Building a Digital Analytics Organization Create Value by INtegrating Analytical Processes, Technology, and People

I realized a couple years ago that most people I met had no idea what I did for work—even
when I told them my job title. Of those who did understand what I was doing, it was because
they likely worked in the Internet industry. But few people I met had any experience doing my
job, which was running a digital analytics organization. At one time, I think I was one of only a
handful of analytics practitioners who worked for a brand and managed people who did digital
analysis and combined it with traditional analytics. Certainly, there were analytics teams in
brands and in agencies and consultancies, but there were few practitioners who had the
opportunity to manage centralized business analytics teams in globally distributed companies
with accountability for technology, the people, the process, and overall analytical
deliverables. Actually, only several years ago, I could count on one hand the number of people
who had both built from scratch or inherited analytics teams that concentrated solely on
understanding digital behavior and using the data to drive both strategic and tactical decision
making. Few had run analytics in both private and publicly traded companies reporting to
senior executives (that is, C-level executives) where the data could not risk being “wrong”
because the markets could act on it—and the stakeholders (and shareholders) had high
expectations. I realized in these complex and often highly matrixed environments that there was
a right way and a wrong way to build a digital analytics organization. The right way and the
wrong way was nuanced, but it was similar whether the company was building an analytics
team from the ground-up or if the company already had “baggage” from previous attempts at
analytics.
When I began building analytics teams in brands, little precedent existed from people who
had done similar work before, so my peers and I figured out how to do the job and how to
succeed in the work. My philosophy when orchestrating analytical activities and building
teams was that the work needed to be focused on helping the business either reduce costs or
increase profitable revenue. That way, if analytics could help impact the top or bottom line, the
team would be secure in its role and employment. It sometimes worked that way, and other
times, externalities, such as the Great Recession, got in the way.
Along the course of my career in analytics, I’ve self-developed a practitioner’s perspective
on how to execute analytics in organizations. Many people over the years asked me, “When are
you going to write a book?” and, encouraged by a few people in 2012, I decided to write this
one. What you have in your hands is the result. This book provides a useful handbook for
analysts, managers, and executives at all levels in all industries to learn the organizational
aspects of digital analytics, to understand and appreciate the process of analytics, the necessity
of analytics teams, and the importance of applying rigorous analytical techniques and methods
to accurate digital data. You can gain additional knowledge and an appreciation for reporting,
KPIs, data governance, and how market research, qualitative data, and other types of
competitive and business intelligence data and technology enhance analytics and analytical
decision making. I hope that you find value in the content of the book and use my perspectives

to help contextualize and inform your own decision making at your companies—as I have
leveraged the perspectives of others in my career.
Writing a book is never an easy task. It takes not only considerable time and effort, but it
also requires saying something that has to be unique, real, and true. For a business book, what
is written also must be relevant, helpful, and useful to people employed in the profession. This
book is all those things and more. And it was only possible for me to author because of the
knowledge and perspectives I’ve gained during the course of my career from working,
collaborating, and befriending among the smartest and most talented people working with the
Internet and analytics today, including but not limited to the following people:
Jesse Harriott, Thomas Davenport, J.P. Isson, Ben Green, Frank Faubert, Nate Treloar,
Enno Becker, Julio Gomez, Akin Arikan, Jonathan Mendez, Raj Aggarwal, Joel Rubinson,
Justin Cutroni, Jonathan Corbin, Rand Schulman, Eric T. Peterson, Steven J. Mills, David
Mahoney, Sean Keaveny, Chris Boyle, Jim Sterne, Gary Angel, Bob Page, Bryan Eisenberg,
Andreas Cohen, Jeffrey Eisenberg, June Dershewitz, Joe Stanhope, Jeff Quinn, Ellen Julian,
Nikolay Gradinarov, Kounandi Couliably, Kurt Gray, Abby Mehta, Lauren Moores, Rand
Schulman, Bill Gassman, Matt Cutler, David Cancel, Andrew and Luchy Edwards, Keith
Lehman, Thomas Boselivac, Stan Ingertson, Brian Suthoff, Mark Gryska, Brian Induni, Seth
Romanow, Alex Yoder, Frank Faubert, Gary Angel, Aaron Bird, Josh James, Alex Yoder,
Casey Carey, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, Scott Ernst, Yaakov Kimelfeldt, Andy Fisher, David
Churbuck, Brett House, Brooks Bell, Matt Finlay, Ian Houston, Avinash Kaushik, Yaakov
Kimelfeld, Larry Freed, Eric Hansen, Kim Ann King, Ali Benham, Josh Chasin, Yuchun Lee,
Kevin Cavanaugh, Ken and Ross Fadner and the Mediapost.com/OMMA team, the members of
the Analytics Research Organization (ARO), the people who support Digital Analytics
Thursdays (DAT), eTail, I-COM, eMetrics, the Digital Analytics Association and the Boston
Local Chapter, and finally, Jeanne Glasser-Levine and Tim Moore and their staff and
colleagues at Pearson.
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