Analytics Driven Operations

2) Do you know, Diagnostic analytics is a form of advanced analytics that analysis / studies your data sets to answer, “Why did a particular anomaly happen?”

Knowing what happened is important, but it is not enough to make a confident decision. Diagnostic Analysis help you find the cause of the problem. 

Here is what typically happens in your Analytics step by step process (Till Diagnostic):

• Descriptive Analysis help you find anomalies examples: Jump in sales on Monday Afternoon, Increase in Auto accident claims from a particular area code, Increased failure rate of students from a particular coaching classes 
• Drill down and Deepdive: requires further drill down and a deeper dive in the data sets available. This typically includes identifying the data source and identifying and analysing external / extended data sets. Example: If there is an increased failure rate observed from students of a particular coaching classes then the dat range could be further increased to include past data and this can be followed analysing particular questions that these students are not able to answer
• Determine causal relationships: Regression analysis, time-series data analytics can all be useful for uncovering hidden stories in the data.

Remember: Even today diagnostic analytics must still be governed by people (My personal View). 

Quote: Just as machines can be used to help reduce the bias in human decision making, so should people be used to contextualize the outputs of machine decision making- Unknown

If you are planning to start your own Analytics COE or if you are a decision maker who wants to graduate to “Analytics Driven Operations”:

• What’s the current state of data analytics in your company? Do you have people who can even do some basic excel based analysis? Do you believe in data driven decision making?
• How deep do I need to dive into the data? Do you know the answers and are you trying to validate those with data analysis?
• Have you set aside some cost for “Trial and Error” and for your proof of concept ?

Let me know your thoughts and how you relate to this.