Contact Us

Thanks for spending time in our web site, I hope you found it valuable.  I trust you've downloaded the report and learned more about my favorite subject.  I would like to have the chance to talk with you and see if we can help you in your business.

        In summary, our services may be for you if: 

• You are a business leader stiving to make sense of your own company's data to improve profitability. 

• Your commercial teams feel they are drowning in an ocean of data and still thirsty for strategic knowledge.

• Your company struggles because your business intelligence software delivers just raw data that neither has strategic meaning nor provides the immediate strategic analysis and direction necessary to grow your businesses profitably.  

Now that you’ve seen the programs we offer and how they can help you grow your business, If you’d like to find out how you achieve your desired results, you can call me, Bill Cabiró, at (262) 681-2869 for a simple, no obligation discussion. Or if you prefer, just fill out the form below.  We appreciate your initiative in taking this step to make a difference!

In this discussion, we'll find out about your objectives and the challenges your strategic and commercial teams are facing.   If there's a fit, we offer a complimentary session to understand your problems and opportunities and to explore how we can help your team increase market share, profitability and cash flow by using our Strategic Analysis Toolbox™.

We respect your email privacy:
 
We do not share our contact list with anyone for any reason, nor do we send unsolicited emails.  Additionally, you may remove yourself from the list anytime you choose with the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails.

 

Ready to Tackle Your Strategic Analytics Issues? 

This free strategy session helps you identify obstacles to data-driven profitable growth and explore the kind of results you’d like to achieve with the resources you already have.

If your teams are drowning in data but thirsty for the strategic information they need to grow the business, we hope you’ve found the information on this site useful.  Strat-Wise has been able to help strategic business leaders, R&D, marketing and sales professionals become more competitive and increase market share, profit and cash flow. 

If this is the kind of improvement you are looking for, consider registering for our Strategic Analytics Session.

Our Strategic Analytics Session is an in-depth discovery interview, held either by telephone or in person, in which we gather information that allows us to explore the challenges you and your team face, the kind of results you’d like to see, and whether this program will be of help or not.

To make sure everyone gets maximum value out of this session, we provide you and your team with a pre-consultation questionnaire.  The consult itself typically takes about an hour and a half, and the session can usually take place within 1-2 weeks of your sign-up.  Just register below, and we will be in touch for a brief discussion about your company’s issues and to schedule the session.

Yes, I’m interested in tackling my company’s constraints in a complimentary Strategic Analytics Session:

Strategy Session Request Name: Company: Title: Email: Phone: Convenient day & time for a brief call: Other convenient day & time for a brief call: Customer profitability info is hard to extract   Only experts can access data   Customer data doesn't always make sense   Market data is missing / not accurate   Competitor data is missing / not accurate   The information is not strategic   Most analyses need to be run in Excel   Analysts are the process bottleneck   It takes too long to get the right information   Most decisions are based on experience   It's hard to answer complex business questions   Issues I'd like to address: Other issues I'd like to address::

We respect your email privacy:

We do not share our contact list with anyone for any reason, nor do we send unsolicited emails.  Additionally, you may remove yourself from the list anytime you choose with the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails.   

 Useful Definitions

• Data: Any string of characters that describes something about our reality. ⁽¹⁾

• Information: Data that answers a question asked. ⁽¹⁾

• Market Intelligence:  Undisclosed information about competitors as related to customers, products or markets.

• Knowledge: Complex body of information from diverse sources, acquired by study or experience through reasoning.

• Strategy:  Plan of action or method for completing specific objectives.

• Tactic:  Short-term method for achieving an end.

• Business Intelligence: Analytical process that transforms raw data into relevant, accurate and useable strategic knowledge. ⁽²⁾  The technology and practice of applying information to make decisions. ⁽³⁾

• Business Reality: The result of complex interactions between numerous market, business and profit measures and dimensions. ⁽⁴⁾

• Strategic Knowledge: Clear understanding and quantification of the relationship of Business Reality interactions in order to obtain profitable growth.  Essential knowledge to ensure sustainable and profitable growth of the company.  Necessary knowledge to devise plans to surprise, deceive and defeat competition. ⁽⁴⁾   

Data Refinement Hierarchy

References:
(1) Eliyahu M. Goldratt – The Haystack Syndrome (Theory of Constraints).
(2) Kirk Tyson – Business Intelligence.
(3) IBM – White Paper.
(4) Bill Cabiró – From Corporate Information to Strategic Knowledge 

Covid-19 Global Tracking Metrics

This is an interactive global tracking of Covid-19 designed to compare key metrics across countries and United States.  

This visual analysis is kept up to date on a daily basis.

Navigation Tips:

1) Click on the Presentation Mode Icon on the bottom right.

2) Explore the different interactive dashboards by clicking on the top tabs.

3) Select the desired filters to review the different KPIs and uncover results.

4) You can download the Visualization.

Select the device to be used:       Phone                Computer

Is Your Business Analytics Driving Profitability?

By Bill Cabiró

It should be no surprise that data-driven decision making works better than relying on managers’ intuition.

Research clearly shows that analytics oriented organizations outperform their peers but making sense of the data becomes an increasingly challenging task as corporate data continues to grow at a 40% yearly rate as a result of the rapidly declining cost of computer memory.

An IBM CFO study shows that analytics-driven organizations had 33% more revenue growth, 12 times the earnings (before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization) and 32 percent more return on capital invested.

This is where Business Analytics (BA) becomes crucial in providing data management, integration, multi-dimensional analysis, visual discovery, data mining and statistical methods to improve productivity in nearly every business function.

Business Analytics is an all-encompassing name for a new discipline resulting from the integration of Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics.  BA not only includes the classic Business Intelligence functions of reporting what happened, drill-down to how it happened, find out the cause of why it happened and alert management as soon key metrics move in the wrong direction.

In addition, BA includes a highly sophisticated subject called Predictive Analytics that can be defined as Advanced Computational Statistics.  It uses large cleansed historical data sets to look forward.  Specifically, Predictive Analytics finds patterns in the data to forecast what has a high probability to happen in the future.

BA application includes operational intelligence, strategic and competitive analytics, customer acquisition and retention, risk management, fraud detection and demand driven forecasting among others.

According to Tom Davenport, “Companies that invest heavily in advanced analytical capabilities outperform the S&P 500 on average by 64%”.

Having a clear view of the profitable customers, products, regions and market segments is fundamental to understand the causes and expand upon the successes.  Equally important is to find those customers, brands, markets, segments and competitors responsible for draining cash and quickly stop the bleeding.

 

In their book, “Competing on Analytics – The Science of Winning”, Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris define decision support, business intelligence, data mining and predictive analytics and put all these concepts well in perspective.

The book shows the five stages of analytical competency and gives plenty of examples of companies that are successful in both the internal and external implementation.

Stage 1: Analytically Impaired – Lack of analytical skill or executive interest.

Stage 2: Localized Analytics – Uncoordinated activities or silos.

Stage 3: Analytical Aspirations – Good intentions with slow progress.

Stage 4: Analytical Companies – Widely use analytics internally.

Stage 5: Analytical Competitors – Use analytics as a competitive advantage.

Business Analytics is a fundamental discipline to find the root cause of issues and probable outcomes.  Taking prompt corrective actions tends to satisfy customers’ needs faster and better than the competition providing the company a competitive advantage regardless of how small the business is.

Up until now, BA has been the exclusive domain of large companies that were able to afford the investment.  Companies like Bank of America, Progressive Insurance, Amazon, Google, Walmart, Capital One and Google were pioneers in this area.

This is no longer the case.  Today, there are many choices of analytic applications, either on premise or in the cloud, that are powerful, user friendly and very inexpensive.  Mainly designed for business users, they include interactive data discovery, self-serve visual analytics  and open source statistical tools that require minimal IT involvement, making them ideal to transform small companies into analytic competitors.

Regardless of the company size, the strategic use of Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics can have major impact on the growth and profitability of the company.

Unfortunately, today many small companies are still unclear about the value analytics can bring to their business. Others, while aware of the value may not be fully prepared to effectively utilize it.  So what steps can a small business take to begin effectively using analytics?

A starting point would be to determine where your business stands regarding the capability to use data and analytics. This can be done in less than10 minutes using our free assessment tool for small businesses.

Based on your responses to several questions this tool will grade your company’s capability level in the analytical landscape.  After you finish the grader, you may want to download the Suggested Action Plan Report to help you take the next step in your company’s Business Analytics journey.

  

Can Small Companies Justify Investing in Business Analytics?

By Bill Cabiró

Even in the case of very small businesses, a strategically deployed Business Intelligence solution can have a major impact on the growth and profitability of the company.

Having a clear view of the profitable customers, products, regions and market segments is fundamental to understand the causes and expand upon the successes.

Equally important is to find those customers, brands, markets, segments and competitors responsible for draining cash to quickly stop the bleeding.

Should we treat all customers equally? 

If you say yes, I’d suggest reading “Angel Customers & Demon Customers” by Larry Selden & Geoffrey Colvin.

This is because in a company that has more than thirty customers, the Pareto Principle will be evident.  Looking inside the Pareto’s famous 80/20 rule not only one can find that the top 20% of products contributes 80% of total sales.  

We can also find that the top five percent of the customers generates close to 50% of the profits while the bottom 50% of the customers generates only 5% of the total profit.  Even worse, the bottom 40% usually does not generate any profit at all!

Many companies have a hard time identifying which customers belong to each group.  The good news is that the strategic use of Business Analytics provides these seemingly difficult answers instantly.

Regardless of the business situation management should be able to ask critical performance questions and find -first hand- clear answers at the speed of thought without interruptions or the involvement of analysts:

• Is revenue growing profitably? Where? How and Why?
• Are we paying sales reps commissions for bringing in unprofitable tonnage?
• Can we quickly tell whether the growth trend is just over last month, last quarter, same quarter last year or this year to date?
• How about the profit growth of the last 52 weeks compared to the previous 52 weeks?  Is it really growing?
• Is our growth accelerating or decelerating?  How much?
• How is our profit growth versus budget or business plan? Where are we failing to meet our objectives?  Why?
• Which competitors are threatening our business?
• In what regions and market segments can we maximize our growth?

A modern Business Intelligence solution is fundamental to find answers to the seven layers of WHY's in order to get to the root cause of issues.  Being able to understand and correct these issues faster than the competition provides the company a competitive advantage regardless of how small the business is.

In the past deploying a Business Intelligence solution was not affordable by small companies, not only due to the high licensing cost of the software but also because of both the internal and external resources necessary to set it-up and provide maintenance.

This is no longer the case.  Today, there are many choices of analytic applications, either on premise or in the cloud, that are powerful, user friendly and very inexpensive.  

Designed for business users, they include interactive data discovery and self-serve visual analytics that require minimal IT involvement, making them ideal to bring small companies to the forefront of the 21st century technology to become true analytic competitors.

References:

1)    Angel Customer & Demon Customers by Larry Selden & Geoffrey Colvin
2)    The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch
3)    Competing on Analytics y by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris
4)    Strategic Knowledge IQ Test

Image: GraphicStock

What Is Business Intelligence 3.0?

Interactive Visual Analytics represents what Gartner Research calls the consumerization of Business Intelligence.  It’s a good example of a disruptive innovation or, as Qlik’s Donald Farmer calls it, a market changer.

According to Tableau Software “visual analysis is not a graphical depiction of data. Virtually any software application can produce a chart, gauge or dashboard. Visual analytics offers something much more profound. Visual analytics is the process of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces”

This new generation of BI tools is so intuitive to the regular user that little or no training is necessary to explore data. This is a great feature since, according to Gartner, BI users do not want to read manuals. They demand intuitive BI interfaces, in line with the internet experience they are accustomed to, like Google searches or smart phone apps.

The current low BI utilization rate of about 5% does not provide many companies an acceptable return on their Business Intelligence investment.  The new user-friendly and intuitive visual analytic tools are helping companies exploit the treasure of business trends, patterns and opportunities hidden in their oceans of data by increasing the number of employees that participate in the data discovery process. The technology enables casual users to transition into power-users and power-users into app developers in a matter of weeks.

Depending on the vendor, the new software class is known by different names: Data Discovery, Advanced Visualization, Visual Analytics, Business Discovery, Self-Serve Business Intelligence or Business Intelligence 3.0

Advanced data visualization is based on the fact that 70% of the human sensory receptors are dedicated to vision while the other four senses share the remaining 30%.  In addition, our brains are much more effective recognizing shapes trends, patterns and colors than analyzing spreadsheets or tables full of numbers. Visual data analysis principles are based on the work of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few.

The data visualization market begun to grow during the last decade as business users started purchasing these applications for departmental use, mainly without IT consent.  The reason was simple: business analysts needed the capability to analyze all sorts of data rapidly, beyond the scope of the data-warehouse.  A request that most IT organizations were not prepared to fulfill. Today as data discovery tools have become more popular and scalable IT organizations are more involved in the purchasing process. 

Today more than two dozen applications fall into this category from companies around the globe. The leading ones –Tableau and QlikView- have grown their acceptance at a very fast rate.  Ten visual applications have made it to Gartner Research's 2015Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics and this number will grow in the future as more BI solutions continue to add visual analysis functionality.  Gartner estimates that more than half of net new purchasing is data-discovery-driven.

"For years, data discovery vendors — such as QlikTech, Salient Management Company, Tableau Software and Tibco Spotfire — received more positive feedback than vendors offering OLAP cube and semantic-layer-based architectures.  In 2012, the market responded:

·        MicroStrategy significantly improved Visual Insight.

·        SAP launched Visual Intelligence.

·        SAS launched Visual Analytics.

·        Microsoft bolstered PowerPivot with Power View.

·        IBM launched Cognos Insight.

·        Oracle acquired Endeca.

·        Actuate acquired Quiterian".

To be clear, Self-serve BI does not mean “IT Free” as a strong IT-Business partnership is always helpful to ensure data quality through proper governance and also to maintain the proverbial single version of the truth.  Self-serve refers to the user’s ability to perform data exploration and discovery simply by clicking or tapping into interactive dashboards and reports.  All this without having to request IT to create specific data marts, build OLAP cubes or predefined reports as this would delay the data analysis process.

Also, it’s important to highlight that there are two kinds of self-serve BI user: 

1. Analytics Power Users who create visual apps from multiple data sources –both internal and external.
2. Regular Users that can fully explore the visual apps created by power users or IT.

In addition to the typical functionality of multidimensional analysis (drill-down, drill-through, roll-up, sort, group, filter and calculations) some visual tools offer “what-if” scenario analysis, data animation, integration with the statistical ”R” program and mobile capability. 

A great feature of this new generation of BI software is its data blending functionality. These applications allow connecting simultaneously to disparate types of data bases or tables, whether in a data warehouse, data-marts, spreadsheets, text files, Microsoft Access, websites and in the case of Tableau OLAP cubes.

The analytic results are instantaneous since the process takes place in-memory (RAM).  Additionally the visual interface, when used proficiently, permits to digest huge amounts of information and visualize trends and patterns in seconds.  This process enables what many call “analysis at the speed of thought”; Meaning that the answers to business questions can be found fast enough without  interrupting the “train of thought” that leads to the next layer of questions, seeking to find the root cause of issues or opportunities.

Visual Analytics packages are not replacing traditional BI in large organizations but complementing them. They provide fast analytical capabilities to more people that need to gain a competitive edge in the current fast changing market dynamics.

For small and medium size companies that haven’t yet invested in BI, Self-serve, Visual Data Discovery is a cost effective solution that can be deployed very fast.

This new generation of BI software takes descriptive analytics to a whole new level. That's the reason for the fast growth rate this $4.5 Billion market segment has experienced during last few years.

It only takes a few minutes to download the free versions most vendors offer for testing purposes.

Below: Dr. Hans Rosling’s video is a few years old but still illustrates the power of data visualization techniques that make 120,000 data-points tell a compelling story in a way that’s very easy to understand. 

Note: The original version of this article was published here by Bill Cabiró in 2011.

Image: GraphicStock