project without support or future effort - we believe in maintaining relationships over the years and seek to help you to adapt and extend your systems to future anticipated—and unanticipated—needs.

We hope this outline of our process helps you understand our philosophy of developing a proper Data Strategy. We work with companies all over the spectrum of the five steps and we can engage with you on the whole process or on a specific step, based on your current needs and requirements.