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August 2, 2009
Web Analytics, BI and a disappointing viewpoint...
Out of interest of furthering the service offerings my company can provide to my clients, I am currently doing a University course on Web Analytics.
In the readings for the course, I came across a statement that can only be, in my opinion, the product of tunnel vision - one of the most short-sighted and fundamentally erroneous statements I have seen in some time. I was suprised to see this quoted with such apparent enthusiasm in our readings
[QUOTE CREDITS:]
[Content contributed by Jim Sterne, Target Marketing of Santa Barbara.]
[Edited by Erika Lindroth, The Weather Channel Interactive, Inc. ] :
"At the 2005 Emetrics Summit in London, Bob Chatham from Forrester Research described what it means to be the key. He told the assemblage that we are the leaders of tomorrow and he wasn't just preaching to the choir to curry favor he made sense. "
"Chatham told us that "web analytics" would eventually be subsumed into business intelligence, thereby changing the game. Instead of giant data warehouses being sifted in hopes of finding patterns, it would be the likes of us web analysts in charge. Having been immersed in the fine art of process optimization, we would be the ones calling the shots.
"We have exercised and built up our muscles optimizing prospect acquisition and lead management. We are optimizing prospect persuasion and conversion. We are tweaking customer services and drilling down to root causes for so many processes across so many departments and divisions that we are in a unique position to know what makes the customer and the company tick. That, said Bob Chatham, is what will make us excellent candidates for the executive ladder over time. "
"Instead"? Sooooo...Web Analytics is BI X.0? Is Web Analytics really going to revolutionize the art of Business Intelligence so significantly?
I think this is an excellent example of what happens when someone seen as a leader in a field becomes too engrossed in what he is evangelizing...he becomes blind to the bigger picture.
The fact is that Web Analytics, though impressive in its power to aggregate user behaviour and use this to optimize website profitability, it is by nature a limited field. You are able to track user behaviour generally anonymous at that through a single customer-facing channel. Web Analytics only adds value to the web channel.
"Giant Data Warehouses", however, are repositories of cross-organizational data, in most cases that extracted from up to hundreds of disparate data sources Legacy systems, ERPs, CRM systems, finance, operations, HR, desktop apps, web services, external sources and loaded into a database of a very specific architectural design optimized to return query results on the huge amounts of data very quickly.
Further, this data will certainly have different meanings across and organization - what does "Customer" mean? How do we define this? Part of the process is to work closely with the business to define common business definitions of business entities...so all that data of all that depth and breadth and richness is based on common meanings that have been agreed to by key stakeholders. We can mine the data to identify unknown customer segments. We can do Predictive Modelling. That is some powerful Business Intelligence.
But wait - let's make it even better - let's take those Web-specific data sources that power our Web Analytics Apps, and add that to the existing Data Warehouse, passing through the same business rules to ensure heterogeneous data has a single meaning. Now we are talking Business Intelligence organization wide, multi-source data. Plug BI's powerful analytical tools into our database, and with some targeted, business-driven KPI's, and we have another, very powerful means of driving profitability
Complicated? Expensive? Prone to failure? Big "Yes" to all of the above. For the same reasons as in Web Analytics projects. However, Web Analytics could be said to be proportionally less expensive same basic cost range for the analytics tool, but less demand for investment in multiple software licenses from different vendors (possibly), less complex data massage (or not...) and shorter time to implement. And that in itself is a strong argument in favour of Web Analytics - reduced time to market. However, you wont have the spectrum of information you have in a well-implemented Data Warehouse.
I believe that Web Analytics is a complement to BI. It can be integrated into a dashboard, or can stand alone to guide developers and webmasters to optimize content. It does have an affect on our database architecture - we must adapt the design of the database to integrate web data. But does it "change the game"? No - it makes it more interesting. And as a Business Intelligence professional, I welcome another tool that will add value to my service offering and to my clients.
BI analysts are already "tweaking customer services and drilling down to root causes for so many processes across so many departments and divisions"...and we've been doing it for a long time. On data that crosses organizational boundaries.
I agree with the above quote that Analytics resources are "well placed to climb the executive ladder". But I think this applies to the larger BI Analytics group...not specifically Web Analytics experts.
Wade Walker
Methodata
WEBSITE : www.methodata.com
Posted by Wade Walker at August 2, 2009 1:00 PM
