New Analytics Talent Assignment

Billie Morris is the BI Director at Love You, a large manufacturer and distributor of upscale cosmetics products for women. Love You sells directly to department and beauty product specialty stores, who then sell the products to consumers.

While at Love You, Billie and her staff have implemented an enterprise data warehouse, an effective reporting system, dashboards, and several analytical applications.

Over the last two years, Billie has seen the hiring of people with advanced analytical skills (i.e., data scientists) into the various business units. For example, marketing hired a person with a PhD in statistics to develop forecasting models and is in the process of hiring another person with advanced skills to do social media analytics. Finance hired a PhD in econometrics to develop corporate forecasting models.

People have joked that they are popping up like mushrooms after a heavy rain. The managers in these business units are very pleased with the results they are getting from the use of advanced analytics.

Billie sees great value in bringing these people and skills into Love You, but is concerned that there is the need for some structure around them and their work. For example, one of them is using SAS Enterprise Miner, another one R, and a third an open-source data mining product. She knows that one product won't meet everyone's needs, but does everyone need a different product?

The money isn't coming out of her budget, but still .... However, she is being impacted by their needs for data. One of chewing up considerable cpu time in the warehouse and another is always requesting downloads, sometimes for data that is not easily supplied. And surely, there must be some best practices that can be shared.

Billie needs advice on how to proceed.

If "yes," how should she proceed? Is she the right person to start the conversation? Who should she have the conversation with?