New Zealand organizations have particular challenges in developing advanced analytics capability. New Zealand is small, which means our organizations are small. Small organizations can only support small analytical capabilities, even though their needs are every bit as big as large organizations. So New Zealand needs to be smarter.


Holt Data Science will partner with you to embed advanced analytics and business intelligence into your organization's decision making. Whether you are looking for customer insights, or beefing up your CRM, or ready to build an enterprise decision management system, we have the experience and know-how you need.

It is not possible to run an organization effectively without management information. Reporting is essential. Yet reporting, by its very nature, is backward looking and promotes reactive decision making. With predictive analytics, simulation, and forecasting, you can use the past to predict the future:

Analytics addresses the questions you need answered:

• What is going to happen?
• When is it going to happen?
• To what degree?
• What action gives me the best outcome?

Use analytics to improve the decisions you haven't made yet, not report on what's in the past.

Decisions don’t stop at the executive level. Every day, tactical and operational decisions are made throughout your organization: IT investment decisions, staffing and footprint decisions, stock management, supplier management, rostering and logistics, and customer management, to name just a few. Analytics can improve these decisions and ensure that the actions chosen are aligned to strategy. This allows you to improve both operations and strategy over time.

Your view of your organization needn't be through a cloudy window of bar graphs, pie charts, and tables. With analytics you can understand the complex system that is your enterprise and develop metrics that directly inform you of where problems are developing or where performance is high.

Whether you outsource your analytics or have an in-house capability, analytics costs money: people, software, and IT infrastructure. The most powerful analytics software is free, and with cloud computing the costs of computing are moderate, non-capital expenditures, so the main constraint is people. New Zealand doesn’t have a lot of people.

If you build your analytics products so that their maintenance is largely automated then your ability to make decisions informed by analytics isn’t constrained by your budget or the availability of expertise. This is a crucial point. How you build your analytics is as important as what you build, because if maintaining your analytics products precludes building more, then you don’t have an effective capability. You will be at a competitive disadvantage to organizations in larger countries.

So automate where possible. Build it once, build it well, and move on to improve the next decision.

We can help you develop your analytics capability to support automation. And any analytics product we build for you will largely require little or no human involvement to maintain - we don’t have a business model based around repeat charging.

Some problems come your way that your in-house analytics team doesn’t have the capability or capacity to take on. We love solving hard problems so that they stay solved. Do it once, do it well, and move on to improve the next decision.

Or perhaps you need independent advice? Building or investing in analytics capability and unsure if you are making the right decisions? We understand the challenges that New Zealand organizations face when building analytics, and we understand how difficult it can be as an executive or board member who is not technical to make decisions about investing in analytics. Let us provide advice to your executive team or Board – we are software and hardware agnostic.

We think that building your analytics capability is a business improvement exercise. If you could make a decision better then you would, so acting to improve that decision is business improvement. And like any business improvement project, you need to involve the rest of the business to implement the change and turn it into “business as usual”.

You need to integrate your analytics with every part of your enterprise - including service delivery, IT, business process improvement, finance, people and capability, and management. Get this right - and set up sustainably - and you can make the better decisions by reducing uncertainty where it matters.

We recommend using a “Centre of Excellence” model to delivering analytics projects. We support Centres of Excellence in the following ways:

• Setting up Centres of Excellence: advising on governance, staffing, and business process design.
• Managing Centres of Excellence: providing programme management, overall management, and contract analytics capability.

Your Centre of Excellence could be in-house, or you could manage your risk through a joint-venture. In the joint-venture model:

• The Centre of Excellence would be co-owned by yourself and Holt Data Science.
• Holt Data Science would provide analytics expertise and programme management.
• You invest and provide subject matter expertise and project management.
• Build capability into the CoE as needed – over time the CoE could provide a revenue stream, through IP licensing or providing analytics services to other parties.
• No contracts - simply dissolve the venture if desired.