[Music] hello and welcome to the friday fast 15 the snack size show where we break down big topics in under 15 minutes the terms data scientists and business analysts have been around for years and today thanks to technology we're able to derive more data about our businesses than ever before but while business analysts and data scientists may geek out like crazy about the data they're collecting they often have a hard time translating the data into business needs today i've invited our director of connected solutions zach brand on the show to help us understand how data drives revenue and reduces costs for business zack isn't a data scientist but he does like geeking out about the data and we agreed this would be the perfect topic for a snack size show welcome zack hi kim good to be here so zach i know you've been on the show before but this is the first time you've been on the show with me as a host so if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about yourself i'd love to learn something new yeah no problem um i oversee our managed services delivery teams at crossviews i also you know personally i have a small four-year-old and a one-year-old that keep me busy and i'm also going through my mba at st thomas university which is local to minneapolis here for those outside of minnesota but i've been really enjoying that a little over halfway through and i've learned a lot parenting and mba and work that's a lot okay so let's get started geeking out about the data what kinds of data does technology measure and which pieces are most relevant to business leaders yeah i think that's i think that's the challenge is that technology can measure anything that you want it to so i think a lot of organizations can either be at least i see challenges in both sides of the extreme either they're trying to measure everything and that's becoming difficult to actually understand what to improve or how to improve it and or on the other side is there's very little data being leveraged so it's kind of going off of uh instincts which can work if assuming that that person is going off at instincts has been successful in the past that can work as long as history seems to uh you know repeat itself and the situations by which you are able to be successful based on your instincts continue to occur and i just really question and i think leaders should question whether or not that is a long-term strategy and i would argue that it's not and i think we've seen that you know specifically covet has accelerated a lot of change in a lot of different verticals and um i think if we're continuing to do things the same way that we did you know three five ten years ago because they were successful then um i think that they're going to find challenges with that so what's important for businesses to measure are business outcomes so it's it's things like revenue it's cost of goods sold it's those are the things that drive business and oftentimes i see data analysts or data being leveraged not necessarily in the communication of business which is finance and i think that's one of the biggest challenges i think that's why there's disconnect um i think oftentimes too that the tools can do really cool things and we spend a lot of time making it do really cool things but we don't tell the story and we don't uh translate it into a language that makes sense for business decision makers so deciding what data and how to translate that to business is important now how is this data measured that's also another challenge is you can measure things however you want them to and i think business leaders need to ask really good questions when they look at data and ask how this data was calculated and what assumptions were made in this data and what biases exist in this data because no data is perfect and you know sometimes you have to go a little deeper to understand what's actually going on um typically if you're working with random variables so say take it for example you're talking about customer satisfaction you're talking about mean time to resolve you're talking about you know stats like that you know first level resolution for service desk et cetera you know those are random variables so you you want to look at what is the average but you also want to look at what is the standard deviation but then you also want to look at the distribution oftentimes people are looking at averages and i could show you 12 different charts that all have the same average but if i look at their distribution they look completely different completely different story so if you're looking basically if you're looking at just one number you aren't looking hard enough and you're not looking at the full picture so you need to look at the mean the standard deviation and the distribution to get an understanding of the full picture so what you're saying is with every question and answer comes another question which leads to another answer so in the whole scope of things how do analysts use this data to then influence business leaders yeah i think touching on what i mentioned before the the language needs to be consistent with what decision makers understand um and oftentimes we're talking about you know first level resolution has gone up or down a couple percentage points or um you know workstation failures have gone up or down certain number of percentage points yeah yeah that doesn't mean you know what does that mean what story are we trying to tell um how or you know if we're trying to tell a story about how it is being effective um you know for example we have one organization that's looking at um a lot of growth in their industry and in their business so if we look at say number of incidents for example their number of incidents is going to look horrendous because it's going up every single month but that's because they're adding employees every single month so we looked at that data and we said well why don't we make it a ratio of employees and when you do that the incident to employee ratio has actually gone down so it's actually gotten better but if you're not measuring it the right way you're going to see that it's getting worse because there's more tickets every month but if you're adding 100 or 150 people every quarter that's going to happen i see so the data is kind of situational well zach thanks for geeking out about this data with me today um do you have any final thoughts to wrap up the topic for us uh no if you have any you know questions or want to talk about it reach out would be happy to talk about it you know there's not a there's not a silver bullet that's going to solve all problems so if you want to talk about it we'd be happy to have a conversation thank you zach and thank you everyone for joining us today this has been geeking out with the data with zach brand mba candidate and director of connected solutions here at crossviews if you'd like to learn more about connected solutions and making data-driven decisions visit crossfuse.com or reach out at let's talk crossfuse.com and for more snack size conversations subscribe to the friday fast 15 at apple podcasts spotify or youtube see you next week [Music]