Description Organizations often struggle to successfully integrate analytics into their business. While this is always a challenging task, there are several approaches analytics teams can take to maximize their impact. This talk provides actionable recommendations to help analytics teams succeed and become essential to their company. Here a few of the specific topics covered: *How a small analytics team should prioritize projects to maximize impact. New analytics teams are often under-resourced and un-specialized. Focusing on a specific area makes it easier for the team to become experts and add value. *Strategies to engage with and become essential to business stakeholders. Too often, analytics teams and the business stakeholders they serve work in completely separate workflows. Building strong relationships with business stakeholders is critical for an analytics team's success. *Methods to increase the overall analytics literacy of your company. Evangelizing the benefits of analytics paves the way for future success. *Building a network of analytics-minded people. Outside of the official analytics team, companies often have many other employees interested in learning about and leveraging this topic. Building a network of these people can be extremely beneficial. Speaker Jai Bansal, Aetna, Senior Data Scientist

1. Maximizing the Impact of
Analytics Teams
Jai Bansal
Data Con LA 2020

2. About Me
• 6 years working in analytics
• Experience in digital marketing,
consumer packaged goods, consulting,
and healthcare industries
• Have worked on analytics teams and
companies with a variety of different
sizes and structures

3. Analytics Hierarchy of Needs
ML/AI
Descriptive
Analytics
Clean + Transform
Organize
Collect

4. Challenges
ANALYTICS AS A
WEAPON
LOW BANDWIDTH LACK OF TRUST

5. Challenges
ANALYTICS AS A
WEAPON
LOW BANDWIDTH LACK OF TRUST

6. “If you torture the data long enough,
it will confess.”
- Ronald Coase

7. Challenges
ANALYTICS AS A
WEAPON
LOW BANDWIDTH LACK OF TRUST

8. Focus
Empower others

9. Challenges
ANALYTICS AS A
WEAPON
LOW BANDWIDTH LACK OF TRUST

10. Build an analytics
community
Communicate with a
selling mindset

11. Analytics
team comes
up with idea
Project kick-
off with
stakeholders
Present
results
Size the
prize
Plan to
implement
Descriptive
analysis
Integrate
domain
knowledge
Shelfware

Productionized
product 
Analytics +
BIZ come up
with idea

12. Organization Structure
CENTRALIZED DECENTRALIZED
ANALYTICS
MARKETING
HR
SALES
ENGINEERING
SALES
MARKETING
ENGINEERING
HR
Department
specific analytics
teams

13. Thank You
• Comments and feedback are welcome!
• Contact Info
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaibansal/
https://github.com/jai-bansal

14. Icon Attributions
• Icons from www.flaticon.com
• Email and presentation icons by Pixel perfect
• Medical, can, club, fist, magnifying glass, plug, finish line icons by Freepik
• Lightbulb icon by Good Ware
• Start icon by surang
• Shelf and graph icons by srip
• Measuring tape icon by Icongeek26
• Checklist icon by Good Ware
• Gears icon by Cursor Creative
• Merge icon by xnimrodx
• Icons from the Noun Project
• Man in suit: Businessman by Gregor Cresnar
• Bandwidth icon: Resistor by Studio Refine
• Community icon group by mikicon
• Ronald H. Coase picture
• By University of Chicago Law School - Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics, University of Chicago Law School, Attribution,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40163701