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Our management is pushing hard for more analytics in what we do but when I ask for the tools to do it, they reply "you already have Office." To them analysis is taking an average like they learned in grade school and they dont even begin to grasp there are much deeper tools.
This morning I had to submit a report that I know is very poor quality because the data doesn't exist. Yet management is happy as can be because the format is good. TPS reports anyone?
No question, just venting my frustration at trying to do a job with both hands tied.
Our management is pushing hard for more analytics in what we do but when I ask for the tools to do it, they reply "you already have Office." To them analysis is taking an average like they learned in grade school and they dont even begin to grasp there are much deeper tools.
This morning I had to submit a report that I know is very poor quality because the data doesn't exist. Yet management is happy as can be because the format is good. TPS reports anyone?
No question, just venting my frustration at trying to do a job with both hands tied.
I feel you, man.
In my analytics role, without getting into all the nuts and bolts, I support the dreaded sales staff and client services teams to provide reporting and analysis for our clients. They have a tendency to over promise to clients on our reporting capabilities, but then do nothing to help our internal team set up the reporting that we need with the vendors we get the reporting from. So then they're breathing down our necks when we still don't have reporting set up a few months after signing the client. I've told management that we need to do better at being proactive with this stuff for our sake and for client satisfaction and retention. And while some of suggestions have been embraced (i.e. a reporting checklist for our RFPs), I've mostly been told that this is just the way it is and we have to deal with it. This new year was such a pain in the rear with getting a handful of clients set up that I'm burnt out already after my first year and I don't want to put up with this going forward.
Oh we can name who in our office is which Dilbert character.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lekrii
So your job now is to quantify how much more money you could make or save to justify the expense of the software you want.
Talk to them in dollars, you need to ask for something with an estimation of how much more profitable you could be with the new tool
That part was easy. Did that before I even brought up the discussion. Cost and alternative products with pros/cons of each. We have some non technical people in key positions and it seems their whole goal in life is to be a contrarian. Somewhere in their careers they learned a particular program and so that is their solution to every problem. I kid you not when I say I've gotten documents from them to review that were written in a text box in Excel. I really wish I could say these are all older generation folks who are afraid of computers but I can't. One of them is really quite good with PowerPoint, but they are just out of their depth when it comes to scientific and engineering software.
What type of analytics you are looking for ? You can use software such as R for free which pretty much does every analytics you can think of.?
Except at some companies, it is a violation of company policy for downloading and installing software not approved for company use. The database is so locked down that you won't be given access, due to data security protocols.
Except at some companies, it is a violation of company policy for downloading and installing software not approved for company use. The database is so locked down that you won't be given access, due to data security protocols.
Bingo!
We can't even directly query the database. My normal process is to collect data from several precanned reports produced by the guardians of the database (no one else has direct access; they call it data security -- I call it job security). Then manually copy and paste those into Excel sheets and clean up the trash that comes across with it. The look for, or sometimes manually create common threads to link the data and merge two sheets into one, and the merge that one with another, and so on bootstrapping back to a much of the full dataset as possible. Making things worse, one third of the most important data is kept in a separate database that has separate guardians that have to query it separately. And it is keyed to a product number where the definitions of the product numbers are kept in a Word document.
At times it makes me feel like I'm working at Bletchley Park on the Enigma code and when I can manage to crib enough together to make a breakthrough, it's too late to be useful in decision making.
You'd think all this data protection would be for some great secret like nuclear codes or something. Nope, just organizational stovepipes. These different databases were developed over time by different organizations who jealously guard their little bit of turf.
We're a good 20 years behind in using data to manage our operations. Management knows we need better data to use in our decision making. Which brings us back full circle to the original post: They know we need analytics. They want the results of using analytics. But when we ask for software and database access across the stovepipes, they simply fall back to the status quo.
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