Do your executives get caught off guard by events?
Do managers spend weeks tracking down issues?
Do workers lack data to make good decisions?
Do business units work at cross-purposes?
Organizations turn to Eckerson Group to get more value from their data. We help them increase alignment and agility, make smarter decisions, and reinvent core business processes. Drive your business with Eckerson Group.
Data and analytics is all we do.
We staff our projects with senior consultants who each have 20+ years of data analytics experience.
We provide unbiased guidance and solutions that are uniquely tailored to your organization.
And, we know our stuff — just check out the hundreds of articles and reports on
our main web site
Organizations (and even other consultancies) rely on us to demystify data and analytics and develop
business-driven strategies that harness the power of data.
Learn what Eckerson Group can do for you!
Put a real expert on your side.
Our Success Signals assessment provides the world’s most comprehensive online evaluation of data analytics capabilities. Designed for your data analytics team, the assessment evaluates your organization’s data analytics capabilities in 7 categories and 28 subcategories specified in Eckerson Group’s Value Chain model (P⁴+D=V).
Our consultants each have more than 25 years of experience applying data and analytics to solve business problems. They are thought leaders in the field. Their knowledge is distilled in our web site and in these short articles below.
Wayne Eckerson, President, Eckerson Group
We take a holistic approach when helping you develop a data analytics strategy and roadmap. We not only dive into technology and architecture, but we address the people, processes, and organizational and governance models required to reap value from your data investments.
P1 Program: A program knits together business and technical resources into a unified whole. It creates the standards, policies, and processes that align data analytics efforts throughout the enterprise.
P2 People: Data analytics programs offer training, support, and communities of practice to build data literacy and technical competencies among business users and technical developers.
P3 Process: Organizations require rigorous processes to harness the power of data. They need to gather requirements, prioritize requests, develop solutions, and govern data, reports and models.
P4 Platform: Organizations need a modern data analytics platform that delivers clean, trustworthy data and simplifies data access and analysis for everyone in an organization.
D Data: Organizations need effective data quality, data governance, and master data to harmonize critical data elements and a modern data architecture that transforms source data into business-friendly views.
Value: Organizations need an explicit method to measure the value of data analytics initiatives, both tangible and intangible, and evaluate their progress toward achieving strategic objectives.
Eckerson Group facilitates the complete project lifecycle, helping your organization during each step of its data analytics journey.
We start with an assessment that evaluates your organization’s strengths, gaps, and opportunities and forms the basis of a detailed strategy and action plan (See Services). The strategy sequences program, people, process, and platform projects into a three-year roadmap that Eckerson Group can deliver, assist, or guide to a successful conclusion.
The Blueprint designs key elements of the strategy, including a logical data architecture, data models, and program and process components. From there, you can take the designs and build the solutions yourself, hire a third party, or hire us. We also help you quantify the value of your data strategy implementation and create a change management and adoption plan to ensure you get a suitable return on your investment.
Wayne Eckerson, President, Eckerson Group
Eckerson Group offers consulting services that help your organization harness the power of data and analytics. We specialize in developing action-oriented data strategies and roadmaps that drive clear business results.
We help clients develop a comprehensive plan to transform their organizations from a data laggard into a data leader. Our data strategy methodology ensures you get the most value from your investment. Our job is not done until your executives approve the final strategy and allocate funds.
Sean Hewitt, Senior Consultant, Eckerson Group
Problem: Business unit and IT managers were frustrated by conflicting and overlapping reports, lack of alignment around business metrics, and the lack of data literacy among self-service users.
Solution: Eckerson Group helped the corporate business intelligence (BI) team develop a report governance strategy to ensure data alignment and consistency across reports and dashboards. The strategy established teams, policies, and processes governing the use of standard metrics and data. It also helped the retailer establish an Analytics Council to oversee the BI program, a certification program to help data analysts build skills and advance careers, and a Data University to foster data literacy among rank-and-file business users.
Problem: The data infrastructure for this $2B+ consumer packaged goods company dated from the 1990s and could no longer keep pace with shrinking batch windows, provide suitable query performance, and support self-service requirements.
Solution: Eckerson Group modernized the company’s data infrastructure by helping it create a conceptual and logical architecture for a corporate data warehouse and integration platform to support existing business intelligence applications and new self-service capabilities. Eckerson Group also helped develop a migration plan to align the new data infrastructure with a major ERP replacement project. It also guided the process to select a cloud data warehouse, Spark-based transformation platform, and a data catalog.
Problem: The new CEO of this globally decentralized manufacturer was frustrated by his lack of visibility into business operations, forcing him to wait weeks to understand the root causes of problems that were disrupting supply chains and hurting customer satisfaction.
Solution: Eckerson Group helped a core team develop a comprehensive data and analytics strategy to align data, metrics, master data, and reports across the company’s business units, which were accustomed to operating autonomously without much input from corporate. The plan included the creation of a cross-functional analytics council, the creation of an enterprise business glossary and data catalog, and the formation of SWAT teams to rapidly build core data infrastructure for business units.
Problem: The hospital had both under- and overuse of data analytics caused by an inefficient and uncoordinated allocation of resources, complicated by autonomous departments that built and maintained their own data and analytics infrastructure.
Solution: Eckerson Group helped a new vice president of data analytics develop an enterprise data strategy to align and extend data and analytics resources across the hospital. The strategy involved fine-tuning a federated organizational structure where embedded data analysts are managed by the corporate analytics team, re-invigorating its data-governance program, reinventing project prioritization and management methodologies, uniting data and operational silos, and creating an analytics council to ensure hospital-wide coordination and alignment.
Problem: A regional metropolitan planning organization (MPO) was charged with fixing a data quality problem that caused an $8.4 billion-dollar error in tax-based revenue forecasting. It needed a data governance program to ensure all future forecasts and data products are error free and trustworthy for use by 18 regional jurisdictions as well as to federal, state and other local agencies.
Solution: Eckerson Group helped design and guide the implementation of a comprehensive data-governance program to ensure the delivery of high quality and trustworthy data to regional governmental organizations as well as federal, state and other local agencies. The program ensures that regional agencies align on key metrics and models, properly integrate and interpret data, and develop trustworthy analytic models that drive multi-billion-dollar investment decisions in regional transportation and other civic improvements.
Problem: A large, multi-national technology and manufacturing company needed to transform a collection of 86 country-based business units and over 1,600 applications into a global enterprise that could operate as a single, unified business.
Solution: Eckerson Group started by illuminating how shared, harmonized data was the single largest enabler of unified global operations. We then defined the strategy to integrate and accelerate global business processes by sharing data across the customer base and the entire value chain. In follow-on work, we defined and led the implementation of a global data-governance program and a complementary master-data management program, within a major transformation program that united the operations of multiple business units.
Problem: An international bank that finances infrastructure projects in selected world regions needed to integrate and align the activities of its four major business units. Each unit was working with the same customers and on the same loans, but data discrepancies reduced operational efficiencies and hindered global risk management.
Solution: Eckerson Group defined a strategy to standardize master data across various business functions, including loan origination, servicing, risk management, and portfolio administration. We also developed the data architecture and model for the bank’s new data hub to harmonize and distribute data throughout the enterprise and helped establish best practices for agile development and data governance.
Wayne Eckerson, President, Eckerson Group
Our Success Signals online assessment is one of the world’s most comprehensive assessments of data and analytics capabilities. Based on 30 years of industry experience, Success Signals evaluates the state of data and analytics at your organization in 7 categories and 28 subcategories specified in Eckerson Group’s Value Chain Model (P4+D=V).
Geared to enterprise data teams, Success Signals measures your organization’s adherence to 144 best practices and evaluates your budget, roles, staffing, and tooling. It identifies your strengths and challenges and benchmarks your organization against peer companies. This is the same online assessment that Eckerson Group uses with its consulting clients.
Try it first. To see if the Success Signals assessment is appropriate for your data team, take our free abridged version. Geared to business people, this 12-minute assessment focuses on business outcomes rather than best practices. We use it in client engagements to gauge business perceptions of data analytics and satisfaction with the services provided by the data team. Then, contact us when your team is ready to take the full assessment.
Success Signals is based on a maturity model for data-driven organizations. The assessment scores your team’s answers and plots it in one of the five levels of data analytics maturity. It also compares your scores to other organizations around the world that have taken the assessment. You can also benchmark your organization against peers using our interactive dashboard or by arranging a custom benchmark with one or more peer organizations. (See below.)
Success Signals is a collaborative platform designed for enterprise data teams. Invite team members to participate using the “Invite” feature and collaborate with each other using online comments. You can monitor their activity with our built-in news feed. Each participant receives the team’s benchmark report that contains scores, recommendations, and comparisons with other companies.
Eckerson Group offers several assessment-related services:
