Episode 28: The Challenge of Implementing Analytics on a Global Scale

Guest: Dan Viterise

People, especially developers and other technologists like me, tend to view analytics projects through the lens of “the technical challenge”. Even if we know that activities like “requirements gathering” and “getting buy-in” are important, they may still be allocated less time and energy than activities related to system architecture, data wrangling and model building which appear – in the moment – to be the bigger challenges.

In this week’s podcast, Dan Viterise tells the story of a global luxury brand that had the reasonable-sounding idea of taking an analytics system that had been successful for financial planning in one part of the world and rolling it out to other regions. Unfortunately, it did not go well. The pitfall was that the initiative was viewed as a technology rollout, missing the fact that the purpose of the system was to solve a business problem and that the business drivers outside the original region – and therefore the business requirements - were quite different!

There is no question that the causes are much easier to diagnose in hindsight than they were in the moment. Even so, we hope that sharing this story will help someone else about to embark on such a project, even if it is just to ask:

1. Have we really understood the business problem?

2. Have we truly listened? Has there been even a hint of skepticism or concern expressed that we should dig into more?

This Podcast is sponsored by QueBIT experts in analytics.