Updated - Plea for Volunteer: Need a Company to be subject of a Business Analytics class project

UPDATE: I have a victim!  Thank you to everyone who made introductions and connections for me, I really really really really appreciate the help!  I'm looking forward to the projects for this class.

Now all I have to do is come up with the topic for my Capstone Project...

Greetings,

I'm putting my full plea here on my blog so I can link to it from other places.  I have a couple upcoming projects to do for my Business Analytics class at Columbia (part of my Master's in Information and Knowledge Strategy).  The course is taught by Jeanne Harris, a top consultant at Accenture in their Institute for High Performance, and a co-author of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning and Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results.

Since I'm currently job hunting, I don't have a workplace at which to perform my analysis, so I'm looking for a willing victim.  :)  From the project descriptions (copied below), most of the information gathering will need to be done in the next week.  I'll need to be able to interview managers or other decision-makers within a company about how they make decisions, what data they gather and analyze to aid in their decision-making, and how use of data factors into organizational strategy.  I can evaluate any kind or size of business.  The benefit to your company would be written analyses of your organization's analytical capabilities, and a proposal for how the organization could improve the maturity level of their analytical capabilities.  The first week will be the main data gathering, but it's possible (maybe likely) that I'll need to perform some follow-up in the later weeks in order to fine tune the maturity level improvement proposal.

If your company, or someone you know, would be interested in a free analysis of your analytic capabilities, please contact me asap.  If you go to view my profile, there's an "email me" link to my gmail address.  Or you can email me at my student address, aea2146 AT columbia.edu.  Or, if you scroll waaaayyyyyy down to the bottom of the blog, the image of the front of my networking card has my gmail addy and phone number on it.  

Thank you!

Alexis 

Analytical Assessment project:

In your first assignment for this course, you will assess the degree of your organization’s analytical completion. You will use this analysis in your second assignment (due later in the semester) to help you think through how you might build on this capacity.

To complete this assignment, do the following:

1. Research your organization’s approach to analytics and decision making. You may need to talk to managers about how they make decisions. What kind of data do managers look at when they make decisions? What kind of data is available? To whom and how do they have to justify their decisions? As you research, continue to look deeper at the use of data in the organization: how does data drive strategy?
2. Consider the primary attributes of analytical competitors from the Competing on Analytics text.Which of these four attributes is your organization exhibiting? As you define the presence of any of all of the four, use examples from your research to demonstrate why you believe they exist or do not exist.

3. Define what stage of analytical competition your organization is currently operating under. Be sure you have read the description of these five stages in Competing on Analytics. Defend your assessment.

4. Finally, define what stage of analytical competition you would select as your organization’s desired state. Not every organization is seeking to be a Stage 5 organization. Based on what you know about leaders in your industry and your own organization’s positioning, what would you recommend as a goal for your organization? Defend your assessment.

Your analysis should be a cohesive, three to five-page essay. You will submit your paper to the course dropbox by Sunday, February 12 and 11:59 pm, ET. You will receive your graded assignment by February 15 so that you can begin working on your next assignment.

IMPORANT NOTE: I am aware that this assignment asks you to describe data usage and business processes that you may not feel comfortable sharing with your colleagues. Please understand that when you submit your project to the course dropbox, your instructor and facilitator are the only people who have access to these assignments. At no point will I ask you to share these papers or their content with the other members of your cohort.

Analytical Improvement Plan project:

In your first assignment for this course, you assessed the degree of your organization’s analytical competition and defined its goal state. Now, you will use this information to develop a plan for how you might build on this capacity and help you reach your desired stage of competition. To do this, you will follow the DELTA model described in Analytics at Work and covered in this course during Units 4 through 10. I recommend that you write your paper piece by piece as we go through each module of the course. That will allow you to take advantage of the optional DELTA forums for posting your questions about the content and will help you to manage your time. You will submit your final, cohesive paper on March 18 at 11:59 pm, ET. 

To complete this assignment, you will do the following:

1. Apply each DELTA component to your organization’s analytic maturity. I recommend you work through your paper each week as you progress through these units. As you learn more about each component of the model, answer the following questions: At what stage is your organization relative to this specific DELTA component? For example, your organization may be at a Stage 3 when it comes to Data use but may be far more primitive in its Leadership commitment to analytics. What would it look like if your organization were to move from its current stage to the desired stage? Think both about how your course text describes each phase and what it would look like in the specific context of your organization. What recommendations can you provide that would help your organization advance to this next stage? Your text and our discussions may lead to some concrete items, but I am looking for you to use these as foundational suggestions and to develop innovative, targeted ideas for how you might improve the use of analytics in your own organization.

2. Synthesize your plan and define a holistic rationale for your conclusions. Look realistically at the plans you have developed for how each of these components can be used to strengthen your organization’s capacity. How will you structure an intervention plan that you can deploy as your organization’s knowledge leader?  Explain the overall impact this plan might have on your organization’s strategic use of analytics. Please note that this is very important: I am far more interested than how you see analytics impacting strategic decisions (approaches to products, markets, customers, etc.) than how you see them impacting specific tactics (pricing, transactional items, etc.).  Your analysis should be a cohesive, 5-7-page essay. You will submit your paper to the course drop box by March 18 at 11:59 pm, ET. I will return this paper with comments before our live session during the final week of the course.

IMPORANT NOTE: I am aware that this assignment asks you to describe data usage and business processes that you may not feel comfortable sharing with your colleagues. Please understand that when you submit your project to the course drop box, your instructor and facilitator are the only people who have access to these assignments. At no point will I ask you to share these papers or their content with the other members of your cohort.