#038: To Outsource or Not Outsource -- That Is the Question

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. We apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

[00:00:26] Hi everyone. Welcome to the digital analytics power hour.

[00:00:30] This is episode 38. You know getting up and running a digital analytics practice that your company is certainly no small task. There are a lot of different aspects to getting a program up and off the ground. You know you may be joining one in process it just needs fixes or you may be starting from scratch rebuilding from the ground up but what parts do you have to do yourself versus where can you go to get help from the outside. On this episode of The Digital Analytics power our here’s a one now our sales pitch for our services. No I’m just kidding. We talk a little bit about this. Where can you outsource versus where can’t you. So help me along the way. Here is my cohost Tim Wilson.

[00:01:14] I’m like oh 10 I actually couldn’t make it. This is Chippie Chippie will do. He’s Teme outsourced the episode this time. OK Shippy Ledoux welcome to put exactly no thought into that. That joy that came from.

[00:01:31] I love that name and we sure hope to hear more from Chippie Ladu in the future. Obviously I am Michael Healthlink. All right so let’s get started. But first of all need everyone to sign this NDA. No I’m just kidding. All right.

[00:01:45] So Tim this is something that’s worth a lot of consideration. No one can just buy everything that has to do with their analytics practice. And I think have a really great one. So where should people start. What could they outsource to the insource.

[00:02:00] How should they attack that problem. It seems like some of the outsourcing happens because of the talent gap in the industry. I mean I think there are companies that have that sort of a philosophy of we know what we do well and we’re going to do that. We’re going to stay just tight tight tight to our core and they don’t really see analytics as being core for them and so they say we’re going to outsource it. Now I think that’s I think that’s generally wrongheaded. I think other organizations wind up outsourcing because they’ve had Wrex open for months or they’ve gotten one person hired and they know they need five. In Iraq we can’t get them. So you know we’ll go outsource so I would love to think that there is a very deliberate approach and thought process into what does it make sense to outsource. What should we grow and develop internally. I think it winds up being more. More often than not a reactive of oh crap we’ve got to get we’ve got to get our Adobe analytics implementation fixed or oh crap like nobody’s able to pull the data that we need. So I don’t think it’s very deliberate. I think there are things that can be outsourced but I just already took us down a tangent.

[00:03:17] No I’m not. I’m in agreement sort of you know. I mean obviously I agree there are things that can be outsourced. I guess for me I tend to separate sort of you know really loosely sort of strategic versus tactical in terms of what it is you’re trying to do and then start looking at for this organization. These things we could outsource these things we need to keep in-house. So that’s what’s strategic what’s well for us is tactics. Sure thing. So strategic is what skill sets do we hire right. If I’ve got budget for a team of three people what skill sets are hired to get the most coverage or the best bang for my buck and then use you know consulting or outsourcing or something like that to fill in blanks where I didn’t get talent to fill those. So it’s like you’re saying you’re saying be strategic on what you outsource. Not saying it just outsource the tactical and but like also how what’s our what’s our approach what’s our practice model. How do we serve the business what are we are we you know a hub and spoke on. Are we a center of excellence or are we decentralized.

[00:04:31] You know so these kinds of those are the strategic questions just to beat but you’re saying you have to answer those strategic questions and then use that to inform what you’re going to.

[00:04:41] Yeah outsource. I mean it all depends because you could get me like I’m an idiot. I’m not saying that. I mean I am looking at you like that. But I’m not saying that your voice is saying for you. OK I think I’m making it confusing because I don’t mean to say that you can’t actually go outside and get help on either of those things.

[00:05:01] So you could go out and get strategic consulting help. Right. You could go and hire people who could give you the strategy for your business to do that. You can also go hire people that could just come in and be your tactical day to day execution support. Right.

[00:05:18] So I think a point number one is trying to decide what your outsource in a purely reactive who’s beating me down for what. Thing right now this report or this thing and racing to outsource. You may have to do it some cases but that that is not going to wind up with a efficient and effective use of outsourcing. I mean I think there is a great case for outsourcing. If there is no one internally who’s been around the block a few times with analytics it’s really hard to internally come up with an analytic strategy because they’re just all these rampant misperceptions you know outlined something that is completely not doable at all. But it does seem like well gee before you start figuring out what it makes sense to outsource your better answer the question of what is our analytic strategy. And that could be something you develop internally because you’ve got the experience and you can come up with it or it’s something where you need some outsourced help to try to figure that out. Luckily I don’t personally do much of that and all the strategy stuff. So this does not sound like a naked sales pitch although I know it is demystified dot com does offer that service.

[00:06:26] Damn it we wound up there. Yeah you ended up there which is fine because insert discovery. So it’s all good.

[00:06:33] No no no.

[00:06:36] But you know so that’s the thing. Before you start putting your chess pieces on the board you want decide what chess pieces you need. And that’s the strategy right. So that’s how I’m going to play this game so you can go out and get help and I think maybe that’s just it. It’s a recognition of what level of support or help do I need right now that I can’t create coverage for with my own team and my own skills. You know we’d be hard pressed to go to a seasoned practitioner with many many years of experience. We went to our last guest Dylan Lewis from into it and he’s been with his company for so long. I imagine that the strategy that they’ve got doesn’t need help right now today for them to be executing at a high level. Right. So that’s not where he probably needs someone to come in from the outside but perhaps your brand new in this role or you just got started and the whole analytics function at this business has cratered because the loss of talent or turnover and you’re starting from scratch again that could be a good time to bring in out toward outside strategic help. So I think it’s a time and place thing. It’s also kind of what your own capabilities and skills are. But that’s true of the tactical stuff as well.

[00:08:01] So what would you say is you’ve got to have a good example of a time where you were watching somebody whether Kleiner or not outsourcing thinking that is the wrong thing to be outsourcing at the wrong time.

[00:08:14] Yeah I mean a lot of times it comes out and that’s the wrong project to do right now.

[00:08:19] You what you need to be doing right now is not that that actually reminds me of.

[00:08:25] I’ve got an example on that one from years ago when I was in when I was a practitioner running a B.I group. I keep getting combers that some of these people actually might listen to the podcast so she’ll have me up on slack. If she did so remember this that the database marketing team was like We want you to do a market basket analysis we want you to do a market basket analysis we’re like That’s not what you need. That’s not going to help you right now. And they’re like Well we found this this company that can do a market basket out this. You just need to pull the data for them to do the market basket analysis and we’re like okay fine. Like we don’t have the bandwidth it’s not that it’s not a priority. So we will we’ll pull the data and let them do it. And of course they came back without inside business knowledge to go and do analysis on Skewes and what had been bought. They came back and presented something that everybody in the organization knew and could not act on. You know one one wit so sorry that just did bring up an example from when I was on the inside.

[00:09:27] No actually I think that ties into something that’s a really key point in anybody’s decision making is Can you outsource insight generation. And the difficulty associated with doing that. I’d like to think that outside teams can generate very insightful analysis and make strong recommendations. But the actual I don’t want to say a cost of doing so but like it’s not cheap to do because you have to have really strong engagement with the company to understand their objectives and what’s happening on the ground at that time so that the insights you generate have alignment and capability to move forward in the business.

[00:10:08] I think that’s I mean the ramp up the ramp up to get to that point and I’ve got cases where I started and this is in multiple jobs where I started saying I just I’m going to help you figure out I’m just going to build your dashboard which for me is I’m just going to help sure make sure we’re really clear on what your eyes are. And then I’m going to give you something of value that you’ll be able to look to monitor how the business is going and we’ll talk about it each week but it could take six months or a year. Actually that harkened back to our conversation with Dollan or Delanoe saying it takes you a year to figure out what the how the company works and I think I’d disagree a little bit that if I if I’m a full time employee onsite at a company I mean there’s varying degrees but there’s a lot of things you can figure out in three months or four months or five months being if you’re outside and you’re part time or even if you’re outside just contracted full time. Just the nature of that to really ramp up and kind of internally know what everybody in the business is focused on and how the organization works and how the competitors move. That is it’s really expensive and if you’re outsourcing you’re paying them to do enough work that they are kind of internalizing that. So I think that’s a good point.

[00:11:24] Yeah. It’s a really tricky balance to strike and especially if you have a team that’s already capable of doing those insights and it makes it totally not worthwhile I think to go outside for that. If you have no capability what I always try to recommend is get the analyst and let them work alongside another analyst that you’re you’re paying for so that they’re getting that training and building the skill that you’ll keep if you want to really build out an effective and long term growing team. But that’s hard. I know that yeah that is not always easy. That is not always easy when it’s in it’s even harder.

[00:12:03] I mean being outside to tell somebody that what you really need to do is kind of it’s a it’s hard for it not to sound like you need to pay double. You need to pay you to find someone to pay them internally and pay me to work along with them. Now I’ve got cases where that’s what’s going on.

[00:12:21] But yeah well I mean obviously expect throughput to be higher in those scenarios because you know you’re not working on the exact same things.

[00:12:32] Well in some cases you’re actually saying I mean I’ve got cases where we’re expecting you to help kind of accelerate the leveling up of the analysts so you’re going to work alongside them. You’re going to have hopefully increased throughput. Again that’s always the case. But along the way we’re moving this person from level 1 to Level 2 or Level 2 to a level 3 because you’re taking the time. You know it’s hard to just like lecture giving. It’s great to go to conference as we were fans of conferences were fans of training but there kind of a show vs tell versus do nature of things and I think that there is some some use in having analysts or having outside outsourcing some kind of more senior talent to do stuff in parallel which again may and it is going to be hard to not not be sounding like we’re self-serving pitches here.

[00:13:28] I guess it goes back to sort of what expertise you’re lacking and how do you go get that in ways that you know you either need to in a long term way with somebody who is there and as your employee or you don’t need it in the long term so you can go get it for a short period of time and then you know you’re done with it you know so a lot of companies outsource implementations right because that’s a discrete project and they can go higher and outsource outside company to do the implementation. The challenging thing is implementations are never done. They need continuous iteration and improvement. You need new metrics being put into the implementation on an ongoing fashion. So really it’s challenging even think about that as something you could purely outsource without thinking about how it will you know six months after the implementation where will you be and who can support you and who’s ready to kind of go in and make the tweaks you need.

[00:14:24] Well I think the implementation was kind of heading the exact same way. I do think because there is more work at an initial implementation or a reimplementation there is more work to be done than there is during the maintenance of it where it seems like it goes wrong is 0 our PMO has assigned the resources and you’re getting I.T. person X and we’re outsourcing the expertise to do the implementation. We’re going to do a solution design and we’re going to give you the code and you’re going to implement it and the project is done and then you’re in a really in a world of hurt because two months later no one internally and you’re kind of stuck kind of perpetually outsourcing. And I’ve got a case right now where is this complete you watch like four parties involved we’ve got an outsourced ANALYST We’ve got an outsourced implementation person. We have the in-house business user and the in-house owner of analytics and source development. And guess what. Just trying to track one little button click in a certain scenario we’ve got these long e-mail threads and guess what it got fucked up because there are just too many parties and no one is really deeply embedded in it. So when doing. I’ve got another case that I’m thinking of where it was the exact opposite. We knew who the one guy internally who was going to ramp up and be the expert. And he knew very little about the nuts and bolts of an adobe analytics implementation at the start.

[00:15:55] Now he’s pretty much he’s hopping into DTM and he’s updating stuff and he can explain allocation and exploration and how things are integrated with sales force and you know and foresee and all these other integrations. And so it is kind of the ideal and that he has ramped up his knowledge his time commitment for analytics is still about the same as what it was. But he has gone up in his sophistication and capabilities dramatically which means that they’re not perpetually paying kind of outsourced support. And he also is the owner of the development relationship. So he’s making sure there are developers who kind of understand what this analytics stuff is and you know you’re less likely to have you know the code drop from the Order Confirmation Page during a release because the latest developer who rotated on was like What is this code thing.

[00:16:49] Yeah. So the one thing I’ve seen that I think has helped a lot of companies is to have specific product owners for the tools you’re using for analytics. So this person they own this product whether that’s Adobe Analytics Google Analytics even the tag management system the testing system who is the owner and they own that for the company that business person or I.T. person or it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It just some owner who’s representing that product to the rest of the company keeps it’s front and center when it’s time to like leverage it or have it interact with other things. I feel like when there’s no Pacific owner that’s where those big big problems crop up is you know nobody is like oh yeah I don’t really know what to say about this code so I’ll just take it off. Whereas if there is a strong owner they’ll like will you need to go talk to Tim because he owns that. He knows what it’s for. He’ll tell you what to do with it. So that’s something that I’ve observed save companies and make them better and better. If you give specific ownership to each product. So is that something that you’re not doing at your company today. That’s a great small step.

[00:18:04] So it goes without saying that the ownership is not outsourced. That’s generally a bad idea.

[00:18:09] Yeah well and I’ve seen that too where people want to hand you the whole thing and be like OK you’re are people. And that’s ok up to a point. But you have to think about what sort of continuity plan all of our knowledge lives on the opposite side of the wall from us. And while that’s really great for me as a console because now you’re pretty much stuck to me. That’s bad for you.

[00:18:33] If our relationship goes south we don’t work together anymore well or even if you’ve outsourced and say it is to search discovery you’ve outsourced the ownership of the product you’ve outsourced the implementation and management of an ongoing management of imitation and you’ve outsourced some degree of the analyst support. So you’re like well that’s great because now if the analyst has some idea they can they can collaborate because they’ve got kind of this external collaboration and the one thing that is totally missing is the internal Full-Time focus on the company and the business and what’s going on. And that is it almost seems like a guarantee like you’re just tying yourself to an anchor that you’re going to drag around. You may still make progress but it’s can’t take you all that far quickly I guess or cost effectively.

[00:19:24] Right. Well and that’s the other thing to balance is yeah your costs versus what you get from it. I mean I’m a huge believer in the our live analytics but you have to get to a certain point with your analytics practice to start to see that are a lie. And so you want to create a plan from day one of how I’m going to use resources whether internal or external to get to that point.

[00:19:48] Does it drive you at all. Nut’s I almost want to go back if when I was taking my financial accounting class 15 years ago if I could go back now I would say spend a little more time on that whole thing that whole reason that it’s cheaper to pay a gazillion dollars an hour to somebody outside than it is to hire NFT because the fully loaded cost for this person. They’re completely separate parts of the finances and that’s this other sort of weird thing where you’re like an terms. There is no way that it is cheaper for you to pay this outside resource. But the fact is the way the accounting works and not and there’s also there’s there’s risk when you take on a full time employee they’re a lot harder you’ve now committed to something that with a contract you have it. But it seems like it’s much more like Oh times are really really tough for us. We can’t hire anybody. We have almost no money. So therefore we’re going to go spend twice as much on external contracts. And that’s just one of those things that I know what happens. I’ve seen it happen again that benefits us. It just seems like really like is there not somebody sitting saying wait a minute you know this doesn’t make sense.

[00:21:08] Well sounds like a really good use case for a.

[00:21:11] No.

[00:21:16] Oh you’re absolutely right. And I feel actually as we’re talking more about this we’re totally straying into management consulting land which is basically designed to help figure out and solve these problems that are sort of more about shape size and scope of your company and what the people you hire need to be able to do. But it makes sense that you hire people to fit certain things but sometimes getting an outside consultant is way easier than making a full time hire just because of the internal pieces around it. I mean a lot of really large companies really really large companies tend to do a massive amount of contractors so that they have basically a floating cushion of people at least in terms of their I.T. and operational things so that they don’t as the business kind of goes up and down they don’t have my opinion of why they’re doing it. I don’t actually know why they’re doing it but as the business goes up and down they can shed those contractors without actually saying they’ve laid anyone off.

[00:22:24] I think there are multiple reasons I think it’s also the perception is it’s faster to get a contractor in because you don’t have to go through the H.R. hurdles or the job description and interact and getting it all open. And the reason that you don’t have to go through all those hurdles is because you’re telling yourself we can cut this person any time like there they’re low risk. The downside is you’re not you’re not really investing in talent you’re just trying to get something done right here and now. And I think I would argue that for analytics unless you really have a plan to be this is an attempt to hire which I don’t think there are firms really you know operate on that that sort of model. I mean I think if you know you work for us or somewhere there are more of those sorts of options. But I don’t know. I guess maybe gets back to think that a lot of the outsourcing is reactive and desperation. There are companies in our industry that they’re like we’re the low cost you know we can do stuff that is just annoying reporting that you don’t want to pay anybody internally and we can get to cheap resources and they can spit out your reports. And that to me always is like ah Gwenda’s non automated yet low skill required relatively speaking required reporting ever makes sense for a company.

[00:23:52] Yeah it’s not a good strategy because you yeah you have people who are generating data without doing anything to turn that around into something meaningful.

[00:24:04] So I had so very large CPG company back in the day when I worked for an agency doing work for them. They we hit a point where they were paying their creative agency that I was working at to do some analytics because everybody’s kind of everybody. Every executive at every company sees analytics as something else they can sell whether they’ve got the capability to do it or not. And this large packaged goods company said Ah we don’t want to pay you’re American you know overhead on top of whatever rate is Frain x. Our plan is we found this other firm we’re going to outsource the monthly pooling of the data from Google Analytics. This was pre premium. We’re going to have these offshore guys outsourced pull the data and then we’re just going to have them send the spreadsheet to your analysts which was my team to cull through them and generate the insights for it. And I’m like you’re actually spending you’re going to spend more money and get absolutely nothing from it. And of course there were no analysts involved in the discussion of whether that made any sense whatsoever. We just had account managers saying hey here’s the here’s the excel file. Can you can you look at this. I mean it shows top pages visits and bounce rate. You know what. What are the insights from that and I just shook my head and said I don’t want to work at that company ever again.

[00:25:29] Well and actually that’s another sort of way that we can talk about this which is what have we seen out there that that’s sort of like fanlight whoa you know warning warning like this is not right because I think there’s plenty of those like us. I’ll give you an example. You know you go in to meet with the company you’re going to start working together. And this was from a long time ago. So doesn’t represent any current client of mine or ours. That will never happen. You sit down there like we want to do buzzword bingo predictive A.I. blah blah blah. You know all the the top shelf. This is what we want to do with our program this is what when I started doing tomorrow and you’re like That’s great. Oh wow. So let’s talk about how your baseline implementation is working. Oh it’s it’s a mess but we want to start two minutes here and you’re like but you can’t really skip that and that and it was like there’s always this cognitive dissonance. We want to help us do this high level stuff but you know pay no attention to the fact that no one trusts this underlying dataset because it’s completely broken and everyone knows it.

[00:26:44] Yep that’s a good example. I think I’ll give a corollary to my example that I just gave and that is the Who are we already working with you know hiring giving your media agency additional money to do reporting and analysis on how the media is working.

[00:27:06] On the one hand there’s a nice little story of well they’re experts on on the media and they are they want to do the best for the clients so therefore they’re closest to it and therefore that’s efficient. And this is really not a media bashing it’s more of a fox watching the henhouse that I’ve watched cases where we’re going to outsource this for whatever reason that decision has been made. Do we want to outsource it to go look for another company that we can outsource it to. Or do we want to look around the outsourced dev shop that we have the outsource creative agency we have the outsourced media agency that we have and just ask all of them hey can you guys do analytics for us. And that so often seems to turn around and to get completely conflicting incentives because you’re paying somebody to essentially report on how well they’re doing. I mean that’s kind of the classic we have covered that thing multiple times before but it still happens all the time and you can see how it is. You can see why it happens because every the people running those companies are like hey we can do a new episode you do some more work for you. And here’s the story of why it makes sense. But if you just step back a little bit. Yeah. That doesn’t generally make sense.

[00:28:25] Yeah no it’s always very tricky out hop with another example that could be good or it could be bad which is on the implementation. We talked about implementation rate and outsourcing that. And I feel like plenty of companies outsource a lot of their I.T. in their development because they know they’ve got ebbs and flows so some of the stuff we were just talking about it rationally says you outsource that and then you can kind of manage it on a project by project basis you’ve got some of the same challenges of I.T. people rolling in and rolling out but that’s another one where it’s over implementation and if you ask the dev shop hey you know can you do our analytics implementation. And they say sure because somewhere down the road they dropped the S Code or they dropped you know geotag her meaning maybe they dropped DTM but it’s been pretty rare for me to come across kind of pure I.T. shops that actually have enough of the analyst and kind of to understanding and the data usage understanding for them to really be effective.

[00:29:34] You know they’ll they’ll do Adobe and say hey we have this idea you’re cutting from Diego Adobe why don’t we just you know shove the euro into the page name because you know hey everybody knows what the oil is. And that’s generally a not the best way to make use of of Adobe and an implementation.

[00:29:53] Yeah totally. I mean we see that all the time. We definitely do a fair few implementations. And the reality is Yeah people just shove it in there without even giving a chance to think about what it is they’re trying to go after. And the other thing we see sometimes which is unfortunate is that there can be this tendency to sort of take a product functionality matrix and say Do you want this. Do you want that. Do you want this and nobody knows. That’s why they hired you. They don’t know they want out of the tool. So if you asked them Do you want this functionality out of the tool you’re not helping them get to where they’re supposed to go. You got to come at it the other way and ask what are you trying to accomplish. OK we’re going to use this functionality of the tool to help you accomplish that. And we’ll explain to you how that works. So it is a mindset shift that also has to have happen. And so actually when you’re when you’re evaluating someone to do that it’s a good set of questions to ask. Certainly by no means were the only people who do this. Lots of great consulting firms that do that this way. Think about the business first then bring in the Tools functionality. If you see somebody doing it the other way around challenge that for sure so you get a better a better implementation.

[00:31:12] Is it fair to say when there is no one internally business or I.T. senior management middle level wherever. If there is no one who really has at least a few years of experience and hopefully exposure to kind of some best practices around analytics outsourcing in that environment is just seems really really challenging. I sort of feel for organizations that are we don’t have an internal politics we don’t have staff we know we have a lot of need. We know we’re way behind. We just need to outsource everything. I guess this gets back to where we started which was you know the first thing you feel like you’re horribly behind and if you spend a month or two months or three months trying to get an analytics strategy outlined if you look at that is saying now I’m going to be another three months behind everyone else. The reality is if you just start executing and outsourcing you’re going to wind up falling farther behind because you can’t be effective.

[00:32:15] Yeah I mean it happens where yeah you’re starting from zero and you can’t get somebody in there to just give you the time of day. That’s certainly OK. And you know what’s funny is I got you know of course we all get e-mails all the time everybody in industry does news or e-mail for a very large company who’s looking for a very senior analytics person and it’s partially challenging to just say to this company OK listen I’ll come in and work with you for a year and then I’m going to leave and I’ll help you get this all set up.

[00:32:49] This is what you need. I know I can take you here and then we’ll get you a really nice team in that time period and then they can take it from there and then I can walk away. I have no interest in working for this company long term. I want to help but at the same time you know obviously that’s not going to work. And now I’m not going to talk to them about it.

[00:33:09] Well but I think there may be there may be room for that. My mother’s cousin’s husband was kind of a sort of a career sales guy sales management at large. I think at IBM and some other places and he kind of semi retired to be a you know interim interim V.P. of sales and you could see that being a you know what we’re bringing you in with a recognition that you don’t want to do this. You’re not looking to be here forever but we need somebody who we can temporarily maybe pay whatever premium that demands.

[00:33:47] Yeah. Interim V.P. of analytics right here. Seven hundred fifty thousand dollars.

[00:33:52] Done deal.

[00:33:59] So I actually did watch this is another some of the stuff it’s just really bleak. So there’s a nationally known retailer that was starting effectively from having no one. And so they looked around and they brought somebody and they had a painful headaches and it took them I don’t know six to nine months to realize that she wasn’t actually going to be a fit. Now sometimes that could be that they weren’t ready for she might have been saying everything right and just they weren’t ready to hear it. And I think that actually happens at times too. Somebody has got to go in take a bunch of arrows in the back and basically soften them up and the next person comes in and all of a sudden they’re saying the exact same thing the last person said but nobody’s going to say no.

[00:34:43] Maybe we threw that person under the bus too fast carrying the baggage hence the get. Hence the interim title.

[00:34:49] It’s perfect right. No

[00:34:53] but I think in this case once she moved on I mean they had her down there like crap like we’ve lost another year. Now the fact is presumably she moved the ball forward somewhat. It is just it is tough to start from scratch. I go back to hearing the siren song of outsourcing. We can quickly mobilize a team which is probably OK. It’s OK for you’re doing that and saying but in parallel we have got to actually figure out what our strategy is and where this makes sense and if we’re working with the same company to do that hopefully it’s not a company that’s and incentivized to say your strategy should be to buy more of our services.

[00:35:32] You know it’s the houseflies scenario or at least there’s transparency at those moments so that there’s you know there’s an understanding on both sides hey what we’re recommending is you continue to work with us at the same time recognize that eventually you’ll want to think about how you take this in-house. You know and if that kind of conversation is happening then you’re working with a true partner as opposed to a consultant who’s just trying to maximize the value dollar value of that relationship. Yep well Tim this has been very interesting in a thinly veiled sales.

[00:36:08] It’s actually not meant to be that and hopefully it’s not coming across that way. Please don’t hire analytics demystified or even search discovery.

[00:36:18] No matter how much you might be feeling like it after this awesome conversation is this that they don’t drive like my brother don’t drive like my brother don’t hire don’t hire search discovery don’t hire. And that’s right. I think we’re both. So since this is I think we’ve had one other episode where we’re falling all over so awkward this much we’re trying to be sensitive to it.

[00:36:37] The reality is that you should hire probably both of our firms at the same time and let us work with you on various things because we work with each other because we actually really. Yeah.

[00:36:52] How about a twofer for just nine hundred thousand dollars you get an interim Tim and an interim Michael. We take a lower cut it would be great to be there for that just a one year contract. We’d go in one year fix a bunch of stuff get a great team in place and then walk away.

[00:37:16] Okay so this is I mean it’s an important topic and you know because we both kind of occupy one side of the equation. I think that’s why there’s a discomfort when we talk about it. However I will say that as you if you’re out there as a practitioner and you’re thinking about your analytics practice and the program that you have to make that list. Think about what are the things I need to see happen and do I have the resources and talent internally to accomplish that. Or do I need to go find that whether it’s at the strategic level to help us create a program that’s at the right structure and level or of it’s tactical I just don’t have the specific skill set and so I’m going to go out and get it while I figure out how to train or get someone up to speed there. Those are the ways that you can do that. And I think this conversation shows you know a little little pieces of that I don’t know. Would you agree.

[00:38:08] Tim Yeah I would. I would throw on there plenty of people who are inside companies who were fishers who are outsourcing and they are active in the community so it’s a I guess a plug for the DA and the measure slack if you say I’m thinking about outsourcing. I’d love to talk to somebody and take that off line there because our industry is fito Junior and genuinely pretty helpful with each other not necessarily your direct competitors not going to tell you how they outsource stuff but if you’re thinking should I head down this path is there somebody else who has done x. Somebody will raise their hand. And I think that would actually be a worthwhile discussion or two or three to have.

[00:38:47] Yeah absolutely. All right we’re excited to try a new segment on this show. We’re calling. Last call we want to go out and talk about something we’ve seen recently that just popped up who we thought would be of use or interesting to our listeners. All right Tim why don’t you kick us off. What’s your last call this week.

[00:39:06] So for a new segment with I figure why not alienate a good chunk of the crowd with something that is only applicable to part of the audience and that would be Mac users. So I can’t remember exactly where I stumbled across this but having done some work with a peakin been kind of had a lot of data visualization effective communication pushed into me. I came across this little app it’s a free free app for Mac OS called Sim Dalton ism which will have a link on the show nodes but it’s this insanely simple little thing. It’s a little tool you launch it brings up a window and then you can drag that window around anywhere on your computer and you can pick which form of color blindness you want to view through that window. And there are a little hotkeys I can’t pronounce any of the colorblindness things but there are like 4 types of red green confusion so I’ve started using it when I’ve no if I use red green and a dashboard. This is a little bit of a nod to Leah because she’d found the kind of a blue orange which maybe not be quite as intuitive but is much better from a visual distinction. So when I’m working on something and I want to see what would this look like to you know the 9 percent of the US male population who has some form of red green colorblindness there’s a little window just pops up you move it wherever you want and you see oh are those two colors. They look identical. Can I distinguish between them.

[00:40:36] So it’s a it’s a cool little free Mac Mac app sim Dalton ism. What’s your last call Michael.

[00:40:43] So the way I walk through out there for this time is one of my favorite intellects. Blogsite. Forgotten about for a long time and I just ran across it recently so I thought I’d bring it up which is by a guy by the name of John Foreman who is a data scientist has also has a really great book on Amazon. So look up Jon Foreman data scientist data science on on Amazon you’ll find his book too but his blog is called analytics made Keesee and it is hilarious because what he does is he does these cool exercises with data science from the context of illegal drugs and breaking bad and that sort of thing. So really kind of a cool concept. Really great reading. It’s actually fun reading and that’s very helpful for somebody like me who doesn’t have the mental fortitude to stick it out with you know data science unless it’s made into a funny comic or something. All right so if you’re listening and you got a cool last call we wouldn’t mind hearing about it or if you hired some let consoles and you really loved it. Give a shout out preferably not on our Facebook page.

[00:41:52] No I’m just kidding.

[00:41:55] No. But no we would love to hear from you on Facebook or Twitter or on the measure slack. So give us a shout out. We really enjoy hearing from listeners.

[00:42:05] How can we make the show better and more interesting for you. All right well thank you everyone for my cohost Tim Wilson. This is Michael Roebling saying keep analyzing.

[00:42:21] Thanks for listening. And don’t forget to join the conversation on Twitter on measures like. Great. We welcome your comments and questions. Facebook dot com slash analytics our analytics on Twitter. Smart guys wanted a made up. Word.

[00:42:43] We might not have a ton of uptake but that’s OK. So to calm them to mellow. Energy energy energy. Actually I did at my high school musical comedy company like all your consulting now a year ago he was like great to come and help. What they’re doing or they’re doing anything wrong. And if you can’t help then you just leave and you move on to the next spring. I think you know John I’d like to think that I actually genuinely out there right next to cynical take on my career. On this show and we’re excited to do it. Yeah. You start to get some DVD 43 and my tape is not going to be 43 or hinges. I just. Like the last call. I’m going to start looking at on my Web sites with rose colored glasses.

[00:43:40] Flag and outsourcing.

 

Podcast: Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS