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>> Hey, everyone.
Welcome back to Accelerating Analytics Maturity.
I'm your host Lisa Martin.
Alan Jacobson joins me next,
the chief data and analytics officer at Alteryx.
Alan it's great to have you on the program.
>> Thanks Lisa.
>> So Alan as we know, everyone knows
that being data driven is very important.
It's a household term these days,
but 93% of organizations
are not utilizing the analytics skills of their employees
which is creating a widening analytics gap.
What's your advice, your recommendations
for organizations who are just starting out with analytics?
>> And you're spot on.
Many organizations really aren't leveraging
the full capability of their knowledge workers.
And really the first step is probably
assessing where you are on the journey.
Whether that's you personally
or your organization as a whole
we just launched an assessment tool on our website
that we built
with the international Institute of Analytics that
in a very short period of time, in about 15 minutes
you can go on and answer some questions
and understand where you sit versus your peer set,
versus competitors,
and kind of where you are on the journey.
>> So when people talk about data analytics,
they often think, "Ah,
"this is for data science experts," like people like you.
So why should people in the lines of business
like the finance folks, the marketing folks,
why should they learn analytics?
>> So domain experts are really in the best position.
They know where the gold is buried in their companies.
They know where the inefficiencies are,
and it is so much easier and faster to teach a domain expert
a bit about how to automate a process
or how to use analytics
than it is to take a data scientist
and try to teach them to
have the knowledge of a 20 year accounting professional
or a logistics expert of your company,
much harder to do that.
And really, if you think about it
the world has changed dramatically
in a very short period of time.
If you were a marketing professional 30 years ago,
you likely didn't need to know anything about the internet,
but today do you know what you would call that
marketing professional,
if they didn't know anything about the internet?
Probably unemployed or retired.
And so knowledge workers are having to learn
more and more skills to really keep up
with their professions,
and analytics is really no exception.
Pretty much in every profession
people are needing to learn analytics,
to stay current and and be capable for their companies,
and companies need people who can do that.
>> Absolutely, it seems like it's table stakes these days.
Let's look at different industries now.
Are there differences in how you see analytics
in automation being employed in different industries?
I know Alteryx is being used
across a lot of different types of organizations,
from government to retail.
I also see you're now with some of the leading sports teams.
Any differences in industries?
>> Yeah there's an incredible actually commonality
between domains industry to industry.
So if you look at what an HR professional is doing,
maybe attrition analysis, it's probably quite similar
whether they're in oil and gas or in a
high tech software company.
And so really the similarities are are much larger
than you might think.
And even on the sports front,
we see many of the analytics that sports teams perform
are very similar.
So McLaren is one of the great partners that we work with
and they use Alteryx across many areas of their business,
from finance to production,
extreme sports, logistics, wind tunnel engineering,
the marketing team analyzes social media data
all using Alteryx.
And if I take as an example the finance team,
the finance team is trying to optimize the budget
to make sure that they can hit
the very stringent targets that F1 sports has.
And I don't see a ton of difference
between the optimization that they're doing
to hit their budget numbers
and what I see Fortune 500 finance departments
doing to optimize their budget.
And so really the commonality is very high
even across industries.
>> I bet every Fortune 500 or even every company
would love to be compared to the same department
within McLaren and F1, just to know that wow,
what they're doing is so in incredibly important
as is what we are doing.
So talk about-- >> Absolutely.
>> lessons learned.
What lessons can business leaders take from
those organizations like McLaren who are
the most analytically mature.
>> Probably first and foremost,
is that the ROI with analytics and automation
is incredibly high.
Companies are having a ton of success.
It's becoming an existential threat to some degree.
If your company isn't going on this journey
and your competition is,
it can be a huge problem.
IDC just did a recent study about how companies
are unlocking the ROI using analytics,
and the data was really clear.
organizations that have a higher percentage
of their workforce using analytics
are enjoying a much higher return
from their analytic investment.
And so it's not about hiring
two double PhD statisticians from Oxford,
it really is how widely you can bring your workforce
on this journey.
Can they all get 10% more capable?
And that's having incredible results
at businesses all over the world.
Another key finding that they had
is that the majority of them said
that when they had many folks using analytics
they were going on the journey faster
than companies that didn't.
And so picking technologies that'll help everyone do this
and do this fast and do it easily,
having an approachable piece of software
that everyone can use is really a key.
>> So faster...
Able to move faster, higher ROI.
I also imagine analytics across the organization
is a big competitive advantage
for organizations in any industry.
>> Absolutely the IDC...
Not the IDC,
the International Institute of Analytics showed
huge correlation between companies that were
more analytically mature versus ones that were not.
They showed correlation to growth of the company,
they showed correlation to revenue,
and they showed correlation to shareholder values.
So across really all of
the key measures of business,
the more analytically mature companies
simply outperformed their competition.
>> And that's Katie's days
is to be able to outperform your competition.
You know, one of the things that we hear so often, Alan
is people talking about democratizing data and analytics.
You talked about the line of business workers
but I got to ask you
is it really that easy for the line of business
workers who aren't trained in data science
to be able to jump in, look at data
uncover and extract business insights to make decisions?
>> So in many ways, it really is that easy.
I have a 14 and 16 year old kid.
Both of them have learned Alteryx
they're Alteryx certified.
And it was quite easy.
It took them about 20 hours and they were off to the races.
But there can be some hard parts.
The hard parts have more to do with change management.
I mean, if you're an accountant
that's been doing the best accounting work
in your company for the last 20 years
and all you happen to know is a spreadsheet
for those 20 years.
Are you ready to learn some new skills?
And I would suggest you probably need to,
if you want to keep up with your profession.
The big four accounting firms
have trained over a hundred thousand people in Alteryx
just one firm has trained over a hundred thousand.
You can't be an accountant or an auditor
at some of these places without knowing Alteryx.
And so the hard part,
really in the end isn't the technology
and learning analytics and data science.
The harder part is this change management.
Change is hard.
I should probably eat better and exercise more,
but it's hard to always do that.
And so companies are finding that that's the hard part.
They need to help people go on the journey
help people with the change management
to help them become the digitally enabled accountant
of the future.
The logistics professional that is E-enabled
that's the challenge.
>> That's a huge challenge.
Cultural shift is a challenge
as you said, change management.
How do you advise customers
if you might be talking with someone who might be early
in their analytics journey,
but really need to get up to speed
and mature to be competitive?
How do you guide them or give them recommendations
on being able to facilitate that change management?
>> Yeah, that's a great question.
So people entering into the workforce today,
many of them are starting to have these skills.
Alteryx is used in over 800 universities around the globe to
teach finance and to teach marketing and to teach logistics.
And so some of this is happening naturally
as new workers are entering the workforce but
for all of those who are already in the workforce,
have already started their careers,
learning in place becomes really important.
And so we work with companies to put on
programmatic approaches to help their workers do this.
And so it's, again, not simply
putting a box of tools in the corner and saying
"Free, take one."
Now put on hackathons and analytic days,
and it can be great fun.
We have a great time
with many of the customers that we work with,
helping them you know, do this,
helping them go on the journey
and the ROI, as I said, you know, is fantastic.
And not only does it sometimes affect the bottom line,
it can really make societal changes.
We've seen companies have breakthroughs
that really make great impact to society as a whole.
>> Isn't that so fantastic to see
the difference that that can make.
It sounds like you're...
You guys are doing a great job
of democratizing access to Alteryx to everybody.
We talked about the line of business folks
and the incredible importance of enabling them
and the the ROI, the speed, the competitive advantage.
Can you share some specific examples that you think
of Alteryx customers that really show
data breakthroughs by the lines of business
using the technology?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
So there're so many to choose from.
I'll give you two examples quickly.
One is Armor Express.
They manufacture life saving equipment,
defensive equipments, like armor plated vests,
and they were needing to optimize their supply chain
like many companies through the pandemic.
We see how important the supply chain is.
And so adjusting supply to match demand is really vital.
And so they've used all tricks to
model some of their supply and demand signals
and built a predictive model to optimize the supply chain.
And it certainly helped out from a dollar standpoint.
They cut over a half a million dollars
of inventory in the first year,
but more importantly
by matching that demand and supply signal,
you're able to better meet customer demand.
And so when people have orders
and are looking to pick up a vest, they don't want to wait.
And it becomes really important to get that right.
Another great example is British Telecom.
They're a company that services the public sector.
They have very strict reporting regulations
that they have to meet
and they had...
And this is crazy to think about,
over 140 legacy spreadsheet models that they had to run
to comply with these regulatory processes and report,
and obviously running 140 legacy models
that had to be done in a certain order and linked,
incredibly challenging.
It took them over four weeks each time
that they had to go through that process.
And so to save time and have more efficiency in doing that
they trained 50 employees over just a two week period
to start using Alteryx and learn Alteryx.
And they implemented an all new reporting process
that saw a 75% reduction in the number of man hours
it took to run
in a 60% runtime performance.
And so, again, a huge improvement.
I can imagine it probably had better quality as well
because now that it was automated,
you don't have people copying and pasting
data into a spreadsheet.
And that was just one project
that this group of of folks were able to accomplish
that had huge ROI but now those people are moving on
and automating other processes
and performing analytics in other areas.
So you can imagine the impact by the end of the year
that they will have on their business.
You know potentially millions upon millions of dollars.
And this is what we see again and again,
company after company,
government agency after government agency is
how analytics are really transforming
the way work is being done.
>> That was the word that came to mind
when you were describing
the all three customer examples,
the transformation, this is transformative.
The ability to leverage Alteryx
to truly democratize data and analytics,
give access to the lines of business
is transformative for every organization.
And also the business outcomes you mentioned,
those are substantial metrics based business outcomes.
So the ROI and leveraging a technology like Alteryx
seems to be right there sitting in front of you.
>> That's right.
And to be honest
it's not only important for these businesses,
it's important for the knowledge workers themselves.
I mean, we hear it from people that they discover Alteryx,
they automate a process,
they finally get to get home
for dinner with their families which is fantastic,
but it leads to new career paths.
And so, you know, knowledge workers
that have these added skills
have so much larger opportunity.
And I think it's great when the needs of businesses
to become more analytic and automate processes
actually matches the needs of the employees.
And, you know, they too want to learn these skills
and become more advanced in their capabilities.
>> Huge value there for the business,
for the employees themselves to expand their skillset,
to really open up so many opportunities
for not only the business
to meet the demands of the demanding customer,
but the employees to be able to really
have that breadth and depth in their field of service.
Great opportunities there Alan.
Is there anywhere that you want to point the audience
to go to learn more about how they can get started?
>> Yeah so
one of the things that we're really excited about
is how fast and easy it is to learn these tools.
So any of the listeners who want to experience Alteryx,
they can go to the website
there's a free download on the website.
You can take our analytic maturity assessment
as we talked about at the beginning
and see where you are on the journey and just reach out.
You know, we'd love to work with you
and in your organization to see
how we can help you accelerate your journey
on analytics and automation.
>> Alan, it was a pleasure talking to you
about democratizing data and analytics,
the power in it for organizations across every industry.
We appreciate your insights and your time.
>> Thank you so much.
>> In a moment, Paula Hansen
who is the president and chief revenue officer
of Alteryx and Jackie Van Der Leij-Greyling
who's the global head of tax technology at eBay
will join me.
You're watching theCUBE,
the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.
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