The Data Animated Audit.

Similar to a diagnostic that reveals problems within your car's systems and components, our Data Animated Audit is a comprehensive assessment of your company’s Data Value Chain, analyzing each of the following components to reveal their strengths, weaknesses, and gaps:

Strategy and vision
This is the overarching framework within which your Data Value Chain operates, so that it can contribute meaningfully and positively to your marketing efforts.
Analytics
This includes machine-learning algorithms to predict behavior. Critical components include the choice of data, the methodologies employed to extract insights, and the subsequent calibration, validation, and implementation into production.
Decision-making
This combines “softer” data (such as focus-group research) with “harder” data (such as machine-learning algorithms).
Staffing
This includes a definition of the responsibilities within each department — from front-line sales to departments that lie deep within the organization.
Marketing programs
These translate the analytics and reports into implementation that is coordinated across your marketing and selling channels. They incorporate rules for the collection of data, and for subsequent testing and reporting — and, especially, the precise measurement of results.
Data management
It is essential that the best-possible data be available to support your company’s strategies and objectives. Data management encompasses the entire process of collecting, cleaning, organizing, and maintaining your data. And throughout, quality control is essential!
Reports
These turn data and analytics into meaningful insights for each level of the organization, and serve as practical tools for effective decision-making. They include processes for getting reports into the right hands at the right time. These reports must reflect business-oriented interpretations of the data, including what it is saying, and — sometimes more importantly — what it is not.
Organization
This is defined as how — in relation to the Data Value Chain — your company operates, including internal communications and the assignment of responsibilities. The focus typically is on the IT, analytical, marketing, and corporate teams.

An Audit consists of the following steps:

OUR AUDIT PROCESS

1. Discovery

We review relevant reports as well as documentation of data-flows and procedures, in order to gain a deep understanding of your Data Value Chain. We then interview your personnel, and examine the following:

  • Company history, goals, strategies, merchandise and/or service offering(s), overall value proposition(s), and competitive environment(s).
  • Corresponding organizational and systems flows.
  • Quality-control (“QC”) guidelines, checklists, and procedures.
  • Tools and skillsets employed at multiple points of the Data Value Chain.
  • QC and marketing reports, both ad-hoc and those routinely generated during production.
  • Examples of three to five significant changes within each of the three stages of data-handling:
  • Collection of the Atomic-Level Data (such as new or altered data feeds).
  • Derived data (such as reports, and statistics-based algorithms to predict behavior).
  • Decision rules (such as criteria for selecting customers to target for marketing campaigns).
  • Within each of these three stages of data-handling:
  • A description of how each of the three to five significant changes were performed.
  • How long each change took.
  • How the accuracy of each change was validated (such as with QC reports).
  • Examples of errors made in the processing, interpretation, and/or leveraging of the data.
  • Examples of three to five significant “aha” (i.e., “eureka”) moments that were driven by the data.

During Discovery, we may ask you to evaluate the feasibility — in terms of the time and (if relevant) the cost — of producing one or more reports and their variations, in order to further evaluate your data-handling capabilities. If producing these report(s) is/are feasible, then we will ask you to execute the report(s) so that we can then:

  • Examine the process you went through to produce it/them.
  • Examine it/them for underlying data problems.

2. Assessment

‍We analyze all that we have gleaned during the Discovery, so that we can determine the effectiveness of your Data Value Chain, including its strengths, gaps, deficiencies, missed opportunities, and risk-exposure.

All too often, we observe that there is significant — and sometimes radical — misalignment between what a company’s personnel thinks is going on within the Data Value Chain, and what is actually going on. As a result, we find that most companies have developed deeply-embedded "false — that is, bad — habits" that lead to poor marketing and sales decisions, as well as faulty execution. One of the most valuable benefits of the Audit is the alignment — for the first time — of impressions with reality.

3. Deliverables

‍Upon completion of the Assessment, we provide a Data Animated Outcome Report that documents successes and failures within each component of the Data Value Chain. Typically, we make many specific recommendations about how the Data Value Chain can be brought into alignment with best-practices data-based marketing. Included are recommendations about how each relevant staff member’s behavior must be recalibrated. Together across all such staff members, these calibrations often lead to significant — and sometimes even radical — incremental revenue and profits across the sum of the organization’s marketing and sales efforts.