Tag Archive for: COVID-19

A message from Ironside’s CEO: Stronger Together

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As we enter into the Independence Holiday weekend, I wanted to drop a quick note. It’s hard to believe three months have passed since my last letter. The world is evolving daily and technology continues to play a critical role in how we all connect, track information and communicate worldwide. Despite the shift toward working remotely, the executive team and I continue to be impressed with the level of productivity, cohesiveness, employee engagement and strength as an organization that we have seen demonstrated by our team. 

Here are a few highlights:

Teamwork. My team has pointed out how their interaction with each other has expanded — collaboratively tackling projects, sharing knowledge to prepare for webinars, and helping clients deal with COVID-19’s impact on their data and business analytics. We’ve hosted weekly Town Hall forums and internal Step competitions that have promoted teamwork company-wide.Under our Strategies for Success free content offerings to our clients, we’ve rallied around our Take30 Series. 

These sessions hosted by Ironside’s Data Science, Data Advisor and Business Intelligence Leads, have made it important for Senior Consultants, Partners and Clients to come together to offer the best of our thinking. The planning and delivery has been mutually beneficial for our team and the ever-growing number of participants who we have shared 30 minutes together, multiple times per week since the start of the pandemic.

Education. This unprecedented time when we are not traveling to clients has offered a time for our consultants to learn additional skill sets and to expand their certifications. One of the greatest values we offer to our clients is understanding best practices related to integration aspects between our key partners: IBM, AWS, Precisely, Microsoft, Trifacta, Tableau, DataRobot, Snowflake, Alteryx, Matillion and Alation. For us, to continue to excel with these partners — cross-training between our Business Intelligence, Information Management and Data Science practices on our most utilized tools — has created many “a-ha” moments toward streamlining our delivery services.

Client Engagements. Despite the sunsetting of “business as usual” for now, Ironside’s business is strong. COVID-19 has impacted businesses in various ways, whether they are operating and accessing data differently or needing to measure the impact of the global environment on their businesses’ analytics. Perhaps now, more than ever, the demand for information and analytics is a “must-have” versus a “nice-to-have.” Some of our clients have found themselves busier than ever and racing to keep up with the demand for new analytics and reports. Other clients are compelled to be more hands-on with analytics that used to be automated by machine learning models that have been rendered invalid. In these cases and beyond, Ironside’s Analytics Assurance Service is here to help. Our team’s expertise is being leveraged for immediate, short term assistance to support organizations running as efficiently as possible, allowing clients to use their own skills for other tasks to avoid stifling tradeoffs. 

Thank you for your continued relationship with our team. From myself and my team to you and yours, we wish you a wonderful Independence Day. Stay safe and remain strong, both in business and in health.

Best,
Tim

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Analytics Assurance Services: Delivering Confidence During Uncertain Times

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The world has changed dramatically over the course of a single month, and companies are struggling even more with things that have historically challenged them:

  • Finding the best people to run, build and innovate on their analytics tools and data
  • Making these environments accessible to employees in a work-at-home model

In this Forbes article, Louis Columbus cites a recent Dresner survey that shows up to 89% of companies are seeing a hit to their BI and Analytics budgets due to COVID-19. The survey includes these two recommendations:

Recommendation #1

Invest in business intelligence (BI) and analytics as a means of understanding and executing with the change landscape.

Recommendation #2

Consider moving BI and analytical applications to third-party cloud infrastructure to accommodate employees working from home.

89% of companies are seeing a hit to their BI and Analytics budgets due to COVID-19.

We’re here to help you explore your options.

Now that the role of analytics is more important than ever to a company’s success, analytics leaders are again being asked to do much more with much less — all while companies are experiencing staff reductions, navigating the complexities of moving to a work-from-home model, and struggling to onboard permanent hires.

To address these short-term shortages (and potentially longer-term budget impacts), companies are naturally evaluating whether leveraging a managed-service approach — wholly or even just in part— can help them fill their skills gap while also reducing their overall spend.

As they weigh this decision, cost, technical expertise, market uncertainty and the effectiveness of going to a remote-work model are all top-of-mind. Here’s how these factors might affect your plans going forward:

Factor 1: Cost

As the Dresner number showed, most analytics teams need to reduce spend. Doing this mid-year is never easy, and usually comes at the expense of delayed or canceled projects, delayed or cancelled hiring, and possibly even staff reductions. All of these decrease a company’s analytics capabilities, which in turn decreases its ability to make the right business decisions at a critical time. A managed services approach to meeting critical analytics needs, even just to address a short-term skills gap, can provide valuable resources in a highly flexible way, while saving companies significant money over hiring staff and traditional consulting models.

Factor 2: Technical Expertise

A decade ago, your options for analytics tools and platforms were limited to a handful of popular technologies. Today even small departments use many different tools. We have seen organizations utilizing AWS, Azure, and private datacenters. Oracle, SQL Server, Redshift all at the same company? Yes, we have seen that as well. Some of our customers maintain more than five BI tools. At some point you have to ask: Can we hire and support the expertise necessary to run all these tools effectively? Can we find and hire a jack-of-all trades?

In a managed services model, companies can leverage true experts across a wide range of technology while varying the extent to which they use those resources at any particular time. As a result, companies get the benefit of a pool of resources in a way that a traditional hiring approach simply cannot practically provide.

Factor 3: Effectiveness of Remote Work Engagement

If you weren’t working remotely before, you probably are now. Companies are working to rapidly improve their processes and technologies to adjust to a new normal while maintaining productivity.

Managed service resourcing models have been delivering value remotely for years, using tools and processes that ensure productivity. Current events have not affected these models, therefore making them an ideal solution for companies  trying to figure out the best way to work at home.

Times are changing. We’re ready!

Ironside has traditionally offered Managed Services, to care for and maintain customer platforms and applications, and consulting services, to assist in BI and Analytics development.

Companies can leverage our Analytics Assurance Services temporarily, for a longer period of time to address specific skills gaps, or to establish a cloud environment to support remote analytic processes.

With Ironside, you can improve your data analytics within your new constraints, while reducing your costs. We’d love to show you how.

Contact us today at: Here2Help@IronsideGroup.com

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A message from Ironside’s CEO: We’re here to help.

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Over the past week, I’ve spoken to a number of customers and partners who are adjusting to the ever-evolving reality of life during COVID-19. Beyond the many ways it has affected their personal lives and families, we’ve also discussed how it has impacted their jobs, and the role of analytics in the success of their organizations.

During these conversations, a few consistent themes have emerged from the people responsible for delivering reporting and analytics to their user communities:

  • Reliability: Continuing to deliver business as usual content despite a suddenly remote workforce
  • Resiliency: Hardening existing systems and processes to ensure continuity and security
  • Efficiency: Delivering maximum value even in the midst of a short-term business downturn
  • Innovation: Finding new ways to leverage data to address emerging challenges in areas such as supply chain, customer service, pricing optimization, marketing, and others.

While none of these topics are new to those of us in analytics, the new reality brought on by COVID-19 has made it even more important for us to succeed in every area. In an excellent Forbes article, Alteryx CEO Dean Stoecker discusses the importance and relevance of analytics professionals in driving success for their organizations in these trying times.

As he correctly concludes,

“If anyone is prepared to tackle the world’s most complex business and societal challenges—in this case, a global pandemic—it is the analytic community.”

We’re all in this together.

At Ironside, we’re taking that challenge to heart and looking at how we, too, can refocus our talents to better help our customers. Our upcoming series, Strategies for Success During Uncertain Times, will cover the steps we’re taking to help our partners weather this storm.

As of today, we’re:

  • Holding on-demand “Coffee Breaks” with some of our most experienced SMEs
  • Increasing remote trainings on key technologies
  • Rolling out short-term hosted platforms to accelerate model development, especially for predictive analytics
  • Expanding our managed-services capabilities for platforms and applications, even for short-term demand
  • Increasing our investment in off-shore capabilities to reduce costs and expand coverage models and other areas, too

Additionally, we are offering more short-term staffing options to our customers. Read Depend on Ironside for your data and analytics bench for short- and long-term success for more about these services.

We’re here to help.

At Ironside, we agree that the analytics community is uniquely-positioned to help our organizations weather the COVID-19 storm, and we’re committed to making our customers and partners as successful as possible.

We look forward to speaking with you about your immediate needs, and continuing the conversation on these and other timely topics.

Contact us today at: Here2Help@IronsideGroup.com

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Depend on Ironside to deepen your data and analytics bench for short- and long-term success.

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Ironside has historically focused on longer-term, project- or services-based staffing. However, we understand that what you may need most now is immediate, on-demand access to highly-experienced professionals.

To address that critical need, we’re making some of our top people available for short-term work. If you have even the most temporary and immediate need to address capacity constraints, delayed hiring, budget limits, or just to knock a few items off of your to-do list, we can assist with a flexible, remote, talented, and cost-effective pool of professionals. Our areas of expertise include:

  • IBM Analytics portfolio including Cognos, Watson, Netezza and others
  • BI tools including Tableau, Power BI, QuickSight and others
  • Cloud-native technologies on AWS and Microsoft
  • Leading data wrangling, management, and catalog tools
  • Top AI and AML technologies from DataRobot, AWS, and more

The world may be up in the air, but we understand that it has to be business as usual for our clients. We’re here to help you with that.

Contact us today at: Here2Help@IronsideGroup.com