Ironside Recognized as Strategy Consultant

BOSTON, May 25, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Ironside, a data and analytics firm headquartered in Massachusetts has been named a Strategy Consultant in Customer Analytics in Forrester’s Vendor Landscape for Customer Analytics Services Providers, Q2 2017.

Tim Kreytak, CEO of Ironside, in a statement said:

“We’re delighted that Forrester acknowledges our analytics services and data enrichment capabilities which complement our strategic offerings in the area of Customer Analytics. Data and analytics is increasingly more important as organizations compete in the global economy. Our investments in Customer Analytics are heavily focused on delivering actionable insights to our clients which drive immediate business results.”

According to Forrester Customer Insight (CI) professionals look to customer analytics service providers to:

• Bridge the gaps in the CI life cycle. The insights life cycle translates raw data into insights and turns those insights into action to win, serve, and retain customers.
• Augment existing skill sets. Many companies look to service providers to fill the talent gap resulting from an inadequate supply of data scientists.
• Accelerate analytical maturity. Whether you’re building new models, incorporating additional data, or applying existing techniques to new use cases.

“Traditional strategy consultancies have invested in considerable data-science talent for advanced analytics, but they also offer guidance on the pieces of the puzzle that are often missing — people and processes. … Deloitte, EY, Ironside, and KPMG all now offer tactical analytics services to complement their strategic offerings. They also offer data enrichment in addition to analytics in the form of demographic, vertical-specific, social media, address, and census data.”

– Forrester, Vendor Landscape: Customer Analytics Service Providers, Q2 2017

Data and Analytics Maturity

Ironside believes the most efficient approach to progressing the analytic maturity of an organization is to first start with a roadmap, based on Ironside’s Data and Analytics Maturity Model, that aligns investments to business goals, and then sequence those investments to build capabilities based on defined business use cases.

“Analytics is an iterative process and this way we are able to build clients’ capability, drive user adoption and show an immediate return on their investment while working towards their desired future state,”  says Greg Bonnette, Ironside’s VP of Strategy & Innovation.

Helping our clients understand their current state, while comparing it to a desired and realistic future state, has proven to be a very effective method for building a data & analytics roadmap. To jump-start this process, Ironside has created a proven framework for assessing an organization’s data & analytics maturity. Developing an understanding of where your company is in each of six key areas is a critical first step in mapping your way forward.

• Strategy: A disciplined process of developing and managing long-term business objectives, including the actions that help achieve those objectives.
• Analytics: Effective consumption of enterprise and ad hoc information with tools that are capability-aligned to analytic use cases.
• Data: An organization’s ability to capture, transform, and enrich data assets, including documentation and maintenance of standardized definitions for master data, rules, entities, and references.
• Governance: Ensuring the ongoing relevance, flexibility, and accuracy of data, and developing application and analytic solutions that fit the company’s unique needs, culture, and use cases.
• Skills: An organization’s collective expertise around supporting the full lifecycle of data & analytics delivery, including data architecture, data integration, project management, business analysis, data science, user experience, and training.
• Architecture: Alignment of systems and infrastructure to support business applications in a secure, scalable, and flexible manner.

While these six areas provide a framework for Ironside’s roadmap engagements, the key to obtaining organizational consensus is being able to articulate clear, achievable benefits. Ironside can help with that, too. While our technical expertise runs deep, we also have broad experience in business analytics strategy, advisory consulting, solution architecture, and technical implementation. We have a rare ability to communicate in both business speak and tech speak, and our years of implementing solutions have made us confident that our theories perform in reality.