Guest Post by: Jim Hazen
[I've been hoping to have some of the Digital Analytics Team here at EY guest post on my blog - particularly some of the newer folks. Jim Hazen is the first of these with some thoughts on his career arc and how he ended up here with us (to our delight). Jim and I are also talking about trying a back-and-forth dialog-based posting on modeling and personalization and I hope we can knock that out in the near future.]
I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging for a long time. I used to do this a lot in late 2000s and stopped as life got more complex. It used to be cathartic in a way even if no one ever read it (other than the spambots, bless them). At least I released things into the wild that were bouncing around in my head so they could stop making noise inside of me. So when Gary asked me to write some blog posts I was more than happy to get back into it, if for no reason than to share what I’ve been doing for the past few years and explain why it is I am here now at EY.
Quick intro to me…I’ve been toiling around in the digital analytics space seemingly since the Paleozoic age. Fell into it by accident full-time in 2000 (though had some experience with it a little before that) and it has been a fascinating ride ever since. I’ve had various roles at IBM, Lenovo, Capstrat and most recently at SAS. Up until SAS, I’d always been a practitioner in digital analytics helping organizations study campaign effectiveness, merchandising efforts, website usability and optimization, sales operations, multi-channel data integration and any combination of things you can probably think of doing with digital data (except anything with the NSA).
I took a 2 year hiatus from doing things with data to work at SAS on product management to develop products to help digital marketers. I figured I’ve been using these tools long enough and complained enough about the limitations in these tools that I could help build some solutions to help my fellow digital brethren. When I took the job, I mentioned to my wife that I hoped that I wouldn’t miss doing things with data or helping organizations solve problems with data. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with SAS, but I did come to miss getting my hands dirty with data, finding interesting things and driving action from it.
So you are probably wondering to yourself, “Well, if you missed doing stuff with data, why not go work client-side at some company and do stuff?” That is a fair point which is the real focus of this post and sheds some light on “Why am I here?”
Companies are driving Lamborghinis in the parking lot at 5 mph
I often use this phrase. Not sure if I heard it somewhere or if it is an actual Hazen original phrase. The phrase comes from listening to tons of companies talk about what keeps them up at night. Organizations have sunk tons of money into software solutions believing that is what will solve their problems. Some of these solutions have hefty price tags and take a fair amount of effort to implement and maintain. Often times, once the solution or software is implemented the vendor walks away and guess what happens? Not much. More often than not, organizations I talked with don’t have the internal resources or expertise to utilize the software or solutions they’ve put in place to gain any real value from them. They merely thought the existence of the tool would solve their pain. But it doesn’t work that way.
I met countless organizations that dropped a ton of cash on expensive tools only to use a fraction of the tool’s capabilities because no one internally knew how to use it. A lot of the problems I was hearing weren’t necessarily vendor problems despite organizations lamenting what they couldn’t do with their current vendor. Instead, a lot of it was due to their lack of knowledge of how to leverage the current solution they had to extract its true value. To me that presents an opportunity and gap in the market. Most of the vendors in the digital space might be experts in their own product but are not all that versed in more enterprise level issues that I was constantly seeing, namely:
- Getting meaningful data out of the digital tool
- Organizing that digital data to understand the who and why
- Getting data at a customer view
- Integrating digital data with backend data
- Doing predictive analysis and helping the entire business not just the digital side
I’ll write more about these particular points in future posts, but organizations lacked folks that had been trained in proper methodologies and didn’t have the headcount to go get them (and they don’t exactly grow on trees…yet). I’ve known Semphonic for a few years and really respected Gary’s work in the digital space as he is one of the few talking about some of the enterprise issues and where digital data is intersecting. When the opportunity arose to be a part of helping organizations finally solve some of these issues, it peaked my interest. EY’s goal is to help organizations improve their business by providing value no matter what the tool by using our knowledge, expertise and methodologies. To me that was interesting and resonated with what I had been hearing in the marketplace.
No man can be an island
But just the fact that EY was looking at the value side of the equation to help customers wasn’t the only factor in me wanting to come aboard. Often when I speak in public or with clients, I make a full confession…I don’t know everything. I am still learning and I want to learn more. I know that may sound like an absolutely shocking thing to say from a consultant, a person who is supposed to be a so-called expert in this field. The truth of the matter is the part I enjoy the most of the digital world is that it changes so rapidly that I have to be adaptive.
In the past, I found that when I was heading up analytics teams or I was the sole analyst and I ran into a problem that I didn’t know how to solve, I’d end up thrashing for a long time. Sometimes great things would come from it and I would learn something unintended but I often I never had anyone to confer with. I never had a group of folks to talk with to find out how they might have handled similar problems at another client or other ideas I hadn’t thought of yet. That aspect was really appealing as I’ve never had that before. It was always me. That’s not to say I don’t know what I am doing or anything, but I now sit in a team of wonderfully talented people that are like me and can share experiences and methodologies. I am no longer alone.
On top of that, and unbeknownst to me before EY acquired Semphonic, EY had been building up its overall Analytics team. My personal goal is to keep growing my skills across the board in analytics in areas such as predictive modeling and learning a bunch of different tools and technologies. During the recruitment and onboarding process, education was stressed and I am going to take full advantage of it.
Learn from a Jedi
Additionally, I really wanted to work with one of the people I admire in this industry (I’d say the same about Avinash Kaushik). I’m not saying that just because he’s my boss but I think Gary is one of the few people trying to elevate digital analytics from its somewhat primitive phase into something with more rigor and structure, even though we are dealing with highly challenging data.
While I was at SAS, I had lots of encounters with traditional marketing organizations that have been doing database marketing for eons but didn’t get the digital data world and conversely I think if you talked to a lot of folks in digital marketing/analytics they have little to no clue about customer analytics. I think we are starting to see these worlds morph on both sides as they become more comfortable with what each side of the table brings. I think Gary’s unique views and methods can help companies achieve that and I personally want to learn more. I also see having both sides of the coin in our Advisory practice as a true competitive advantage.
Coda
I’m here because I think EY has the potential to do something really interesting in this space, something that I can contribute to but also continue to grow in. While a lot of the other players have hardware or software offerings and are more focused on doing things like implementation, hosting or selling databases, we’re trying to do better things with organizations’ concoction of technology and software, all the while using our expertise to give companies a way to finally start deriving value from these things.
[We’re about a month from X Change and filling up fast. So it's definitely time to register!]
[If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’d like to invite you out to a very X Change like half-day session hosted by IBM. Their EMM Thought Leadership Thursday Roadshow on Marketing Attribution is on August 22nd in Silicon Valley. I’m going to be giving a presentation on preparing for an Attribution Analysis that will cover techniques and considerations for data collection and execution of an attribution analysis. It’s a part of the topic that rarely gets discussed, but it’s the real bricks-and-mortar of getting the analysis done and done right. What I think is particularly interesting about the event is the one-hour collaborative white-board session that follows the two presentations. Very cool idea – and I’m looking forward to seeing how it works. If you’re in the area and you have an interest in Marketing Attribution – check it out.]
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