In my last post, I discussed some of the information shared at the Information On Demand 2010 conference in Las Vegas.  The main focus of the conference dealt with applying information and analytics to drive innovation, business optimization and competitive differentiation.

The question I left you with  — How do we integrate and employ the techniques learned?

One way is to perform an analysis.  Because I attended the conference, our company has received a free assessment by IBM. They will, at their cost, come in and talk to the business units and determine our Analytics Quotient. They will produce a written Road Map and work with us to prepare a Strategy Map.
The next big challenge is to what extent are we going to transition our organization to have a higher AQ and use the tools across our company? Companies with a high AQ are at a competitive advantage and have employed the tools necessary to perform Predictive Analytics. They have put forth the best practices throughout their organization and have created an enterprise centric solution to optimize results across all departments.

The key points in the final day for me are as follows:

1. In the past, we accumulated structured data, but in the future we will leverage unstructured in the form of faxes, E-mails, blogs, Tweets, and other Internet sources.
2. Understand the effectiveness of the different tactics we are using in real-time.
3. Use cost cutting aspects that can be gained with analytics to fund the new projects that increase revenue.
4. Analytics-driven organizations outperform by a factor of 20 times, 50% revenue growth, and 30% more return on investment.
5. Become an analytics driven organization.

Brenda Dietrich, VP of Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences really summed it up.
“We are using data to build, not just a model that says what’s going on now, but a model that looks backwards and says, given all the things that happened in the past, I can begin to tease our cause and effect. I can build a model that I can then play forward dynamically in time and see what is likely to happen in the future. The second thing we can do with this model, is we can take real-time information; coming off sensors; coming off mobile devices, coming off people tweeting, and bang that against the model of how the world works to get real-time insight into what has just happened, and what actions we can take right now or very soon that would improve the outcomes.”

Ok, so how do we apply what was learned this past week?  First, create a trusted data source. Second, leverage both structured data and unstructured data. Third, apply predictive analytics to everything and every department in our organization.

If you attended the Information On Demand 2010, we would be interested in hearing your take-aways from the conference.

Last week, I was in Las Vegas attending Information On Demand 2010, the premier conference for organizations applying information and analytics to drive innovation, business optimization and competitive differentiation.

The opening ceremony was eye opening and moving. Dr. Atul Gawande described how analytics is used on the battlefield to reduce casualties from 24% to 10% over a 10-year period. Injuries were evaluated beginning with the Civil War; at which time 50% of the injuries resulted in death. A significant drop between 1991 and 2001 came about by looking at the type of injuries and employing technology (Kevlar) and evaluating the medical methods used to treat the injured. A medical doctor analyzed a 100 years of data and recognized that the most important time period was the first hour (the Golden Hour). If a person could be stabilized in one hour, they could be transported to other medical units and in a 24-hour period be operated in different parts of the country (field, Kabul, Germany) and be saved.

The first day opened a new universe of methods, software, integrators and tools to help us build our Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics environment. My focus was to get acclimated into the process and see at a top level the way people are employing Business Analysis and Business Intelligence.

IBM calls this the “Decade of Smart”.  A universe of smart is now coming together to employ enterprise centric solutions to gain insight and optimize results. Analytics will help us to differentiate and move us to an analytics-driven industry instead of an intuition driven industry. The new methods will provide business users with the information they need to make responsive and informed decisions regardless of their location.

Some interesting data was shared about the future. By 2015, there will be:

• 7 billion terabytes of Twitter data tweeting per day
• 4 billion text messages sent per day
• 2 billion Internet users
• 1 billion wireless users
• Pervasive PC touch screens

And by 2020, we will see a 44x increase in the availability of information from 800 petabytes of information to 35 zettabytes (1 followed by 21 zeros). Now that’s a lot of data!

During the sessions, the speakers shared a number of success stories on applying analytics.  Some of the ones I thought were most interesting included:  Omnicom improved working capital by $200 million; Richmond Police reduced homicides by 40% by applying predictive analytics;  First Tennessee Bank increased up-sell by 600%; and, Alameda County reduced waste by $24 million.

Here are some of my take-aways from the opening session:

• Involve customers in upcoming promos
• Capture the data in real-time
• Perform Sentiment analysis
• Set a marketing campaign prior to a launch and involve all in the conversation and dialog
• Use public repositories of data to cross link structure data with unstructured data
• Merge the world of physical and digital worlds
• Apply predictive analytics

The last two days of the conference connected the dots for me, but now comes the challenge. How do we integrate and employ the techniques learned?

I’ll share my thoughts in the next post, so check back!

Terry Roberts is EVP of Business Analytics and Distribution of Mercury Retail Services.

Our mission at Mercury Retail Services is to be the best in class Wholesale Distributor/Service Company in the country. At Mercury we take our mission very seriously and it’s because of this that we just held our first Annual Leadership Forum. These forums are designed to establish a culture of leaders throughout our company.

Our guest speaker, Nathan Jamail, author of The Sales Leader Playbook, delivered an insightful message of techniques and best practices to help make our leadership team even stronger. These forums are critical to master the skills necessary to increase team morale, improve skills and abilities and improve communication within our company.

During this forum we had the opportunity to officially award some our best employees. Each and every employee trains and graduates from our Mercury Academy before they are accepted into our workforce.   We also promote from within by offering our employees opportunities to have more responsibility and additional training.  To ensure we have the best in class, we have designed four levels of merchandisers.  Based on employee interest, training and testing, we have built the best team in the country.

Our employees also have the opportunity to earn a Master’s in Merchandising from our academy. The qualifications are rigorous and only the best earn this elite position within our organization.  They must be recommended by their superiors and have over 4,000 hours of service. Our Masters are trained to tackle any task and contribute tremendously to our success and execution in the field.

During our Leadership Forum, I was there to award our first Master’s graduating class from Grand, Prairie, Texas:

Brian Downey                        Michelle Pinela
Denise Jessup                        Mona Lebrun
Elly Decena                           Phelda Brown
Duane Duncan                        Raul Trevino
Gary Latson                           Rick Walsh
Jeff Huntsman                       Russell Massey
John Felts                             Shannon Hamilton
Juan Briones                          Sid Hilton
Kellie Jo Ryals

I would also like to recognize the following recipients from our company who have been awarded the elite status of Master Merchandiser:

Houston Distribution Center
Bonnie Edge                          Deborah Meguess
Jacqueline Frohm                  Don Menard
Tammy Gardner                     Sandra Owens
Denise Hammond                   Rick Walsh
Trudy Hopson

San Antonio Distribution Center
Richard Aguirre                      Miriam Juarez
David Barton                         Janet Lambert
Janice Dube                          Mark McClenny
Ruby Garces                         Shirley Medina
Christina Gonzales                Mike Mraz
Pete Guajardo                      Darryl Roth
Jamie Hart                           Robin Snell
Heidi Henthorne                   Sandra Vasquez
Ken Johnson

Grand Prairie Distribution Center
Chris Hillen                          Karen Rinehart
Chris Johnson                      Terry Watkins
Jennifer Kern                       Renate White
Mark Lamar                         Kimberly Winslow

If you know any of these super stars, please let us hear from you by commenting below. Thank you!