Ideas backed by data are more effective than intuition-led business decisions. Therefore, reputed global brands dedicate extensive resources to devise novel insight discovery, market research, and product development approaches. This post will elaborate on how data analytics consulting firms often empower businesses with comprehensive and unique insights.
Data Analytics Consulting Firms - Introduction
A data analytics consulting company nourishes talented analysts to assist client organizations in finding recurring patterns in enterprise datasets to accomplish business objectives. For instance, forecasting financial performance metrics will need a predictive modeling tool. Meanwhile, investigating data mismatch and manipulation issues will require diagnostic analyses.
Defining Data Analytics Consulting
Data analytics consulting involves understanding clients' problems and reporting expectations. It also encompasses documentation formats to evaluate their data for relevant insights. Besides, it can be a standalone activity or a crucial step in a more complex problem-resolution strategy.
Likewise, client expectations and the scope of data processing activities can impact tool selection, costs, and time-to-insight (TTI).
Role of Consulting Firms in Data Analytics
Consulting companies find and train professionals so that clients can get high-quality insights without handling related human resource management duties. Additionally, consultants preserve historical intelligence for continuous performance and cost optimization.
As a result, clients will spend less on acquiring detailed reports, while the data analytics consulting firms will share a significant workload and operational risks.
Importance of Data Analytics Consulting for Businesses
Businesses must ensure maximum compliance with regulations governing enterprise practices concerning customer profiling, progress tracking, and investor disclosures if they process data. However, letting a data analysis partner manage insight extraction and reporting activities reduces the clients’ exposure to non-compliance risks.
Established data analytics companies also conduct research and development (R&D) programs. So, clients can benefit from their in-house techniques, which will accelerate, automate, and streamline data sorting or insight validation.
Finally, leaders want to reduce potential conflicts of interest (COIs). If in-house teams’ misguided unity incentivizes deliberate progress monitoring dishonesty, it sets a bad precedent. Thankfully, organizations can cross-examine company documentation with the help of data analytics consulting firms.
Read more: How is the BFSI Industry Benefitting from Data Analytics Capabilities?
Evolution of Data Analytics Consulting
Before the invention of modern computing methods and advanced statistical calculations, data analysis relied on manual number-crunching. It also focused on inventory management, financial transactions, and time-dependent studies. However, current ideas of quantifying intangible aspects had less prevalence in trade, investments, and business development.
In the twentieth century, military applications encouraged a broader scope of electronic tools for mathematical modeling and data-driven strategizing.
What began with relational database management systems (DBMS) in the 1970s evolved into bid data by the onset of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, data analytics applications remained unique to defense personnel and academic research. After all, computers used to require a substantial upfront investment.
As the electronics and telecommunication industry matured, more individuals could access and own hardware adequate to run basic analytical operations. Fast-forward to today, and data analytics has multiple sub-disciplinary branches delving deep into customer segmentation, product testing, sales forecasting, risk management, and quality assurance. Furthermore, supply chain analytics has enabled remarkable advantages in this globalized business landscape.
Related: Data Analytics Tools - A Comprehensive Guide
Core Services Offered by Data Analytics Consulting Firms
1| Data Strategy & Consulting
A data strategy offers logical frameworks to establish relationships between multiple processes, such as data collection, quality assessment, data transfer, secure storage, insights extraction, reporting, and visualization. It serves an enterprise’s long-term goals.
In the absence of a robust data strategy, business units will gather data as a formality and lose sight of a vital quality consideration: relevance. So, data analysts deliver data strategy and consulting to corporations wanting to harmonize intelligence gathering, pattern recognition, and business applications based on the extracted insights.
2| Data Lake Solutions
Data lakes facilitate vast data storage resources accommodating unstructured and structured data assets. They also preserve raw data formats for future use cases and investigative purposes.
Consulting companies leverage data lake and warehousing systems to help client organizations lead big data analytics projects.
3| Predictive Analytics
Leaders want to estimate customer response to a new product series. They often seek solid evidence of competitors’ potential strategies. Therefore, consultants develop machine learning (ML) models for predictive insight reporting.
Predictive analytics consulting goes beyond conventional geometric extensions of trend graphs. It also considers multivariate aspects influencing how a metric will change over time.
4| Data Visualization
Data visualization standardizes and simplifies business communication by reducing the need for tabulations and manual anomaly identification. For example, color coding and proportionally sized geometric shapes in reports facilitate quick comprehension during stakeholder meetings.
Accordingly, services offered by data analytics consulting firms enable one-click visualization features. Some offerings also create animated dashboards to demonstrate how metrics change for storytelling and real-time problem monitoring.
5| Data Management Solutions
Data managers oversee data sourcing, storage, security, sharing, and archiving activities. To maximize efficiency, they coordinate data engineers, scientists, analysts, quality inspectors, and visualization specialists.
Renowned data analytics consulting companies assist clients with these tasks because they have utilized optimized DBMS ecosystems for analytics-related facilities over a long time. The world already lives in a data-first world, so the difference between analytics and data management businesses faded a long time ago.
Read more: The Role of AI and Data Analytics to Drive Personalization Strategies
Key Players in the Data Analytics Consulting Industry
1| SG Analytics
SG Analytics (SGA) has been active in this industry since 2007. It offers contextual insights into customer motivations for reliable behavioral predictions, enabling clients to boost user engagement and customer satisfaction (CSAT) metrics.
Its domain encompasses the following:
- Strategic consulting for primary and secondary research,
- Risk-reward explorations concerning capital markets,
- Sustainability reporting and compliance ratings,
- Process automation and artificial intelligence (AI).
Similarly, SG Analytics delivers cloud integrations, machine learning, and data visualization services. It fulfills the demand for business insights in banking, financial services, insurance (BFSI), media, pharma, healthcare, and technology industries. SGA has a global presence through its offices in London, Zurich, San Fransisco, Pune, and New York.
2| Accenture
Accenture helps corporate data transformation processes by addressing issues like data fragmentation. Moreover, it equips clients with artificial intelligence capabilities while accelerating data discovery, democratization, and augmentation.
This data analytics consulting firm serves companies in natural resources, automotive, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), and travel industries. Accenture has offices in New York, Bengaluru, Milan, Tokyo, Munich, and Dublin.
3| Deloitte
Deloitte excels at financial analytics, risk advisory, tax, auditing, and legal facilities. Its analytics packages comprise information delivery, workforce analytics, and freight analytics. The analysts at this financial data company also understand clients’ data engineering, strategy, and management needs.
This consultant enables 5G networking, insurance, computer security, and infrastructure brands to leverage enterprise data analytics. Deloitte serves Australia, Italy, Japan, America, Israel, South Korea, Canada, India, and Denmark.
4| EY
EY enables clients to enhance workforce performance reports, supply chain insights, and global tax compliance ratings. It also assists governments, financial institutions, and mining businesses throughout decision-making.
Aside from analytics and tech transformation advisory, EY delivers blockchain and artificial intelligence projects for confident corporate strategizing. It is one of the leading data analytics consulting firms serving the Americas, Middle East, India, Africa, and the European Union (EU) across data-centric initiatives.
5| TCS
Tata Consulting Services, or TCS, offers cloud integration, cybersecurity analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) support, and network infrastructure facilities. It has targeted capital markets, travel, manufacturing, media, education, and retail industries. Besides, TCS helps fast FMCG and energy businesses leverage data insights for process improvements.
Like other enterprises in this list of best data analytics consulting companies, TCS engages in community engagement activities for corporate social responsibility (CSR). It provides rich internship and skill development resources for budding analysts’ professional growth.
Read more: How EdTech Companies Can Use Big Data Analytics
Data Analytics Consultant Responsibilities
A professional data analyst must collaborate with data strategists, engineers, architects, managers, and designers to improve insight discovery. For instance, they must discuss required data quality standards to help quality assurance teams understand validation and cleansing workloads.
Likewise, a data analytics consultant is responsible for finding and rectifying potential algorithmic biases in analytical models. Otherwise, skewed insights will go unnoticed, hurting the reliability of services offered by data analytics consulting firms. If the deliverables include biased results, the consultancy will likely lose clientele.
Thankfully, reputed data analytics consulting companies maintain a diverse team to embrace the division of labor principle, facilitating domain specialization opportunities. On the other hand, some companies assign multiple responsibilities to data analysts, requiring them to lead data management, security, and governance initiatives.
In both situations, an aspiring data analytics executive must ensure presence of mind, communication conciseness, and mathematical integrity. Data analysts must not succumb to external pressures since manipulating reports for unfair reasons goes against data ethics.
Ways Data Analytics Consultants Will Help Your Business
1| Tool Selection and Modeling Methods
Data analytics firms recognize the need for business-relevant technology procurement and provide clients with software-related consulting. For instance, a global organization might gain better value by switching to another platform for analysis.
Similarly, each business problem will necessitate unique definitions, models, metrics, and optimizations. As a result, data analysts in consulting firms will assist in making analytics more effective based on what the client enterprise wants to accomplish and the employees' role.
2| Legal Compliances and Governance
More stakeholders want corporations to handle personally identifying information (PII) using encrypted ecosystems. Therefore, leveraging data for customer profiling, behavior analytics, telemetry, and data lake solutions is becoming more challenging.
Accordingly, businesses must interpret global and regional frameworks to process data without breaking any law or attracting stakeholders’ dismay. Data consultants can help brands navigate the related guidelines and develop ethical, compliant data processing environments for better governance ratings.
3| Employee Training and Third-Party Integrations
Investing in excellent data analytics tools is essential, but your employees must understand how to use them to achieve business goals. So, data consulting partners might conduct continuous professional development (CPD) programs to address this obstacle.
Meanwhile, a company’s in-house systems can benefit from cloud integrations and automation services offered by data analytics consulting firms. Experienced data analysts with expertise in legacy and modern modeling tools can oversee third-party integrations for client organizations.
How Data Analytics Consulting Services Can Transform Your Business
- Healthcare and life sciences companies can use data analytics to enhance disease diagnosis and recovery treatments. They can also use insights to monitor medical resource consumption, inventory requirements, booking requests, prescriptions, running costs, and equipment health.
- Media and entertainment businesses can evaluate marketing effectiveness using analytics. They can compare historical projects to explore why some shows excel while others fail to attract audiences. Furthermore, they can predict whether a story or multimedia project will succeed in a target demographic.
- Supply chain, travel, and shipping companies can optimize their tours to reduce fuel costs or delays at work. They will also assess alternative methods to acquire and transport goods of several specifications. Finally, these companies will examine tax and currency risks concerning transboundary contract tasks.
Conclusion
Data operations are the norm in today’s business world. Moreover, programs and strategies in data management, analytics, and visualization have evolved, offering cross-platform support and extensive options for sharing data between programs.
Simultaneously, regulators have enforced novel directions to enterprise data processors. They want brands to fine-tune how they inform customers and employees about data usage for consent collection.
Given this concurrent rise of tech and legal complications, the role of consulting firms in data analytics and business insights has become more significant. As such, growth-poised brands seeking new roadmaps for informed strategizing must partner with ethical data analytics consulting companies for business development and digital transformation.
A leader in the data management solutions domain, SG Analytics partners with global data enterprises for comprehensive market research and advanced analytical capabilities. Contact us today if you seek qualitative business insights to surpass your competitors and boost in-house innovation for 360-degree operational enhancements.
About SG Analytics
SG Analytics (SGA) is an industry-leading global data analytics services firm providing data-centric research and contextual analytics services to its clients, including Fortune 500 companies, across BFSI, Technology, Media & Entertainment, and Healthcare sectors. Established in 2007, SG Analytics is a Great Place to Work® (GPTW) certified company with a team of over 1200 employees and a presence across the U.S.A., the UK, Switzerland, Poland, and India.
Apart from being recognized by reputed firms such as Gartner, Everest Group, and ISG, SGA has been featured in the elite Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India 2023 and APAC 2024 High Growth Companies by the Financial Times & Statista.
