Early adopters of Analytics in Mobile VAS

One of AnalyticsWorks' clients in the Mobile VAS (Value Added Services) domain generates over 16 million data transactions per day. At an average record size of about 1KB per transaction, this translates to a database of roughly 480GB per month. In terms of storage this is not an expensive affair at today's storage costs. However, it translates to a nightmare for decision makers looking for high level business and revenue trends in an ocean of transactional details.

To keep the information retrieval scalable, the need for a good warehouse design cannot be overstated. With high growth in Mobile, Media and Advertising companies, their information systems are growing at an equally furious pace.

Early adopters for Business Analytics in Mobile and Media companies have a distinct advantage of developing and sharing a Business Intelligence discipline within the organization to gain a bigger piece of the market pie. It allows decision makers to focus on modifying and creating strategies by having a robust automated solution for fact-finding. The short learning curve and the initial investment in an Analytics solution is easily offset by the improved Business Performance resulting from speed of Analysis and the value of insights which are currently unavailable.

Exciting development at AnalyticsWorks for users on-the-go

AnalyticsWorks has always followed the philosophy of listening to clients and partners to alleviate their pain points and providing refined solutions which suit their operational and strategic needs. In this vein, the Analyticsworks team is currently working on an exciting feature that can fundamentally change the way business users view and harness Business Analytics.

The latest addition to the strong feature list is bringing Business Intelligence to your mobile phone. This has the potential to radically change how business users access the analytic information for their organization. With the increasing pace of information churn and the need to have data ready "here and now", the need for Mobile Business Intelligence is a necessity.

To enable this, the new mobile version of AnalyticsStudio will allow Business users away from a PC to view Reports and Charts of interest on their mobile phones. Watch this space for more news!

Mobile Users - A Goldmine for Advertisers

According to a recent survey, the mobile users are thrice as affluent as non-owners in India. Experts believe the people who are using mobile phones are more shopping freak, open for new offers, ready to take up various kinds of financial products and latest consumer items.

Consider these facts from IIMS Dataworks’ Invest India Incomes and Savings Survey 2007:

• Over 46 per cent of earners from the country’s 73 million households with mobile phones could be in the market for life insurance in the next 12 months (27 per cent will definitely buy life insurance, the rest are considering it);

• Over 10 million earners from these households will be in the market for mutual funds and another 7 million will be looking to buy equity, in either the primary or the secondary markets.

Read Full Report at AgencyFAQs

Mobile based marketing can be one of the effective mediums to target this segment. This gold mine needs to be tapped carefully with non intrusive manner or gratification based consent.
Organizations doing mobile based interactions with their subscriber base should start investing in performing user profiling / segmentation and start monetizing their traffic using mobile advertisement. Analyticsworks has a great solution to address this need.

Case Study: mKhoj

mKhoj has already started getting the benefiting from our efforts. Take a look at the attached case study.

mKhoj Case Study

Analyticsworks for mKhoj

India-based mobile advertising company mKhoj made its first public appearance in the media today. It has announced an interesting and novel way of advertising, that’s not only innovative but affordable to the pockets too. Now Mumbai residents can access deals from thousands of brands, retailers and merchants across the city.

All you need to do is type in key search words like the ‘product’ and the ‘location’ and SMS it to mKhoj (at 6767777). And voila get ready to see a collection of the best deals for that product in and around the locality, on your screens.

The key to success of the platform is its ability to track return on investment by individual advertisers on the money they spend on running their deals at mKhoj. Analyticsworks helped mKhoj in achieving this by providing state of art business intelligence solution using its product Analytics Studio. Advertisers can also know the views they are getting on its active deals, what kind of searches users are making who are getting their offers, what is the overall traffic at their categories and location.

The above list is just a sample, the actual implementation has covered the entire business of mKhoj, enabling them to effectively manage Sales, Usage, User Behavior, Operations, Promotion Inventory and Content Quality.

We wish mKhoj a great success in providing mobile advertising for the India market.

I am on the *right* track !

There was an encouraging note from the IT Head of India’s one of the most respected business groups. He liked my views on the issue in the current BI industry and their solutions. My sincere thanks to him once again.

“At the outset let me appreciate the articles written on this subject - the key point is highlighting the real issues which an user organisation must take into cognizance before embarking on such an initiative. I am fully in line with these articles hence I had contacted you.”

I felt rewarded for writing that article and also feel more charged up to show the true value of BI to the decision makers.

Embracing Business Intelligence - Part 1

Purchasing BI tools, creating data warehouse & reports is not end of the BI implementation. To me its a begining of your journey to reap the benefits from this amazing science. Its important to have a comprehensive plan for adoption of this practice within the roadmap itself.

I would like to talk about an approach that can be taken to embrace business intelligence within an organization.

Take Small but Quick Steps If you are just beginning, dont start with a big bang approach with multi-million budget. In most of these cases, the individual decision makers dont get the required attention from the implementation partner (BI vendor). Prioritize the work, start with the function where the need of quick visibility is inevitable. With this approach, you will have more confidence on the effectiveness of this practice.

Simplicity is the KEY According to a survey, only 5% of the users of this system are advance analysts who care about flexibility in analyzing the data. Rest of the 95% care about the information in easiest possible way. For them the relevant information must be few clicks away. In the race of competition, the commercial BI solutions companies dumped a lot of features which are irrelevant to a big % of the user base. Infact with my own experience, a quick and relevant report in excel format is worth million than having the same from a fancy but complex to use tool.

Need to push off for a meeting, more in Part 2

Stepping into Decision Maker's Shoes

For the BI implementation partner, the first and the foremost thing is to get into the decision maker’s shoes and understand his pain points. The focus of the BI solution should be more about the user and less about the technology. Realization of true potential of the BI is all about transforming the data into information, passing it to the right hands and the right time.

There has been disconnects within the perspective of the IT side and the business decision maker. The IT side of it will have more focus on the tools, data transformation, etc. On the other side for business top questions will be: (a) Who are my most profitable customers? What factors make them so? What can we do to raise the profitability of other customer below this level? (b) Which are the top 5 efficient sales channel? Why? (c) etc

At core of it the decision makers needs the answers to What is the problem area, Why it is a problem & How can be solve / prevent it? This can be a big challenge for the implimentation vendor to map these requirements into tangible solutions. Enough care should be taken who will be user of the given report. This fact was well summarized by Gartner:

“The selection of BI tools and applications must be based on a segmentation of the BI user community. Different user segments will require different modes of delivery of BI, ranging from basic static reporting to sophisticated analytic applications. Deploying the proper mix of tools and applications is critical to achieving optimal benefits from BI.” — Gartner

Marketers and analysts—bridging the communications divide

Check out this article from senior members at Fair Issac. It highlights the common disconnets that Analytics and Marketing teams have along with their possible solutions. his is on the same line as the importance of having a strong linking between Business and Business Intelligence. I have personally observed this within my career. This article is must read for people in Marketing and using (or planning to use) Analytics for decision making.

Read full article.