Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Getting started.....
Welcome to my blog
As this is my first post of hopefully many to come I thought I would say a bit about myself. I am an analyst, I analyse any data I can find. However I have a pretty simple agenda and that's to get some sort of business benefit from the analysis. I am not an academic crunching numbers for crunching sake however I have a great amount of respect for people who do that, they move analytics forward.
As far as studies goes I am a mechanical engineer, graduated from WITS University in 2000.
Over the last five years I have worked for a credit card company and now a retailer, applying everything from hard core credit analytics to optimising direct marketing campaigns which is my main task in my current job. I have a large interest in valuing companies and the stock market in general but have no real experience doing this sort of analytics in the real world...but I am working on it.
Enough about me lets get blogging, my first topic I would like to cover is really an IT one. I work for a very large retailer and we have some amazing data, so amazing I chose to move from my banking job to go and use this data to make a difference. When I arrived I realised my vision and implementation of Management Information is totally different from what IT companies try and force down on companies. You see I like simple solutions
As this is my first post of hopefully many to come I thought I would say a bit about myself. I am an analyst, I analyse any data I can find. However I have a pretty simple agenda and that's to get some sort of business benefit from the analysis. I am not an academic crunching numbers for crunching sake however I have a great amount of respect for people who do that, they move analytics forward.
As far as studies goes I am a mechanical engineer, graduated from WITS University in 2000.
Over the last five years I have worked for a credit card company and now a retailer, applying everything from hard core credit analytics to optimising direct marketing campaigns which is my main task in my current job. I have a large interest in valuing companies and the stock market in general but have no real experience doing this sort of analytics in the real world...but I am working on it.
Enough about me lets get blogging, my first topic I would like to cover is really an IT one. I work for a very large retailer and we have some amazing data, so amazing I chose to move from my banking job to go and use this data to make a difference. When I arrived I realised my vision and implementation of Management Information is totally different from what IT companies try and force down on companies. You see I like simple solutions
- SQL to construct my data set
- Excel pivots to splice the data into a usable report
- PowerPoint to show the data but mainly to show the graphs from Excel
If you use the links within PowerPoint to Excel in makes the final report really flexible and easy to construct by non IT professionals and the data in the pivots can be refreshed at anytime and then updated into PowerPoint with a one minute process.
So my question is why do things like rigid reports developed by IT departments exist, why aren't all reports in Excel and PowerPoint and developed by general analysts, whats the benefit? I know the question is pretty "Simple World" but I am sure you get my point, lets hear what you think.
Marc
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