From the Blog Meister:

May 24, 2010: "Agora" The Story of Hypatia Makes it to the Big Screen!

Agora, whose title refers to the public square and marketplace where ideas were debated in the ancient Greek world, is directed by the Spanish-Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Amenabar, who wrote the screenplay with Mateo Gil. He originally envisioned a movie about the history of astronomy from Aristotle to Einstein but changed direction when his research brought him to Hypatia and the period just before the start of the Dark Ages.

From the Blog Meister:

May 12, 2010: Tekrati Cites Hypatia Research, LLC as Business Intelligence
& Analytics Influencer to Watch!

Whenever you look for the purchase decision influencers in business intelligence (BI) and business analytics, you end up looking at the trade press. And there's some noteworthy news on that front this week: media giant TechTarget announced that they've acquired the BeyeNETWORK properties and network of experts. TechTarget plans to leverage BeyeNETWORK experts to build out their footprint in BI via the new SearchBusinessAnalytics.com destination site.

Regardless how this M&A looks once the dust settles, it will have a definite impact on the influence wielded by the BeyeNETWORK experts.

Many of these experts are solo or small-group professionals with deep subject matter expertise. The group includes analysts, consultants, lecturers and authors. They tend to have closely held relationships with their clients and industry contacts. They influence purchases, implementation, and best practices around enterprise business intelligence, data warehousing and analytics software. They engage with the market, and formulate and promote their own opinions. They can also play important roles in the influencer ecosystem as intermediaries -- bringing the viewpoints of more powerful influencers, such as vendors, directly to their own contacts.

If you're in the BI market, monitor BeyeNETWORK and TechTarget over the next 3 to 6 months to see which experts get more play, which get less, which get lost, and any new experts attracted by the larger combined media site. Keep your focus on the individual influencers, not the BeyeNETWORK brand itself.

For example, some of the BeyeNETWORK experts I recommend putting on your watch list: Merv Adrian, Lou Agosta, Leslie Ament, Steve Dine, Neil Raden, Craig Shiff, James Taylor, and Colin White.

Improve customer data analytics: Tips for using metrics, technologies

Implementing customer data analytics requires attention to methodologies, metrics and technologies.

Before trying to secure additional budget or resources, audit all customer-related performance metrics along with the methodologies or formulas used for each. For example, does your organization capture:

•   Campaign metrics based on uplift?
•   Trade promotion results based on single products or multiple product attachment rates?
•   Percentage change in customer complaints?
•   Percentage change in customer migration rates?
•   Customer risk profile?
•   Net promoter score?
•   Customer recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) value metrics?
•   Customer profitability per customer on a quarterly, bi-annual or annual basis?
•   Customer lifetime value (CLV) metrics?

The holy grail of customer analytics is closely tied to a virtuous circle of closed-loop performance metrics -- which is next to impossible to accomplish in a multi-channel consumer environment. However, it is highly possible to improve an organization's customer analytics processes with a goal of enhancing the customers' experience and corporate profitability. To do this, organizations must define and standardize performance metrics at the corporate level.

Corporate-level agreement on how metrics are defined and calculated is as necessary as enterprise standardization of data dimensions across data marts. Failure to do this renders any report analysis and insight derived wildly inaccurate. Do you want your senior executives making critical decisions based on highly inaccurate information?

Some examples from our research at Hypatia Research LLC include:

• An office supply retailer utilized specific marketing metrics to calculate "uplift" from a trade promotion run on printer ink and internally announced the promotion as a rousing success. However, at the profitability level, the company actually lost revenues on the promotion as market-basket analysis revealed that the promotion did not influence shoppers to buy other products with higher profit margins. In short, they paid for expensive media advertising, store signage, direct marketing and reduced the price of printer ink below cost and realized a negative return on both trade promotion investment and product sales.
  
• Another company utilized activity-based costing (ABC) as the preferred methodology for calculating product category profitability. However, Hypatia found that one team included the actual cost of both production and raw materials in their calculation while other departments added in an average cost of sales per product SKU.

[1] C.2009 Hypatia Research, LLC. "Decision Science & Customer Analytics: Competitive Advantage or Necessary to Compete?"

Exploiting the value of customer data with analytics

Attaining true "customer intelligence" is both art and science --requiring attention to technology, including customer data analytics, processes and organizational mindset.

Prior to the recent global melt-down of 2008-2009, many executives believed that marketing, branding, customer interactions and social media investments were mostly about creating buzz around an organization's product or service offering -- an intangible investment that didn't require justification. The new post-recession paradigm calls for senior executives and marketers alike to create alignment between key performance indicators (KPIs), marketing performance metrics, corporate goals and shareholder earnings in order to prove value and remain relevant to multiple stakeholders. Hypatia Research LLC studies confirm that more than 50% of marketing departments, sales and business development professionals, and customer service and support teams continue to be tasked and measured in a non-integrated, often ad hoc, fashion. In short, companies actually committed to measuring marketing performance continue to rely on a patchwork of linear and non-integrated metrics. more...

•   Improve customer data analytics: Tips for using metrics, technologies
•   Expert advice for developing a customer data analytics program
•   Customer data analytics best practices from top performers

From the team at Hypatia:
May 2010 be a year of peace, good health & economic stability to all.

Team Hypatia Research, LLC

In the not-too-distant future, organisations looking to fill the post of chief marketing officer (CMO) may not peruse the marketing department for the perfect candidate. According to a study by Forrester Research, the next generation of CMOs will in fact hail from the customer intelligence discipline.

The report, "The Intelligent Approach to Customer Intelligence", suggests that changes in consumer behaviour, and a subsequent struggle to understand customers, will force businesses to put greater stock in customer intelligence.

Author of the report, Dave Frankland, describes this as "injecting science into the art of marketing". He points to comments by Andreas Weigend, Amazon's former chief scientist, that individuals will generate more data this year than in the combined history of mankind. An incredible statement to make --but one that bears contemplation.

Hypatia Research, LLC was pleased to be asked to adjudicate the 2009 Vision Awards  sponsored by the BeyeNETWORK. This year's winners include:

2009 Vision Award for Business Impact Winners

•   Analytics: Kognitio for TRA, Inc.
•   Business Intelligence: Hitachi Consulting for Schumacher Group
•   Business Intelligence: Teradata Corporation for Freescale Semiconductor
•   Data Access, Integration & Executability:Initiate Systems, Ochsner Health System 
•   Operational BI: MicroStrategy for Nygard International
•   Performance Management: Actuate for St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital
•   Software-as-a-Service BI: Adaptive Planning for Pep Boys

"Congratulations to all the recipients of this award," states Ron Powell, cofounder of the BeyeNETWORK. "In this time of limited budgets and stretched IT resources, it is reassuring to know that successful companies are taking the necessary steps to improve the way their organizations derive business value from the wealth of data available to them." 

Special kudos to Teradata and Actuate who won this award in their respective categories for the second consecutive year.

PRESS RELEASE: "What Healthcare CIOs Need to Know About the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act & Electronic Health Records: EHR Technology & Government Funding" [BusinessWire Link:]

BOSTON, MA --September 16, 2009 --Hypatia Research, LLC today released a report entitled "What Healthcare CIOs Need to Know About ARRA & EHR: Healthcare Technology Solutions & Service Providers" outlining  current developments, major adoption challenges, business case justification and an assessment of more than 30 EHR vendors that meet government standards for certification and funding programs.

This comprehensive 50+ page report [http://www.hypatiaresearch.com/images/HypatiaResearch_ARRA-EHR_CoverTOC.pdf] complete with client case studies, and figures takes account of:

Benefits of Electronic Records: Efficiency and Access

Beyond the obvious value of centralized access to patient data, electronic records systems provide health providers with multiple benefits:

1. Accuracy & Error-Checking: Automated alarm systems notify physicians if drugs prescriptions are contraindicated for patients
2. Reporting & Decision Support: EHRs Healthcare professionals may compile & analyze data to spot trends
3. Medical Knowledge-base: Advanced EHRs allow physicians and nurses to stay abreast of medical protocols, and in key developments
4. Near-time Actionable Insight: Intelligent health records systems (IEHR) that exploit  natural language processing [NLP] or semantic analytics to aggregate & analyze unique clinical data

• Increased compliance in diabetics from 8.6% to 28.5%
• Reduced errors in patient charting for allergy information from 36% to 11% via electronic reminder alerts for prescribing clinicians
• Increased the percentage of women over age 42 receiving mammograms from 24.5% to 49.4%
• Avoiding approx. 42 potential anti-coagulant overdoses per month via alerts on duplicate prescriptions

August 12, 2009:

NEW REPORT: "What Healthcare CIOs Need to Know About the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act & Electronic Health Records: EHR Technology & Government Funding"

Research Trends Overview Webinar: "Enterprise Feedback Management to Actionable Customer Insight: Maturity Models & Best Practices"

To reserve your space, please email:research@HypatiaResearch.com.

June 15, 2009:

Visibility & Usability Pose Challenges: Previous quantitative research performed by Hypatia revealed that use of timely, complete, and accurate information leads to improved customer service levels, reduced operational costs, increased revenues, and higher customer satisfaction and retention rates.  In short, it's all about revenues and customers-market share growth and enhanced retention rates. In fact, use of marketing science and information analysis services has moved beyond a competitive advantage for companies that seek to grow aggressively. It has become necessary to stay in the game. Leading companies consistently focus on retaining customers and growing revenues through the use of customer data for the following business functions:

•   Customer service & support: Operational (64%)
•   Corporate Planning: Strategic (56%)
•   Product design: Strategic (48%)
•   Business development / Sales: Operational (36%)
•   Marketing: Operational (20%)

Note: All content excerpted from "Decision Science & Customer Analytics: Competitive Advantage or Necessary to Compete?" by Leslie Ament. ©2009 Hypatia Research, LLC. To purchase or license the complete report, contact: ZGR@HypatiaResearch.com

May 21, 2009:

Over 250 users of EFM and Customer Insight techniques have responded to our survey thus far.  Please take a moment to complete our survey and receive a complimentary version of the report in July 2009. The survey will close this Monday May 25 on Memorial Day!

Transforming Enterprise Feedback Management into Actionable Customer Insight: Maturity Models & Best Practices

TAKE THE SURVEY

Our next research study will benchmark the current state of the market by identifying best practices and performance metrics used by successful companies to improve performance and profitability via EFM and Customer Insight initiatives.

Hypatia will assess the processes, organizational expertise and key performance indicators that set top performers apart such as:

• Which team or role is responsible for analyzing and sharing this insight throughout your organization?
• How successful are organizations in systematically capturing, managing, analyzing and applying customer intelligence throughout the enterprise?
• What tangible benefits are realized by those who invest in customer knowledge?
• How effective are various technologies or processes such as: Customer Experience, Enterprise Feedback, Business Intelligence, Marketing Automation, Customer Relationship Management, Web Analytics, Speech Analytics or Customer Satisfaction in facilitating creation of actionable customer insight?
• Why do some organizations utilize market research service providers or agencies for customer insight while others prefer to operationalize this process internally?
• Is free text [blogs, call center notes, phone interviews] integrated and analyzed along with structured information such as purchase price, survey responses, and demographic data--or not?
• Which metrics, key performance indicators or closed-loop processes are used?
• What do successful companies do differently?

From the Blog Meister:

Our next research study is designed to benchmark the current state of the market, identify best practices and performance metrics used by successful companies to improve performance and profitability via EFM and Customer Insight initiatives. Survey respondents who complete all applicable questions are eligible to receive a complimentary executive summary of the report.

How successful are organizations in systematically capturing, managing, analyzing and applying customer intelligence thrhoughout the enterprise? What tangible benefits are realized by those who invest in customer knowledge? Our research will benchmark the current state of the market, future plans for selection and investment in technologies or service providers. Moreover, we will assess the processes, organizational expertise and key performance indicators that set top performers apart such as:

• Which team or role is responsible for analyzing and sharing this insight throughout your organization?

• How effective are various technologies or processes such as: Customer Experience, Enterprise Feedback, Business Intelligence, Marketing Automation, Customer Relationship Management, Web Analytics, Speech Analytics or Customer Satisfaction in facilitating creation of actionable customer insight?

• Why do some organizations utilize market research service providers or agencies for customer insight while others prefer to operationalize this process internally?

• Is free text [blogs, call center notes, phone interviews] integrated and analyzed along with structured information such as purchase price, survey responses, and demographic data--or not?

•  Which metrics, key performance indicators or closed-loop processes are used?

•  What do successful companies do differently?