Data Consultancy
Generate actionable insights, uncover business intelligence, design data strategies, and build data products with our expert data consultants.
Data Consultancy Set Up to Support on Data Strategy and Data Governance
In a world where school children can use AI to write their homework, personalised recommendations are a given and legislation is requiring businesses to intimately know and report on the minutiae of each domain – data is king. This is why an increasing number of organisations are building their own data products.
What is often lacking within an organisations data products is:
- A clear organisation-wide data strategy
- Good data governance and data literacy across those interpreting the business intelligence reports
In addition to these challenges, information is often stored across multiple systems and spreadsheets – tucked away from the people that need it most. As such, uncovering insight can be time consuming and frustrating, limiting access to business intelligence.
Building a data capability and potentially a data product is the best way for businesses to:
- Connect disparate sources of data
- Generate actionable insights
- Operationalise data for trading gains and efficiency
- Leverage modern technologies such as predictive insights and AI – it just needs operational and strategic consideration as well as technical
Our Data Consultancy Services
We can help you liberate data from 3rd party systems and spreadsheets and turn it from a time-sink into an asset. This is done through:
- Designing a data strategy and architecture for the whole business, including what data to collect and create to achieve the businesses goals
- Building data storage, processing, and management infrastructure
- Driving business intelligence and creating analytics capabilities
- Managing operational change to improve organisation-wide data governance and quality
We work across all data types from product, customer, sales, ESG, and other business information.
Data Strategy
We help design data strategies that align with business principles to drive growth and achieve long-term success.
Business Intelligence
We create data capabilities that can generate ongoing business intelligence to the people who need to make decisions and take action.
Any Type of Data
We work with B2B and B2C organisations to collect, store and process a range of data types across our data consultancy.
Common Data Problems We Solve
If you are at the start of your data journey, then the first problem to solve is usually answering the question:
What is the right data strategy to enable the businesses goals?
This helps to set-out the right data architecture and tooling necessary to mature your businesses data capabilities in line with your strategic objectives. Our data consultancy is primarily made up of data strategists and architects that focus on this question. Other problems that we help with are:
1. Unifying data by breaking down departmental barriers
Often each department will have found ways to access and process data to inform decisions and achieve objectives. When organisations do not have a unified data strategy then there is often a cottage industry of report building, data processing, 3rd party tooling for collection, duplication of metrics and a house-of-cards approach to data. Building a governance team that offers a centralised toolkit for each department breaks down data silo’s, builds resilience into the operations and improves business intelligence. Our data consultancy arm not only designs data strategies for collection and storage but will also support in reshaping your organisation to cater for better data governance and capabilities across all business units.
2. Operationalising data
Liberating data from legacy systems, 3rd parties and spreadsheets so that teams can use it to drive decisions and customer experiences is the best way to improve efficiency and grow profit. We can help assess what data is already being collected, work out where it needs to be and move the data into a useful state through our data consultancy arm. Driving next-best action messaging and surfacing information to reduce friction points in customer experiences enables data to become a tool rather than just a historical record of action.
3. Best-fit data repositories
Some types of data benefit from specialist data storage repositories that help those involved in daily data management do their jobs well. Whether it is a PIM for products or a CDP for customers, we can help identify what types of data in your organisation need specialist repositories and find the best tool for the job. Our data consultancy has helped implement these systems many times over and can work with you on distinct data storage projects, or as part of a wider data transformation project.
4. Collection strategies for ESG initiatives
There is a rise in focus on ESG data – either through legislation, business commitment for improved business practices, or both. Some of this data may already exist and just needs to be surfaced for reporting. However, in a lot of instances this data needs to be collected. Our data consultants can help identify what information is necessary to drive and report on ESG initiatives and put in strategies to collect, store, and provide actionable insight.
5. Data measurement frameworks
Top-line KPIs focused on the financials are great for assessing the economic health of an organisation, but they don’t shed much light on gaps and opportunities. Our data consultants can design measurement frameworks that support a customer experience strategy to give ongoing insight into how well experiences are meeting expectations. If you are regularly being handed a report with unexplainable changes in top-line metrics or are relying on ‘gut feel’ to explain variations, then a measurement framework can provide reliable insight.
6. Data governance
Collecting and storing data requires data management. Centralised governance models mean that good quality data is being stored, the business can understand what is available in storage and appropriate retention and sharing policies are being enacted. Without this, data can easily become polluted or pushed to places it shouldn’t be. For some businesses full-time data governance isn’t necessary but a regular audit or check-up is necessary to keep on track, which our data consultants can support with.
How We Deliver Your Data Strategy – The Profound Way
Building a data capability is iterative. It typically starts with a strategic engagement with our data consultants to define a data strategy. This is then used to inform a data architecture and work out an operational model that can bring the architecture to life, including data governance. From here data storage, data processing and data visualisation tools are put in place at a pace that is right for the business.
It is normal that you will have some level of reporting or insight that will need to be re-created with the new data product as a first step before new capabilities are added to the business. Sometimes this can feel like investing effort and resources into technology just to get back to a status-quo, however, we will always look for ways to ensure the first iteration of the data product delivers efficiency gains or streamlined insight back into the business.
Once the foundational data product(s) are up and running, there will be a roadmap of changes to collect or feed more data into the product or find new ways to make the data. This roadmap will include helping you re-shape operations, products and experiences to maximise the benefits of this new data capability to drive efficiencies and business intelligence.
The philosophy of our data consultancy is to accept that data is in a constant state of flux and to build strategies around that. This is because data is representative of a current state and as it is being collected to inform decisions to change that state, the new state needs to be regularly anticipated and catered for in the capabilities and products.
Clients we've helped...
We knew that delivering a better Customer Experience would need a successful strategic digital transformation. Profound were invaluable in helping us create this experience, from their use of customer insight to the technical implementation. The use of customer evidence combined with a technical proof of concept gave us greater certainty and confidence in all our decisions, particularly as we were considering a modern headless architecture. It’s rare you find a trusted partner like Profound with a passionate focus on the customer experience and the matching technical vision and capability to implement it. It also helps that they’re actually really easy to work with.
Marco Maccio
Head of Digital, Horizon Platforms
Profound were instrumental in helping us with our TechSource webshop development programme. As soon as we met, it was clear they listened to our brand intent, the market we wanted to appeal to and how our users interact on a global basis. Their prototyping was quick, functional and collaborative and they helped create a video demonstration we’ve used at many conferences to articulate the value of our new technology platform. I’ve really enjoyed working with them too as they were flexible, supportive and balanced. Just what you need in a long term partner.
Chris Hanson
Group Director of Technology Sourcing, Innovation and Industrialisation, Computacenter
As our ecommerce ambition grows, it is vital that we tackle customer experience and UX design with the same level of passion that we have for technical excellence in genomics. It all contributes to our differentiation in the life science market. We’re so glad we chose Profound – they were thorough, open-minded, and have a great sense for the end user ecommerce experience, which challenged us in a good way so they could produce great design work. They also demonstrated substantial skill and experience helping us understand our customers, with a very pragmatic approach. With various ecommerce capabilities now in play and more rolling out, we now have a modern, attractive, easy to use site that showcases our products and makes that path to purchase much easier for our customers.
Grace Lean
Director of eCommerce, LGC Genomics
Profound helped us to deliver a first-class result in terms of an e-commerce website re-design, system integration and ongoing optimisation. In its first full month the conversion rate from a mobile device doubled year on year and all objectives were met in spectacular fashion. We also now have a better branded site that gives the consumer added reassurance. With 67 % Revenue Growth, 64 % Profit Growth and 136 % more online Tyre Units sold, we are delighted. Profound has demonstrated great design and technical expertise and, for a business-critical ecommerce site, that combination of skill is invaluable!
Morgan Jamison
Head of Retail, Protyre
This project has been a desire for our business for many years and I can honestly say working with both of your businesses has been a pleasure. The experience and knowledge you have added to our project team has been immense and I do not doubt that we wouldn’t be where we are now without you. What we have all achieved over the course of this year on this project has been nothing short of monumental! To have created and launched the full tech stack we have in 9 months is truly amazing.
Nathan Young
Director of IT, Interflora
The retail sector had a wake-up call when COVID-19 hit and we realised how important having a highly effective ecommerce offering alongside the retail stores had become. It was also an opportunity to seriously advance our online presence by replacing our platform, which was no longer fit for purpose. We needed an immediate fix, coupled with a long-term plan and a partner to guide us and stay with us on the journey. All our decisions were vindicated when we had our best-ever Black Friday sales that we were then able to fulfil on-time. Profound and Gradient Edge were key to the whole process – they helped us not just transform digitally, but also transform our thinking, and this has had a direct, positive effect on our strategy and resulting revenue.
Alex Hodge
Customer Director, Planet Organic
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